I’m using the trimwheel on the G940 flight system (an oldy with FFB, not that it works, but hope they get it working soon )
Whenever i start a flight, i have to move all controlsurfaces, including the trimwheel to get everything working correctly. If i forget the trimwheel, and do it midflight, then i’m getting a very sketchy up and down movement like described above.
I’d imagine that a flightsim would be able to keep track of the range of the controls to start with.
(and yes, i’ve added a curve to almost all controls.)
Just another example of a basic and mandatory function of flying that got released not working anywhere close to accurate, even though it HAD TO HAVE BEEN NOTICED by beta testers. Very frustrating.
I did a test in the Beechcraft Baron G58 where I operated the trim controller (a POV hat on my TM Warthog HOTAS) while looking at the trim wheels in the aircraft. Briefly clicking even 3-4 times showed no change to the trim wheel setting, yet the aircraft was rolling after some lag time. Holding down the POV it did nothing for a second or two on the trim wheel, then moved very quickly. Very difficult to dial in any manner of fine control. Since these are not axis controls there’s no sensitivity curve calibration. Unfortunately neither stick nor throttle have wheels to map. I’ll try some other controls as suggested by others - maybe a toggle switch would be better. My POV setup works great on all other sims and I try to use similar mappings across all sims and aircraft where possible so my aging brain isn’t too taxed. Oh well…
Tm warthog hotas here and in planes with prop I use the pov to trim which works fine but induces a bit of porpoising as you can’t be accurate due to the change from small input to large input is immediate and not gradual (possibly similar to other knobs where you go from 1 tick to 5 or 10 pretty quickly)
Instead of fiddling with out of trim I get into ballpark, fine tune trim as close as it gets and compensate with power for the final tune and then adjust with power as needed
When using planes with no prop I use the right most axis as a trim axis and I have sensitivity dialed quite far down (-40 or -50) which allows fine control for the most part but as you move to more and more trim it quickly accelerates. Ideally the curve is linear throughout the entire control band but for trim this needs a long travel (I.e. wheel with several rotation between 0-100) to be comfortable to fly imo.
For those of you happy with delving into the file system, the trim calibration can be changed manually in the file : “flight_model.cfg”. The parameters are (for example):
The folders are hidden, so you may need to type %AppData% into the address bar of windows explorer to see the folders.
For some planes, these parameters may be in a “generic” plane folder. And yes, I’m sorry but you will have to change the file for each plane you fly."
I gave this a try on the caravan, to no avail.
And it turns out, at least in the caravan, that even MSFS can’t make the trim work! Using the autopilot, I finally got her trimmed out straight and level at fl110. Flew that way for about 20 minutes, then used VS and -1100fpm to begin descending, and wow…terrible! The airplane chased the FD all up and down the sky. Any time it got within 5 degrees (ish) of the FD marker, the plane would make a crazy pitch maneuver and blow past the FD…and try hard for several hundred feet to come back to center. Crazy.
So, now I don’t feel so bad about not being able to trim out the aircraft; even the sim itself isn’t capable of doing that task.
In the external ‘chase’ view speed, altitude, elevator trim and various other instrument readings are displayed on the sides of the monitor. Although they have elevator trim they do not show aileron trim and this would be very helpful in achieving straight flight and seeing how controller action actually affects the trim function.
I screen-recorded a short clip of the TBM attempting to climb in autopilot VS mode. Wow…violent! I ran out of airsick bags in this brief 1 minute climb. (Apologies for no sound; literally my first time ever screen recording a flight simulator session. Sheesh, and I’ve been flying these sims since the late 80’s! Welcome to 2020… )
Also, I’ve set my graphics to “low end”, just to see if higher frame rate would help, but nope…
BTW, I’ve opened a ticket in ZenDesk for this issue.
Um…I just tried this again, with the TBM, but this time I went all the way down to 0.1.
And…it works!! Trim adjustments are still a little bumpy, and 1% movement is still way too much movement, but it’s not nearly as violent, and the AP has a much easier time changing flight levels (I’ve only tried it with VS so far, not FLC) and holding a flight level.
Speaking of which, I’m currently at FL250, GS is 328KT, and my family of 6 are comfy and ready to go visit gramdma’s house after landing at KFMN RWY05 in about 45 minutes.
If I can figure out how to land this thing, that is…
This will be my very first full flight since the sim came out!
Yep, I have the TWCS and T16000M Hotas and try to use the wheel configured by default on the gear and even with extreme changes in sensitivity it’s unusable. I use button2 on the stick side (also here by default) but that’s better but far from perfect. I hope they will fix this and we will not have to edit CFG files for each plane
Well, I have to say…descent went very poorly. I was cleared from fl250 to 8000, so I throttled back a bit, set the alt to 8000, clicked VS, and dialed in -1100fpm. Mayhem! Purposing violently, the aircraft creaking and groaning. 1000’s of feet in both directions at a time. I had to shut off ALT and hand fly it down. I couldn’t get it trimmed out. Landing was “fun”.
So…not sure what that means, except that “it doesn’t work”. But, we knew that.
I opened a zendesk ticket for this when I first started posting here about it; and kept updating the ticket as I updated this thread. Finally after my last post they acknowledged my ticked and closed it…which means it’s been moved to their internal bug tracking software that we mere mortals don’t have access to.
So, that’s a good thing, I think!
Then, yesterday I found another thread about this issue (I was looking to begin a thread so people could upvote it), and found a couple people that had deleted the key-mapping for elevator trim up and down, and had success.
I did that and saw a slight improvement, but my X45 wheel and the AP both would still slam the plane up and down.
So I deleted all mappings for elevator trim, both keyboard AND joystick, and now the AP ascent / descent is smooth as butter when using VS to change altitude…no slamming around of the airplane. It still hunts around a bit as it gets to the set altitude, and the way it changes FPM as it gets close is a bit strange, but it works.
Of course, you can’t trim the airplane out in manual flight like this.
So i added joystick mappings in every possible combination of “elevator trim”, and no matter what I tried, the AP would start slamming the plane around, and whatever wheel or button I setup on the joystick didn’t work as it should.
So, I’ve compiled links to all the “elevator trim is broken” threads and created a single “upvote” post in the bugs & issues thread. And now I’m posting in all these threads so that we can unifiy and UPVOTE!
See this thread - there is a known issue (it’s referenced in the forthcoming patch list) of controllers like the honeycomb yoke where some of the switches send continuous on signals to the sim. Unmapping these solved my trimming issues.
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(Apologies for no sound; literally my first time ever screen recording a flight simulator session. Sheesh, and I’ve been flying these sims since the late 80’s! Welcome to 2020… 
)
I was cleared from fl250 to 8000, so I throttled back a bit, set the alt to 8000, clicked VS, and dialed in -1100fpm. Mayhem! Purposing violently, the aircraft creaking and groaning. 1000’s of feet in both directions at a time. I had to shut off ALT and hand fly it down. I couldn’t get it trimmed out. Landing was “fun”.