DC Concorde nose/visor cannot be lowered with Lever or Joystick

User Support Hub Aircraft & Systems
, ,
1

I am flying ver. 1.1.0 of the Concorde. When on the runway and preparing for take-off with the Concorde, I note that the aircraft’s nose and visor are at Position 1, i.e. both up. From tutorials I know that part of prep for take-off is to lower the Concorde’s nose down five degrees (Position 3), by using the Nose and Visor Lever on the Centre panel between the Captain and First Officer. However, I cannot move the lever with my mouse so I attempt to move it with my HOTAS One controller buttons B3 and B4 (on the back of the Throttle) which I’ve mapped back in Controls Options (see screenshot below). The lever does move up and down – but only temporarily. It immediately returns up to Position 1 as if pulled back there by an elastic band. Meanwhile, neither the nose nor the visor have budged.

The word “Nose” does not appear anywhere else in the HOTAS One mapping options. The Concorde’s elevators (“elevons”) are on the trailing edge of its delta wings, i.e. almost as far back from the aircraft’s nose as you can get-- so why does the controller mapping shown below mix them together?

Strangely, when I instead drop the Concorde into a custom flight somewhere with no official destination, and it starts out cruising at altitude, I have actually been able to raise and lower the nose/visor with the B3 and B4 buttons. But I don’t know why it works this way while not working back on the runway. And this issue persists whether I have put in an official Flight Plan or not.

I know that there have been more recent updates for the Concorde so the above bug may have been fixed already. So, any assistance or direction with this bug or updates would be most appreciated.

Screenshot (41)
Screenshot (41)1920×1080 148 KB

2

Hi Stuffy, I read your post because I’ve been wondering if to buy the Concorde or not and I’m curious to know what’s going on on this bird. So, I don’t have it now but I have a few general comments that may help you.

  1. You say that it’s not possible to move the nose lever with the mouse .In this case I would make sure there are no parallax problems…by moving the cockpit view with the keyboard arrows in order to have the lever just in front of the pilot and try again with the mouse pointer …you may also need to zoom in a little. I did that a few times on others aircraft and it worked.

  2. Not clear to me what you did on the settings because the pic attached here only shows a mapping to the elevator Trim Nose up and down . I really wonder how is possible for the elevator trim move the Nose and Visor up and down. Maybe this is a setting that works for the Concorde. This setting move the nose up and down on all aircraft simply because they make the the plane pitch up/down.
    Furthermore these 2 settings have been made to the axis X+ and X- not to 2 buttons as described.
    (edited)

  3. Is there any manual for the Concorde on its down-load file? Some aircraft have it.

3

Pretty sure my flaps button lowers / raises the nose …but will need to check that!

4

Hi Crazyhorse,

Good questions. To respond to #1, in the Concorde tutorial videos I’ve seen, the Nose and Visor lever was operated from any vantage point in the cockpit, provided the lever was visible. I’ve tried it from close up and from an angle. Same negative result.

To respond to #2, it’s true that the Elevator mappings do indeed move elevators on most aircraft – but maybe for my own controller (HOTAS One) the ones I’ve found were the only ones available that mentioned the “nose” at all. Believe me, if any other mapping had specified simply “Nose up” or “Nose down”, I would have preferred that. While it’s true that B3 and B4 don’t seem to correspond to the Axis X+ and X- mappings, when i cleared those mappings and rescanned for each while pressing the B3 and B4 buttons on my controller, they were identified as Joystick Axis X- and Axis X+ respectively again, as you see them in my screenshot. So they do correspond.

To respond to #3, here’s the User Manual for the Concorde. It’s very thorough:

https://downloads.justflight.com/support/manuals/DCDESIGNSCONCORDEMANUAL.pdf

5

Hi Stuffy,

sorry for you that it’s not working .It would be good to have a feed-back from other users..
With ref to the mouse pointer on the lever have you tried to use the mouse wheel to see if it works?

On point #2 why not to temporarily try setting the 2 commands nose-up nose-down to 2 real buttons on your joystick instead of the actual B3 -B4 sliders. Just to see what happens..you never know.

#3 Thanks a lot for the manual..I will study it to see how complicate it is .. before the purchase. BTW do you know it the purchase on FS2020 is actually ported to FS 2024?

6

Hi Crazyhorse,

The mouse wheel has no effect for the Lever action. B3 and B4 are buttons – not sliders–and I’ve already tried mapping other buttons for the Lever control but none of that works, either. I’ve contacted Tech Support at JustFlight in the U.K. and we’ll see what they suggest.

Speaking of JustFlight, they have a version of Concorde available that works on either MSFS 2020 or 2024:

https://www.justflight.com/product/dc-designs-concorde-microsoft-flight-simulator#:~:text=DC%20Designs%20are%20proud%20to,Microsoft%20Flight%20Simulator%202020%2F2024!&text=Concorde%20has%20been%20coded%20with,issues%20with%20future%20simulator%20upgrades.

