A320neo (stock aircraft): complete "blackout" mid-flight

User Support Hub Aircraft & Systems
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Holy moly! So I was crusing at FL 200 with the stock A320neo and reading some forum posts here while I’ve heard the engines going to “idle”. While I was ALT+Tabbing to MSFS the engines had completely died and all screens were completely dark (shut down)!

I panickly tried to start the APU again (which I remembered from the movie “Sully” ;)), but to no avail. The aircraft nose already followed gravity quite steeply, and shortly after I crash-landed in some grass field near Carlisle (Scotland - I was on my way to my newly purchased airport Edinburgh, EGPH):

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This is with the “Modern” flight model, but “Crash” disabled (hence MSFS considered my crash landing as “success”, according to the flight log which popped up right after). I don’t have any A320neo related addons installed (in fact, I was flying with the default livery as well, as seen in the above screenshot).

I do have some scenery related addons installed (in the Community folder), such as the “We Love VFR Region 1 & 2” and “Powerlines” addons - but I doubt that such scenery addons would have an effect on the flight systems of any given aircraft?

Once the flight log was popping up I pressed “Continue”, as I was curious whether I could restart the engines somehow, but to no avail:

  • Neither “auto-shutdown/start” worked (CTRL + SHIFT + E, CTRL + E)
  • Also evaluting the checklist did not seem to work: all button lights and screens remained dark

UPDATE: This screenshot was taken after I had tried to restart the engines. During the flight (and specifically at the time of the “blackout”) the engine selector was reset to NORM for the entire flight:

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This was a “low IFR flight level” flight from Liverpool (EGGP) to Edinburgh (EGPH - which I obviously never reached), starting from “cold and dark”.

Crash site:

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All flight parameters (especially fuel) were left at their default values, and according to the following dialog I should have had plenty of fuel (47%) remaining:

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Engine Mode was reset to “NORM” and the APU turned off. Everything was “normal”, AFAICT - until again, “everything went dark” (while I was reading some posts here in the forum - should have paid closer attention perhaps ;)).

Technical details:

  • Graphic Details: “Ultra”, except
  • Glass Cockpit Refresh Rate set to LOW and
  • Motion Blur DISABLED
  • DX11

I was flying with:

  • Traffic: REAL-TIME ONLINE
  • Multiplayer: LIVE PLAYERS
  • Generic AI Traffic: ON
  • Generic Multiplayer: OFF
  • Traffic Variety: ULTRA

Data: everything enabled (Bing Data, Photogrammetry, …)
Rolling Cache: Enabled (cleared and rebuilt after I installed yesterday the World Update)

I found some older bug reports (October 2020 already, e.g. this one), but they did not gain much traction - one “solution” seems to be related to set both multiplayer and AI traffic to generic models, but that seems to be a bit “esotheric” (and again, that bug report is from October 2020 already).

Anyone else has recently experienced this “blackout”?

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Did you run out of gas?

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That was the obvious thing to check, but as written above I had 47% remaining (from the default 50% initial fuel).

However I noticed that I still had the ground spoilers armed and “Auto Brake” still set to MAX (in case I had to abort the take-off). Perhaps that somehow “killed the systems”?

I am currently flying a similar (but shorter) route to Edinburgh (from Newcastle, EGNT) and see how it goes :slight_smile:

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Hi Steeler, I had your same experience a week ago but I just ended the flight by hitting ESC !!
I mostly fly with Asobo A320 when on IFR flights ,with starts from the runway for a matter of time and have no problems apart for the ATC FL calls ,expecially on descent,as many knows.
However, only recently I did a 3-4 flights starting from dark&cool and only in these cases I had a problem like your and in other cases ,on Arrival…,the plane lost the route and I had to manually take the plane to Final and engage the AP /ILS/LOC/APPR. again for a correct ILS landing.
It seem that a variety of problems occurs when starting dark&cool. Don’t know why!!

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Time like this makes me wish there was a playback feature. Hard to say. Probably just a bug at play and the aicraft was out of fuel even though it had fuel as far as the weight and balance menu says.

Still, I’d expect to see the batteries power on and working, but perhaps they went dead on the emergency descent?

Though it shouldn’t cause this to happen, I think the engine mode selector should have bene in the norm, not ign/start. Though, you probably tried to start engines and that is why the switch is still positioned.

I don’t recall that msfs yet models malfunctions, so I’d consider it a bug and not worry too much about what you did wrong, because you probably didn’t do anything wrong.

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I’ve often had the brakes and spoilers set for the entire flight on multiple occasions and every was fine. Quite the odd bug you’ve got there!

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I see you left the ignition switch in START. That’s a no-no.

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As a matter of a freak coincidence I am the author of one of such record/replay apps - unfortunately I wasn’t recording this particular flight :wink:

Yes. that’s correct: I am 90% sure (the 10% uncertainty from the time that has passed since the “crash”) that the engine mode selector was reset to “norm” during the flight. But in fact I remember other flights in the past where I had indeed forgotten to reset it from IGN/START back to NORM, but no obvious harm was done. This is the first “blackout” that I encountered in the stock A320neo.

On the screenshot you see the state after I had tried to restart then engines (I should have mentioned that earlier), with various approaches (“automatic” with CTRL + E as well as by following the checklist, after having “turned off” the engines for good with CTRL + SHIFT + E).

For the record: I just concluded my second flight, but this time from the much nearer EGNT (Newcastle). I didn’t climb higher than 7’000 feet (according to the ATC anyway), and this time I made sure to disarm the ground spoilers. The flight went successfully.

I will perhaps redo my previous flight from EGGP (Liverpool) to EGPH (Edinburgh) and pay attention to the ground spoilers. And perhaps another time with ground spoilers kept armed during the flight. Perhaps the “forgotten ground spoilers” are the culprit here (having them “armed” and having set the AUTO BRK (“auto break”) set to “MAX” for the entire flight).

Yes, I also tend to classify this as a bug. However I am curious whether it is reproducable (and if so: how) respectively whether it is triggered by some obvious “mis-setting” that I did (e.g. one which “abnormally drains fuel or electricity”), such that I could report it to Zendesk.

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Oh, okay then. It was just the only “obvious mistake” that I had made. In any case, I’ll try to reproduce this with ground spoilers kept armed (as I just wrote in my previous post my 2nd flight from today - but different route - went fine).

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Yeah, I should have mentioned that before: the screenshot was taken after I had tried (out of curiosity respectively in order to find out what went wrong) several methods to restart the engine. But as I just wrote earlier I am pretty sure that the selector was properly reset to NORM for the flight.

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I’ve had some strange “one off” things happen to me that I have never been able to reproduce. The most memorable was the A320 just fell out of the sky for about 3000 feet before it regained control and started to climb back up to cruise height. AP didn’t cut out or anything. It has never happened since.

You see it all the time in the forums. These strange behaviors that nobody else gets or can be reproduced. This is a complex sim/game…probably the most complex available. There’s a lot of #$*& going on in the background. Things will go wrong and will continue to do so because one line of code was read incorrectly, or slower than what it should have been.

This particular situation is quite likely an anomaly and may never happen again. If it does, you need to start digging that some third party add on (most likely the culprit) is not getting along with the sim.

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Sorry. It was a long post and I didn’t read it thoroughly. My bad. I guess fuel came to mind because that happened to me a while back–I had off loaded fuel from the standard 50% and forgot to monitor it. Went into the water on 2 mile final. Oops.

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