The P-51 Pilot’s Training manual would beg to differ with you. There’s a tank behind the pilot. Now, the plane shouldn’t quit if you’re choosing either main tank, that’s true, but, there is a middle tank. If, you chose one of the drop tanks, well, yeah, that would kill your engine, since the plane doesn’t have any. That would be a problem.
As a side note, if the plane has any sort of decent weight and balance and flight modeling, you in fact do want to start off using the aux tank behind the pilot. And avoid any sudden maneuvers if that tank has a lot of fuel in it. It pretty negatively affects CG when full or nearly full.
Please note that if you have it set as shown in the image below, that would be a problem. That’s the Right hand drop tank, which doesn’t exist on the Asobo P-51 (interesting they (North American, not Asobo) labeled it backwards. Now I’m going to have to research why.).
Edit: I just tested the plane, it works fine for me in 2024 for any of the two main tanks and the fuselage tank.
Edit 2: that’s super annoying, why do the two right panes of glass on the windshield want to tear away rhythmically at the bottom every so often? Hmm, fixed itself when I went to outside view and back in. Sad I can’t open the canopy
I’ll have to check it out again. I’m sure I saw in the tablet that there’s only two tanks.. left and right.
Are you sure the middle tank applies the racing plane this models? Yes the P-51D in WWII had one. I saw one once IRL that did not. There’d be no reason to carry the weight in a plane made for racing anyway.
When I switched to right, it definitely died when I showed fuel in the tank both in aircraft and in the tablet.
All I can say is all three tanks work for me, I switched between them repeatedly. I didn’t look at the EFB, though.
Sure, you’re right, many racers probably removed them. But this one clearly retained it. I can’t speak to the EFB, you didn’t mention that in your original post and I didn’t check it out.
Maybe looking at the EFB screwed up the fuel system? I could see that if it only listed the two tanks, and the aircraft code has three… If they’re labeled left to right 1 2 in the EFB, and the plane has three labled 1, 2, and 3, left to right, it might have canceled the other main tank, sent it to never, never land. They mess up code like that all the time; one group works on this, another that, a functional spec is written saying only do the two tanks, the plane authors reuse their code that has all three and don’t read the spec in detail and… oh well.
I’ll try to check it out again as well. I hope my memory didn’t screw me over that bad lol
I didn’t look at the EFB until it died. I was just trying it out and I’d been on the left a while so switched to the right. A bit later engine died. Switched back and it was fine. Switched to the middle and it was fine. Turned on the EFB and saw two tanks - left and right. I think…? We’ll see!
