1.20 autothrottle responsiveness and speed hold

[bpcw001 28]

Hi all,

I'm using the 1.20 version, freshly installed with no previous versions on the PC before. I have three questions concerning autothrottle behaviour:

1.

The AT seems to respond very slowly, e. g. when there is a wind change (REX 2.0, wind changes softened by FSUIPC to reasonable rates) from headwind to tailwind, it will almost always result in an overspeed situation because the engines don't spool down fast enough.

I would have expected the AT to react dynamically, i. e. when there's a fast change in airspeed, throttles would spool up/down quicker to compensate and adjust to the selected speed, and when the speed change is slow and/or the airspeed pretty close to the desired airspeed, throttles would react slower.

2.

When using the spoilers to slow down the aircraft to a selected airspeed, e. g. 250kts, the AT spools up too early again so it will never actually reach the 250kts. I will have to set the airspeed bug to 240kts to prevent a premature engine spoolup keeping me from reaching the target airspeed of 250kts.

3.

It appears that I cannot manually set a mach target speed for cruise. No blue triangle will show up, and AT does not react to any manual mach setting. The blue triangle on the speed tape only shows up when I set a target airspeed in kts, and only then the AT values my speed setting. Am I missing something?

How is this in the real A320?

Thanks

bpcw001

[Andy B. 40]

3.

It appears that I cannot manually set a mach target speed for cruise. No blue triangle will show up, and AT does not react to any manual mach setting. The blue triangle on the speed tape only shows up when I set a target airspeed in kts, and only then the AT values my speed setting. Am I missing something?

The speed you manually set in Mach is displayed on the FCU itself and above or below the speed tape in blue if I remember correctly.

[bpcw001 28]

The speed you manually set in Mach is displayed on the FCU itself and above or below the speed tape in blue if I remember correctly.

Hm. Never seen the manually set mach number anywhere at or near the speed tape in the PFD, no matter what I did with the speed knob (push, pull, turn, etc).

It should work just the same as it does with setting the speed in kts, so I'm wondering what I might be missing here.

Will have to check it out again.

[bpcw001 28]

Yep, I found out. In the aircraft.cfg, there's a "max_throttle_rate" parameter.

Increase its value and the AT will be a lot more responsive. Works better for me.