Dear,
Why is my airbus quadrant always going on idle mode when I pause the game and then going back to game?
And why is sensitivity between IDLE and CL so high. How can I reduce sensitivity just for this area.
I am on PC version.
Everything updated.
The FBW mod allows much better calibration of the Throttle settings.
I found the difference between CLB & Idle on my TCA Quadrant to short so I printed a new detent layout on my 3D printer and moved the detents further apart.
Having re-calibrated in the FBW mod it works much better now.
There’s a old post on the forum about moving the detents.
This issue can be caused by duplicate binding. For example, you have Thrustmaster Airbus Quadrant, with the throttle bound to the throttle axis by default. But if you also have the TCA Sidestick attached with default profile as well, the slider in the sidestick would be bound to the throttle axis by default.
Because you have conflicting duplicate binding coming from two hardware or more into the same function/command. The sim will take both simultaneously And you will get this issue.
Go through all your control bindings. Make sure only 1 command is bound to 1 control from the entire hardware that you have connected. Meaning, if you have the throttle axis bound to your TCA quadrant, make sure you unbound the throttle controls from your Sidestick and your Keyboard as well.
Golden rule is: You can assign a single control button to multiple functions/commands. But do not assign the same function/command to multiple control buttons.
This is because there is a difference in the ratio between the Thrustmaster quadrant compared to the range of throttle in the actual Airbus.
If you look at the Thrustmaster quadrant. You’ll notice that each detent are equally spaced with one another. In other words, you have Full Reverse at 0% lever, IDLE at 25% lever, CL at 50% Lever, FLX/MCT at 75%, TOGA at 100%. So for each detent, it’s equally spaced with one another at 25% equal increments.
But when you look at the actual airbus throttle in the sim. Full reverse to IDLE is actually -20% range. From -20% to 0%. The 0% is actually the IDLE point. Then the CL point is at 85%, FLX/MCT at 95%, and TOGA at 100%.
When you see the range above, they’re not equally spaced with one another. We have 20% range from FULL REV to IDLE. Then we have 85% range to CL, before it drops to 10% range towards FLX/MCT and another 5% increase to reach TOGA.
When you compare the two, notice that it has a different scaling? Meaning the thrustmaster is designed with equal distance for each detent, and the sim has to “interpret” it to cover the variable distance of the Airbus aircraft.
The reason why it’s so sensitive between IDLE to CL is that, the sim has to cover 85% of throttle distance, using only 25% range from your physical throttle. In other words, for every 1% that you move your physical throttle, the sim has to move the throttle by 3.4% of power. Meaning it needs to have 3.4x more sensitive to movement, than your actual movement.
Same logic applied to the other detents, from CL to MCT, the sim can only cover 10% of thrust range, but your Thrustmaster quadrant is sending 25% of range. That means the sim has to “reduce” the sensitivity because this time, when you move by 1% in your thrust lever, the sim can only move 0.4% of throttle. This time the sensitivity has to drop into 0.4x the sensitivity as normal linear movement.
If you want to stick with the default A320, you’ll have to adjust using the sensitivity page in your control options. But if you’re using FBW A32NX, you can use a linear sensitivity curve, and use the EFB FlyPad to calibrate the throttle, so that it can move the throttle linearly, but it would still have the same sensitivity multiplier that I mentioned above.
I just bought the Thrustmaster Airbus edition joystick and throttle quadrant a week ago, and so far I am extremely disappointed. The joystick is very good, but the quadrant is pretty much unusable except in a few brief moments.
Using either the default setup (FS2020 autodetects the quadrant when you plug it in) or customizing it in the FBW EFB, the throttle is WAY too sensitive at low power settings. Have fun trying to taxi around an airport where you only want a few percent power changes. Same thing when landing, and you’ve turned off the autothrottle - fine control of your throttle on final approach is impossible.
The problem is that the physical travel of the throttle levers, let’s say 0-100 (which is approximately the actual travel of the lever in milimeters, so that works nicely in this example), they have been forced to conform to Airbus’s detentes, which are roughly equidistant from each other. There are 5 detentes in all (including the extremities). That means about 25mm of travel between each.
Detente 5 is Full Power/TOGA. No brainer, full foward, 100mm lever travel position, 100% throttle, .
Detente 4 is Flex or MCP (I don’t have it open at the moment). That’s 25mm back from full power physically, but represents something like 95% throttle.
Detente 3 is Climb Power, which is the position you generally stay in from just after takeoff all the way until just before landing. That is at the halfway point in the physical travel (50mm), but still represents around 90% throttle.
Detente 2 is Idle. No problem there. But when trying to control the engines manually, the difference between Idle power and 90% power is squeezed into the 25mm of travel between Detentes 2 and 3 - pretty hard to be precise. But it gets worse. The relation between the physical lever travel and thrust position is exponential! Assuming Idle is 20% power, at halfway between Detentes 2 and 3 you might be at 30%, but the remaining 60% of power comes in the remaining centimeter of travel - most of it at the end.
Detente 1 is full reverse, needing the reverse-latches to be pulled to access. Not too bad, but it’s hard to apply reverse-idle because the lever is so close to Detente 2 (Idle) it ends up clicking into that detente and cancelling the reverse buckets. Full power reverse, no problem.
When you look at the graphs in the Control Settings, you can see what they did to the sensitivities to make it work with Airbus’s detente system. But unless they can make the power more linear between detentes, I don’t see how it will ever work.
Oh, and forget about flying another type of aircraft with this throttle quadrant, unless you want to mess with saving a completely separate configuration for non-airbus aircraft.
For now I am flying (Airbus or otherwise) only with the Airbus joystick/sidestick, which feels very nice and has a nice, linear throttle slider.
The reason why Asobo create the default profile for the TCA Quadrant Airbus Edition is that most people would only buy that, so they can have an accurate(ish) hardware control to fly the Airbus aircraft. Any other aircraft would be a secondary purpose to buy the TCA Airbus edition.
Your reasoning is exactly the same explanation that I’ve written in a previous post before yours, is that since MSFS has Airbus A320 as a default aircraft, the default control profile is setup for that aircraft. Including the sensitivity curve. That’s why the default sensitivity curve is set up to be very sensitive on the lower range, before it drops at the higher range, so that the detents from the TCA Airbus edition can match the detents in the sim.
Why is this a “mess”? Creating a separate profile for every type of aircraft should actually be a “rule” to do so. Because every aircraft is different. You have GA prop aircraft where you have to deal with mixture and everything. You have Boeing that doesn’t have detents at all. Then you have Airbus that uses “Throttle Modes” through the throttle detents. These different types of aircraft that has different flying philosophy is the reason why everyone “Should” create separate profiles for every aircraft types that they want to fly.
You can create a separate profile where the sensitivity curve can be customised to your liking. So if you want to fly a different aircraft, Just duplicate the Default profile, then adjust the sensitivity curve accordingly. If you want linear just use the sensitivity slider to 0% in everything (except for reactivity which should be 100%). Once you done that, you’ll notice that the throttle controls are more linear now.
If you’re using FBW A32NX aircraft, you’ll need these linear sensitivity curve anyway because the EFB FlyPad can calibrate your throttle detent properly when it’s configured to use linear sensitivity curve.
You know what, you’re right. I never really thought of doing that but having multiple setups is pretty easy. I’ll set a couple up and try it out. I also just discovered the screws to disable the detentes. I’ll have to test to see if I want to do that.
I was thinking of buying the cheap Logisense throttle quadrant as well for piston aircraft, just in order to be able to have the throttle/mix/pitch trio. No way to map it on this Airbus unit.
About the FBW, can you change the relation between throttle position and detente? I haven’t seen that setting if you can. Ideally, you would set the Climb detente at 50% and MCP at 75%, so that you have a more or less linear relation, unless you activate the autothrottle of course.
For me, I don’t want to remove the detents, because I already broken the tensioning screw at the back when I unboxed it. 
. Without the detents holding my throttle position, my throttle would slide back down like it’s on ice. I technically can’t set my throttle to any other position other than in the detents. As soon as I lift my hand while positioning the throttle between the detents, it’ll slide back down to the nearest detent.
That is actually the first step that you have to do before you start using the aircraft. The EFB Flypad in the aircraft will show you the current position of your throttle, and all you need to do is tell the aircraft where you want the aircraft to save the detent position.
For example, after setting the sensitivity curve to linear in everything, go to the EFB FlyPad under Configuration and Aircraft and Calibrate.
In there, all you need to do is position your TCA Throttle to Full Reverse, and in the FlyPad, select Full Reverse and click “Set from Throttle”. This will tell the aircraft saying according to your TCA throttle position, “this is the full reverse”. Then you do so for the remaining detents. Position your TCA throttle in IDLE, then press IDLE on the FlyPad, and press Set from Throttle. Then position your TCA on FLX/MCT, select MCT on the FlyPad, and press Set from Throttle. And do the same for TOGA.
Once you’re done, you’ll still technically have linear controls but the FBW Aircraft itself will determine the proper scaling on where the position will be in relative to the detents that you set. Which means even if you only travel 25% of throttle in the TCA quadrant from IDLE to CLB The FBW Aircraft automatically scale that to cover 85% of throttle “linearly”, before it automatically drops to a lower scaling when you move from CLB to MCT and so on.
I made a video on how to do this here. The blue bar shown on the calibration page refers to the actual position of my TCA throttle. It’s basically positioning my TCA throttle to the detent that I want, and I set the Aircraft to save that position as the detent position:
Nice video. I’ll be going through it. Thanks.
BTW, since I plugged in these Thrustmaster units, some joystick buttons got associated with basic menu items like you see on the bottom left of the screenshot below. I even removed all button associations and they are still there. It causes weird stuff like, when going to the settings menu during a flight, you hit the Esc key to resume the flight, and Button 3 is invisibly tied to Esc, and commands full flaps and spoilers to extend, which makes things exciting when cruising at FL400. Any insight on cleaning that stuff out?
That has nothing to do with the joystick button commands that’s tied to the menu like shown on the bottom left. The issue must be coming from the Flaps and Spoilers binding that you set. If you don’t have the TCA Addons (Spoilers and Flaps additional hardware) connected to it, what happened is that the sim is receiving “phantom inputs” from a hardware that you don’t have.
So if you don’t have the Flaps and Spoilers addons attached, you need to remove the Spoilers and Flaps axis that is bound from your profile.
Basically make sure you only have the Flaps and spoilers command coming from just one button out of all the collective hardware that you have connected. That means, you also have to remove it from the keyboard profile as well. If you’re using joystick buttons to manage flaps and spoilers deployment.
I usually create a blank profile for my keyboard so I don’t get conflicting command bindings from multiple hardware.
Thanks. I have deleted the unneeded bindings and taking the FBW out for a spin, after following your video for the settings. If you don’t hear back from me I have crashed and died. 
Thanks for your help.
Edit: Well I lived, and going from the settings menu back to flight did not cause my flaps and spoilers to deploy. But it did send my engines to max power. Go figure… But making the progression linear made all the difference - it is usable now. Thanks again.
Did you still have the slider on the TCA Sidestick to be bound to the throttle. If so, you need to remove the throttle axis binding on the sidestick as well. This might be what’s causing the sim to push max power on the throttle after unpausing it. Since it’s also receiving throttle commands from the sidestick.
Yes I do. I think I get it - when it re-enters the sim it polls all the various inputs to see if anything has changed from previous settings, and while I hadn’t touched the throttle quadrant, it might have seen the setting on the joystick and went, “Oh, that’s a change”, and registered it.
I’ll do that.
Yeah. I actually changed my TCA Sidestick slider bindings to Left and Right Brake Axis. That way I can control my braking pressure using the slider. (Because I don’t have rudder/brake pedals).
I had the same problem, can you make a tutorial on how to unbind the flaps and spoilers axis? Thanks
You can search for the bindings using the search field in the control options. Search for Flaps and Spoilers, and you should see them bound to an axis. Simply click on them. And press the Clear button.