I bought my own version a few weeks back, on the MSFS2020 Marketplace, via Steam. But of course it’s available in many other places. If you decide to buy it yourself, ideally the version you get will have some of the bugs already fixed, i.e. a version more recent than mine (ver. 1.1.0). Good luck…

7

Hi Stuffy,

hope you find a solution eventually.Good idea to contact JustFlight tech support..Last thing I would try is a reinstall..maybe you did it already.

Thanks a lot for the feedbacks on the purchase. I am thinking to buy it on the MSFS2020 market place ..on sale right now.

Good luck to you too.

8

Hi DGJ,
Any luck with your own Lever function with whatever buttons you’ve mapped? Strange that we’ve not heard from others about this Concorde bug.

9

I will take a look later!

Update:

OK…just had a quick look here!
I’m running v1.1.1 from JustFlight.

My visor is working fine and is bound to my flaps control - by default I think! (Info: I use a Logitech A/P panel which has the flaps switch).

Visor down and up all works ok, only observation is that when selecting down, there is approx a 5 second pause between selecting and the visor moving (in all detents).
Going up there is no pause.
This may be realistic…but never flown Concorde so can’t verify! :wink:

10

I use my flaps control buttons on my joystick and it moves the nose and the lever in the cockpit. There is, as DGJ622 has noted, a slight delay between doing this and the nose actually moving.

11

After originating this post, I’ve seen several useful comments from a few of you and they’re much appreciated. As I reported, I contacted the Tech Help Dept. at JustFlight in the U.K. and they have gotten back to me to point out that not only must the Checklist items be done before attempting to lower or raise the Concorde’s nose/visor before take-off, but there are several switches that then need to be turned on as the nose/visor depend on electrical power to operate.

I’d already completed the initial Checklist items but apparently there were further specialized and technical steps needing to be done --and I had no idea. I’ve seen a lot of Concorde basic walkthroughs and Cold and Dark startup tutorials – but none of them dealt in detail with the specific switches the pilot turns on in order for the nose and visor to work. Most of them demonstrated the Lever being raised and lowered and promptly moved on to other things – without pointing out what had to happen in order for the Lever to even work in the first place. That little detail somehow escaped them as needing attention for us Newbies.

So if anyone knows a really good video that does that, I’d appreciate some links.

12

Pro tip - don’t watch P Gatcomb videos. Constantly misses out stuff and goes so fast you can’t follow.

13

Hi,
can you please attach a pic of you controls assignments ? I understand that you are moving the
FLAPS with a switch (or is it a push on/of button?) while Stuffy is moving the ELEVATORS up/down by a device assigned to an AXIS. It’s all quite different I believe.
Thanks

14

My controls are all default…my logitech panel flap switch is default…no special\specific flaps setting.
Whatever is default in 2020 is what im using.

15

Hi DGJ, Crazyhorse & Mucus,

Here is my final report on the DC Concorde issue I created here. Thank you for all your comments and suggestions thus far. I continued my dialogue with JustFlight, asking for more details about which electrical switches in the Concorde flight deck I needed to turn on before the nose and visor would work properly. They replied, and I quote:

“The electrical systems are located on the pilots overhead panel and also at the engineers station. The nose can be controlled by the F5 to F8 keys, when the nose is raised, there is a 5 to 10 second delay before the nose actually starts to lower. Also note: any flaps controls you have assigned in MSFS will control the nose and visor in the DC Designs Concorde. Also worth checking your MSFS assists to see whether changing them to - If you can (temporarily if you prefer) set them to “True To Life”, with everything showing “Hard” and all assists turned off.”

This last suggestion intrigued me. Before I tried anything with the electrical switches, I exited back into the Main Menu/Options/Assistance Options. There the possible choices for Assistance are: Custom, All Assists, Middle Ground, and True to Life. I had this set at Custom, for some reason. So I switched it to True to Life, with level set at Hard instead of Easy or Medium.

Back into the Concorde, still parked on the runway. Bingo, now my joystick B3 and B4 buttons worked! The nose and visor lowered and raised properly. The Lever on the instrument panel visibly lowered and raised at the same time. Not only that, but my F5 key raised the nose/visor to Position 1 (parked or in cruise mode), while my F11 key lowered them both fully down to Position 4 (coming in for a landing). So a bonus here is that I didn’t even need to bother with any electrical switches.

Problem solved. However, lesson also learned. In the various tutorial videos I’ve seen, the authors certainly showed how to carry out the various tasks in the DC Concorde, from take-off through the flight to the final landing. However, NONE of them ever said anything about what would have needed to be tweaked in the first place --those essential settings which are embedded deep within the Options/Assistance menus–for any of their numerous tasks to work as smoothly as depicted in their videos.

As for me, I never thought to ask any of you why your own experience with the Concorde nose/visor issue was perfectly fine. Probably you had your own settings set up correctly.

Well, now I do as well. So thanks again, and Happy Skies everyone.

2 Likes
16

I must admit…I tend to start on the runway…ready to go, not cold and dark!
So if there are any switches etc that need to be made, then they would have been set automatically for me!
…Im such a lazy pilot! :slight_smile:

17

Hi Stuffy,

good finding.!!! Thanks a lot for posting it…

Cheers.