Escape used to be the more reliable way to pause. In the past “Active Pause” caused weird behavior on returning, especially, because, well, things like your engine kept consuming fuel even though you weren’t moving, and when you came back, often you’d be plunged into a dive, basically the whole world kept moving around you.
The Escape key used to pause the game, and return you to exactly where you were. But, about 2 or 3 updates ago, MSFS started forgetting the state of various controls. For instance, and this has happened to me, if you paused while taxiing, you’d come back and suddenly your plane couldn’t move. The parking brake was clearly in the off position, what the heck is going on, wait a second, if I hit the parking brake, I can move again. IOW, MSFS was resetting the parking brake but not showing it in the controls of the plane.
Other people have been recording the same experiences, with different controls being affected upon return depending on the state of the plane prior to pausing. Thing is, it doesn’t always happen.
And, in typing this, I wonder if it has to do with, rather than remembering the state of all controls, I wonder if they are applying the aircraft’s *.flt files, choosing one kind of based on the state of the flight. I just checked the plane I had the issue with, and the parking brake is set to =0.0 in the taxi.flt. I wonder if 0.0 means the brake is on or off? Then I looked at the apron.flt, and, yes, I was on the apron when I hit Esc, I had paused before entering the named taxi lane, in that file Parking Brake = 100.00. Perhaps this is what’s going on?
Throttle parameters in cruise are .722 for the DC-6 in Cruise.flt, of all the files, this is the highest value of the throttle levers in all of the *.flt files. There’s a billion lines in each of the *.flt files of the DC-6, most of which are unintelligible to me, so I didn’t do an exhaustive check of all variables. The Carenado Archer *.flt files, where I personally first observed the behavior, are much simpler 