SimWorks Studios and PILOT'S Dash 7!

Also having issues with the AP. It worked mostly fine on my first flight, but after my 2nd consecutive flight (without going back to the menu) most of the AP lights don’t turn on. Here I am descending in VS mode (which I had to adjust with my honeycomb bravo because the VS wheel didn’t work either) and on NAV mode but none of that shows up.

Ok, finally I found some time for flying this bird and I must say that I love the plane and it will probably become my current favourite craft.

Actually my first impressions were not that good - I thought that after finishing so many flights in the ATR I don’t need to read any manual and just fly the thing. Well, I was wrong, my first flight was then a complete disaster. So I took some time to read the AOM (some nice person shared a link in this thread) and following the procedures my second flight was great and fun. There’s no auto propeller rpm management like in the ATR, take-off’s and finals must be with Max rpm, climbs should happen with 1070 rpm as stated in the AOM. The behaviour on AP looked spot on to me, I successfully captured ILS at BIAR 01 (a nice new bespoke airport from the latest WU) and I was flying the last 1000 ft manually. The hand flying is absolutely great in my opinion.

There are two bugs I’ve noticed though. The needle for selecting cabin altitude is acting strange between 0-5000 ft and if I use IAS mode for climb the mode rightly deactivates shortly before reaching my selected altitude but the annunciator stays on.

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Off topic but wondered what airports - ie payware or freeware - you use for Baffin/ Greenland / Very Northern Canada area?

If all goes according to plan, the next patch will feature fully moveable armrests:

This will be for all 4 armrests.

Jerome

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Is it slightly underpowered?
Not on ground though, where it accelerates a bit too easily (eng 2+3 feathered).

If Im above 17,5-18t (TOW) it feels a bit sluggish and barely climbs at recommended climb power (3500/1070).
Also really have to pull hard back on stick during initial climb, and hold it there, even if TO-trim is set to max limit.

Widerøe used these on their network before.
I believe they limited MTOW/number of pax on the short-field-strips.
At below 17t it feels better, but rotation speeds a tad high(5isk kts)?

Edit - also: it feels slippery on final/ILS before you can get flaps15/gear down at 147ias. It barely slows down even on idle on a humble 3degree slope. Once you get to flaps 15 its no problems, but before that it barely slows…

See if I can get hold of some ex-Widerøe Dash 7 pilots :wink:

Anyway - my favorite plane right now :wink:

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I don’t think it’s underpowered, but rather that the wings don’t generate enough lift. a STOL plane like this should lift off the ground easily and climb without the nose being pitched too high. I was also having trouble getting it to take off and climb while hopping around some short strips in Greenland.

The Dash-7’s climb after takeoff is sometimes described as levitating rather than climbing. See this picture and caption from the book De Havilland Canada:

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There seems to be a bug when selecting “user lights” in dev mode for this aircraft. I wanted to increase the brightness of strobe lights but every time I select it, it instantly crashes my sim to desktop

I don’t have any Dash 7 time, but I’ve got a few thousand hours flying Dash 8’s for my day job, and the inability to slow down to the first flap speed doesn’t seem right.

On both the Dash 7 and 8, the props have a large amount of surface area, so at flight idle and full prop RPM, they go to a fairly flat pitch and act as pretty effective speed brakes.

On the Q400, we could pretty easily slow down while in a 2000fpm descent, and in a shallower descent or leveling off, the airplane will bleed off airspeed at a pretty impressive rate, so getting to the gear or first stage flap speeds on an ILS shouldn’t be terribly difficult unless the airplane is heavy and you’re dealing with a high density altitude and/or tailwind.

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Yeah, tnx!
I know a few Dash 8 pilots here in Norway, and talk to them as atc (engm app) and on private.
Dash8 seems very flexible with rapid descends and speed reductions. We often have to tell them to start descend as they keep hanging there :wink:

The Pilot’s Dash7 seem too ‘floaty’. It decelerates for a few seconds when putting in full prop - but thats about it. After that its very slow to get off speed.
To me it seems like a problem with (some) planes in msfs, or the whole msfs code.
But read somewhere there is a (new?) Prop Drag Setting (or something like that) in the SDK.

Hope Pilot’s can tune that aspect.

Just an amendment to my previous post:
Saw some irl vids of the Dash7 where they used 4200/1070 (another 3900/1070) for climb power. That worked much better (than the Air Tindi 3500/1070) than what I used before.

