I built my father who has over 6000 hours in Cessnas and no longer flys, a cockpit. I built it from scratch including a dedicated computer, honeycomb yoke and throttle quadrant, thrust master pendular rudder peddles, a Logitech saitek avionics panel bundle, and a realsimgear.com Garmin GNS 530. With Spad.next and an open source popout manager, all components seemed to work fine.
After just a few takeoffs and landings we started noticing bizarre behavior from the aircraft. It would fly sideways, engine power levels were far too low and no control position would correct it, it performs maneuvers like barrel rolls despite all efforts to prevent it, and the screen blacks out randomly and comes back on with the aircraft in an updated position.
I contacted MSFS customer service and no tech support is available because the software is part of a home cockpit build. They couldn’t even direct me to a local expert in the software. We have an up to date version of windows 11 as the operating system, MSFS24 aviator edition is the product we are using, and we live in Dallas, TX.
Has anyone had a similar experience or any idea that might fix the problem?
Thank you for your consideration.
What a great project!
Sorry to hear you are having those kind of issues - and yes, there is very little in the way of official MSFS support.
There are many people on the forum with experience with your peripherals and with SPAD.next who I’m sure can help better than I can.
That being said, from what you describe I can almost guarantee they are related to Control bindings - overlaps or conflicts between devices.
Flying sideways sounds like Skew, and Barrel Rolls sounds like Roll… I think you need to methodically search each of your Controls in the MSFS Settings for Skew, Roll, etc, to see what is bound.
if you can identify each specific issue and what is being pressed, on which device, when it happens, then you can search the Controls by Input to find what command(s) are bound to that input - likely more than 1 thing and that could be a conflict.
It might help to disconnect all but 1 device and get it working, then add the next one, and so on.
Have you figured out the MSFS Controls UI? It’s a bit confusing at first, but once you understand it, it’s usable.
I assume that all of your controls are calibrated? I have no experience of Honeycomb devices, but do they come with any software to calibrate them? Alternatively, you can run joy.cpl from the searchbar or a command prompt, this should show your control devices where you can check if they are centred properly.
Thank you gimbal axis, I indeed did not check to see if my father had added some control bindings that might conflict with one another. He did try to set them up once himself and I had to reset them all. I’ll give that a try first thing this morning. If spad next is setting bindings to events, any binding might be the problem. I’ll clear them all and cross check with spad next for conflicts.
Thank you, I was able to confirm that the controls were calibrated correctly in the spad next control panel.
Frustratingly I was not able to reproduce the problem when I arrived. It flew like a dream with the only problem being the auto pilot automatically regulating the throttle. I suspect that’s some kind of feature required by the government to maintain a standard of efficiency. I didn’t check settings for a way to turn it off. My father couldn’t figure out how to work the avionics in his chosen airplane, so I’m going to find a guide for that. Thanks for helping, if the control problems reappear I will check the bindings immediately.
Which airplane? If it has Auto Throttle, then that’s a control in the plane. If it doesn’t have Auto Throttle, there is a section in MSFS Settings for Assists - start there.
The airplane is the Pilatus pc-24 and the next time I make it over there (probably tomorrow) I’ll check for a control to disable that. My father was more concerned with his unfamiliarity with the avionics package. I’ve searched high and low for a manual on the primus epic 2.0 avionics package, but Honeywell doesn’t just give it out to anyone. They are reviewing my application now to see if I qualify, but so far all my attempts to download technical documents have been denied. YouTube is the next logical step but my searches don’t find specifically avionics themed pilatus pc24 videos. Also he talks about going from VOR to VOR to navigate by instruments and I think he needs the maps to correctly tune into those. From my observation of the avionics panel I think we’ll be able to figure it out, without the manual, I’m sure there’ll be a lot of features we will miss out on, but he’s used to a garmin GNS 530 anyway. I’ll post to let you know how we get it resolved. Thank you for you help:)!
Edit: A few videos of the PC-12 and PC-24 might be of help (both are Primus Epic 2 I think, or similar enough?) even though they don’t show VOR usage. I’m sure there is VOR tuning in the Radio panel of the Avionics below the MFD. And the MSFS 2024 EFB will show you VORs if you enable them in the Map, and you can click to get the frequencies.
And another video of the PC-12 with quite a bit of focus on Primus Epic 2 if useful
But there are also plenty of Garmin-based planes (or just analog, like the C152…) for VOR flying.
