I did a cargo mission today in my company-owned PC-12, and except for some small problems (described here in detail) everything seemed fine. But while I was not looking at the screen for a few minutes, something went terribly wrong: After I got an “Envelope” warning, I looked at the screen and saw that my plane was flipped upside-down. Turning my yoke to righten the plane only got me the “Autopilot” warning (which means it was still online up to that moment), but the plane just stayed that way. So I pulled back the throttle (speed was already yellow) and initiated stall recovery, but that got me only even more speed until the plane crashed with overspeed.
What could I have done to prevent this? Why could I not recover from that situation? Could it be something to do with wind? What wind would be necessary to just flip a plane in the air? I hope someone had at least some answers do this… Otherwise please vote for that wish I linked, we are in desperate need of some replay tool in career mode.
My suspicion is that you crossed what I’d describe as a “weather boundary”. You aircraft suddenly went from one “weather” to another, e.g. “wind from the back, generaly calm” to “strong winds from the front”. And your plane had a realistic reaction to something unrealistic.
But it’s just a suspicion, and I can’t be 100% sure. Do you remember were it happend ? A position on the map, an altitude ?
I don’t know exactly where I was on my route but it was a trip from EKFD to LH58. I remember passing first waypoint DISGO on my way to POBOX, but can’t say for sure if I already reached there and went on to SCE or not. Next waypoints would have been UBOMI, WCL, BAXEV, NIT. Departure was around 1428 UTC yesterday. I know I had a good tailwind of around 20kn and a crosswind of around 30 to 40kn. Cruise level was FL190.
This sounds like a strange incident I had with the PC-12 a week or so ago. I was flying stable and level with autopilot engaged, then I panned the camera around to look into the cabin for a moment only to realize something was wrong. When I turned back around, autopilot had disengaged, and I was flipped over in what ended up being an unrecoverable dive. The result was a mission failure I think due to overspeed, and I wasn’t really given a chance to recover.
I still have no idea what happened. I figured maybe I bumped something and wrote it off .. until I read this topic.
I encountered a similar issue, whereas I was flying fine with AP, and then all of a sudden the AP started flashing red, and the plane was very hard to control. I even slowed sim rate to slowest speed, and plane rates were still going crazy, and was unable to re-enable AP without it flashing red. Ended up having to restart mission.