Have you tried the Dash7 (in the game :wink: ) @AZpilot?

Compared to the Dash7, the Dash8 is as slippery as a heavy jet!
When we got the Dash8, we were told how difficult it is to slow down! :rofl:
The Dash7 is incredible slow and always creates a lot of drag, even with the props at 1070.

During approaches with parallel runways we were always able to overtake the fast jets on short final.
E.g. EDDF has very long runways and since flap and gear speeds are awfully low on the Dash7, you could easily cross the threshold at 50ft in clean config at 180kts (decelerating and at idle with the props full forward of course), get the gear down, flaps to 25deg at approx the middle of the runway and touchdown with the correct speed and lots of room to spare.

At LOWI it is no problem to vacate the runway at the first taxiway.

During STOL approaches you have around 7 deg nose down.

Climb happens at a very shallow pitch attitude and the lack of climb performance at high weight is very obvious.

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We had a couple of airports (mostly LAS) that never figured out the Q400 wasn’t a King Air, so we started doing malicious compliance every time they told us “Maximum forward speed 'till 5 mile final” on an approach.

They never figured out that for us, that was 210kt until 5 miles, and then slamming on the brakes and hitting about 110kt at 1000’, which screwed up their spacing something fierce.

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Thank you very much! I must say a dev being so interactive and reactive to end-users is very refreshing! Keep up the good work!

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Regarding Power:

3.500 / 1070 is really low for climb. It equals ~ 65% power. I think you missinterpreted the pdfs. You just set 3.500 ftlbs before you change the rpm to 1070 to avoid overtorquing, since the torque will rise, when you decrease the rpm. After you set the rpm to 1070, you then increase torque back to specific power setting.
If you have no real performance tables for a Turboprob I would recommend following power setting for the sim (that is an average of all my insim experience with turboprops, where I had POHs at hand):

Max. Power Climb - 100% Power
Intermediate Climb - 90% Power
Eco Climb - 80% Power
Max. Performance Cruise - 100% Power
Intermediate Cruise - 60-70% Power
Max. Range Cruise - 45% Power

BUT: Torque is not Power. Power is a linear function of TQ times RPM (Horsepower = Torque * RPM *1/5252).
For the Sim you can just use Power in Percent = Torque in Percent * RPM in Percent.

If you wanna climb with 90% Power in the Dash with 1070 RPM, which is around 90% RPM you must determin what factor times 0.9 would be 0.9 - that is 1. So 90% Power Climb would be 4800/1070.
4400/1070 is around 80% Power
4200/1070 would be around 75% Power.

Anf if you dont want to calculate fractures - the just set the Power in Percent as Torque in Percent with Max. RPM. After that you can just lower the RPM and the Power stays the same, as the Torque will accordingly increase. Just have to watch, that you dont overtorque.

I.e. if you want to set 45% Cruise Power, then just set Max RPM then set 45% Torque and after that decrease RPM back to 1070. Done.

Cheers

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Tnx Jaydee!
I just saw climb power 3500/1070 somewhere in the operating manual.
That was obviously too low ;).

Do you know the SDK well? Any way to increase “prop drag” or something similar - as it acts very ‘floaty’ now…

For prop drag -

edit in engines.cfg

prop_mod_zero_lift_drag_cf = 0.015

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Too much for me :wink: . No idea what Im doing in those config files…

Dash7=PT6A-50.
Just had a quick look at Milviz PC-6 (PT6A-27) and TwinOtter (PT6A-34) - totally different engine cfg’s…

Hope Pilot’s will have a look at it.

Thank you so much! I would love to see one of your check lists for the Dah-7. Let me know if I can contribute.

I understand the hesitation. Looking at non-English code can be intimidating. But if you’re willing, making an edit to one line isn’t difficult.

First and foremost, make a backup copy of the original file!
Double-click the file. If you’re prompted to pick an app to open with, choose Notepad. Once open, hit Ctrl+F on your keyboard to open the Find function, and paste in the prop_mod_zero_lift_drag_cf parameter. Once you get to that line, change whatever value is there to the one specified above. Close and save, then test.

Yeah tnx.
I know how to edit it.
Its already set to 0.015.
No idea what I should set it to :wink:.

And theres tons of other settings that can be tweaked and influenced by changing some parametres.
Better some competent ppl(Pilot’s) do it :crossed_fingers: