X-Plane releases thread

Yeah, me too. Love the Kodiak and great to have one for X-Plane.

Another phenomenal airport release by “tdg” at X-Plane.org…LGHI - Chios Island (Greece)…

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Recently gone freeware, Republic Sea Bee:

I’ve been trying the Quest Kodiak the last couple of days up in AK in my usual Air Hauler AO. It’s a really fun and capable aircraft with great short field prowess. The pop-up menu system allowing you to paint on the fly is quite nifty, as is some of the other functionality, like Slew.

We could have a long and enduring relationship, but for one nagging omission. No ice prevention equipment, making it a warm weather bird. I almost lost my virtual hunkus last night running a load of livestock from PAKT to PAGS. At FL090 about half way through the trip I began loosing power badly. No visible accumulation but airspeed dropped of to below l00 kts indicated no matter the power setting (R&L pitot on). I had no choice but to let down through the solid layer between around 3800 and 7000, which was well below MEF. Breaking out the OAT was still - 4 or so, but clear of precip the power eventually returned and we skittered among the mountain tops until about 20 to go. Kind of puts a damper on things. When I saw the airspeed falling off I began digging through the “POH”, but the section marked Ice Prevention was noted as “optional equipment”. Great.

OK, as much fun as the Kodiak is to fly, I’m not a big fan of scud running just to get the livestock, dog food, or DVD players delivered :confused:, so I guess that it’s back to the trusty old Caravan.

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Here’s my delema. Need to ferry the aircraft from PAGS (Gustavus) down to PASI (Sitka). Then make cargo run back to our domicile PAKT (Ketchikan), which expires in 4 hrs. On the VFR sectional I see along the first leg MEF of 5.5, 4.3, 4.3, and 5.4. Current METAR which sounds like a pretty every day one is…

PAGS 072256Z AUTO 32009KT 10SM -RA OVC038 05/04 A2932 RMK AO2 RAB2158 SLP930 P0001 T00500044

The POH says that the optional ice prevention gear should be used whenever the OAT is +5C or less and there is visible moisture, or something to that effect. So with a field elevation of 35 feet and 5500 feet to clear the tallest obstruction, if I remember aviation WX, temp lowers 2 C degrees per 1000 feet, or around -5 or -6 to clear the MEF, and this will be my new avatar.

Ice is a PITA - I guess that’s why American Eagle moved all those ATRs to the Caribbean a long time ago. I notice they are creeping back up into the States though…I think they got a raw deal on that anyway…

Good luck - check the batteries in your EPIRB!

That’s one feature that’s pretty funny on the Thranda Kodiak. I misjudged one of my first landings in type (fortunately off the clock) and managed to set off the ELT. Of course in XP that is persistent until you find the kill switch, which is more or less in plain site. That’s probably why it took me so long to find it.

The Flightfactor 757 version 2 is out now at the org store. $64.95 but owners of the previous version get $20 off.

That’s tempting…but to be honest, I haven’t gotten my value out of the FlightFactor 757 Pro yet…so I’m gonna hold off on that one…

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I love the 757 and to be honest the only reason I would pull the trigger on this one is it is basically the 767 but cheaper.

I think I picked up version 1 of the 757 on sale anyway.

Man…I borked something in my X-Plane install and finally the whole Jenga tower has fallen down… LOL It’d be funny if it weren’t so frustrating. I’ve got so many damn plug-ins running it is no wonder something isn’t liking something else. Running the FlyInside X-Plane beta might have been the final straw. Now I’m getting a “Lua stopped!” message in the upper right hand corner - I suspect it has something to do with SkyMaxx Pro, NOAA, Ventura Sky, Real Weather Connector and all the twine that holds it all together. Not to mention I run legacy plug-ins such as Air Hauler and then you have individual aircraft Plug-Ins (DreamEngine, SASL, etc…)… If I can’t figure this out in the next few hours, I’ll probably just wait for XP11 and then start rebuilding from there…

your log file should tell you what happened.

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Not sure if this was posted yet, but a Bell 429 got released last month!

pretty!

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Yeah…this is the error I’m getting that is causing FlyWithLUA to stop working…I’m not sure where in my house of cards something is going wrong. I tried reinstalling VenturaSky and the NOAA plug-in…but that still didn’t fix it. I can’t wait for a single point weather generator for X-Plane. While I love the results of SkyMaxx Pro + Real Weather Connector + NOAA + VenturaSky…I’d really rather have a one click solution (or no click if Austin would make a better weather engine as the default…)

[001014] FlyWithLua Info: HID access initialized.
[001015] FlyWithLua Info: Discovered 19 HID devices.
[001016] FlyWithLua Info: Load ini file.
[001017] FlyWithLua Info: Searching for Lua script files
[001018] FlyWithLua Info: Sorting Lua script files
[001019] FlyWithLua Info: Start loading script file Resources/plugins/FlyWithLua/Scripts/Ventura_Sky_v1.2.lua
[001020] FlyWithLua Info: Finished loading script file Resources/plugins/FlyWithLua/Scripts/Ventura_Sky_v1.2.lua
[001021] FlyWithLua Info: Start loading script file Resources/plugins/FlyWithLua/Scripts/carichi.lua
[001022] FlyWithLua Info: Finished loading script file Resources/plugins/FlyWithLua/Scripts/carichi.lua
[001023] FlyWithLua Info: All script files loaded successfully.
[001024] FlyWithLua Info: Loading time for all scripts is 0.084 sec.
[001025] G64: 44.980: Trigger: Run(‘OnBoot’)
[001026] FlyWithLua Error: The DataRef “xjpc/XPNoaaWeather/weather/visibility” does not exist.
[001027] FlyWithLua Error: The DataRef “xjpc/XPNoaaWeather/config/override_visibility” does not exist.
[001028] FlyWithLua Error: The DataRef “xjpc/XPNoaaWeather/config/override_clouds” does not exist.
[001029] SkyMaxx Pro: METAR parser enabled
[001030] SMPMetarBridge: METAR activation fired.
[001031] SkyMaxx Pro: Activating METAR parsing.
[001032] Skymaxx Pro: Requesting new METAR download.
[001033] SkyMaxx Pro: Found new METAR.rwx file
[001034] SkyMaxx Pro: Found new MAXX_METAR.rwx file
[001035] SkyMaxx Pro: Parsing METAR data
[001036] SkyMaxx Pro: METAR parsing took 4090 ms.
[001037] XL: 0 : JARDesign plugin: X:\X-Plane 10\Resources\plugins\X-Life\News/news.txt file updated.
[001039] FlyWithLua Debug Info: Sorry, no debug Info on stack.
[001040] FlyWithLua Debug Info: Debug file written to “<>/FlyWithLua_Debug.txt”.
[001041] FlyWithLua Debug Info: Debug file written to “<>/FlyWithLua_Debug.txt”.

Yeah…I posted it HERE, and it is really nice (payware quality). I was having a problem with the rotors not moving though for some reason…I’ll have to go back and check and see if that problem self corrected (you know how aviation is…turn it off, then turn it back on again and 95% of the time the problem fixes itself…)

You are not wrong, and that is kinda disturbing I suppose. Heck, it’s what we do on the ground, turn it on and off repeatedly and see if the problem repeats itself…

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“Could not duplicate. Ops check good. Returned to service.”

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All values measured within AMM tolerances. Could not reproduce problem on ground.

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Have you removed noaa and tested?

Edit: like run it without noaa I mean, not just reinstalled it.

I picked up one of our King Airs from maintenance yesterday and it had a pretty heavy duty inspection where they actually pull the main landing gear and other stuff. (They also found a birdstrike on the wing that apparently had occurred on the ferry flight to maintenance). Whenever we pick up plane from maintenance we are pretty meticulous with the preflight checklist and pay lots of attention to even the smallest of things - less out of a fear that something is going to kill us and more out of a fear that we’ll get the plane back to our base with a write-up that we should have discovered prior to leaving the maintenance facility.

Anyway - yesterday was one of those rare days when everything worked perfectly. Usually you go to pick one up and something is out…either something minor (like a nav light) or something major (like a prop governor that won’t test or something). So as you go through the expanded checklist and hit all the “dusty buttons”…you are just hoping everything is going to work. Yesterday…it did… We also delayed the gear retraction until we were up a few hundred feet in case something was rigged wrong anticipating a big crunch and kerthunk…but it all went super smooth.

They put a new deice boot on our left wing but kept the old one on the right wing and just patched a couple holes in it…so I told them we’d only put the left wing in the icing conditions…(LOL). Our own maintenance guys (at our home base) are going to replace the right boot at some point down the road. Our head of maintenance actually drove up with us to pick up the plane (I love it when that happens…it is very reassuring) and I’m always very interested in all the observations he makes about the maintenance that was performed and I always learn something new about the airplane after talking with him about what was done to the airplane. Yesterday I learned that the prop anti-ice timer which cycles at 90 second intervals from left to right can be reset (or flipped) from one prop to the other just be resetting the switch…so you don’t have to wait 90 seconds to see if the other side is actually working (as indicated by the prop electrical ammeter). 20 years of flying the King Air and I didn’t know you could force it to the other side just by resetting it (I thought it was on a timer that stayed on one side until the end of the cycle).

Any-who…now I’m rambling…

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