I typically fly the Cabri G2, and also have several hundred hours in the LongEZ, and the ICON A5, but mostly fly the G2 helicopter.
I was watching Nova tonight and they highlighted the Joby electric aircraft. I never thought I was interested in flying a glorified quad, let alone a “sex-tupler”.
I should have watched the youtube on how to set up the controls, but I managed what I thought would work. I was able to airplane-taxi and as I throttled up the motor thingeys rotated horizontal, so I took off as an airplane. I forgot to get into the cockpit before take off and shift-c apparently only works on the ground, but it was actually good to be flying by the follow-cam because I could see what direction the motor thingeys were pointing.
I leveled out, ran the pattern, pitched down for approach and throttled back - whoa the motor thingeys rotated vertical and my forward motion stopped. Oh boy now I’m in trouble.
I was totally stopped, just hovering and couldn’t figure out how to get to the runway in front of me. I wiggled the ailerons and discovered I could lose altitude slowly that way. The throttle didn’t seem to do anything anymore. The rudder pedals still produced yaw. Pitching forward kept me from drifting backwards, and with wiggling the ailerons I managed a very soft touchdown on the really fancy golf course across the street from the airport.
As the saying goes, “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one”. I’m not pushing my luck again till I find an operating manual!
THANK YOU!
- Operating manual read
- Controls mapped and Procedures Verified:
My mapping: VKBsim Gladiator MKII
Ailerons: Joystick LAXIS X
- Hover Mode: translate left/right
- Flight Mode: normal aileron function
Elevator: Joystick LAXIS Y
- Hover mode: pull back to rise, push fwd to descend
- Fwd Flight Mode: normal elevator function
Throttle Axis: Joystick LAXIS Z Inverted.
- (throttle slider, start fly mode centered 50% position
- Push fwd 100% to enter fwd flight mode, then adjust for desired speed
- Pull bkwd 100% to enter hover mode, then fwd/back from centered to go fwd/bkwd
Rudder Axis: Joystick RAXIS X. (Also mapped Pedals but Joby S4 does not have pedals)
Toggle Cockpit/External View: Joystick “Eject”
Starting:
- Enter cockpit (Toggle External/Cockpit View)
- Custom view 1 (fwd looking)
- Load Mode on PFD
Taxi:
- “Left hand incepter/LHI” (joystick throttle) centered 50% position
- Fly mode in PFD
- “Right hand incepter/RHI” (Joystick). Pull back to rise, release to hover
- Move to taxiway or runway
Fly:
- Push LHI (Throttle) fwd 100% till desired speed, the center
- pull RHI (joystick) back till desired altitude
Land:
- LHI full back till fwd motion stops, then center
- RHI push fwd to descend
- LHI slight fwd/back to taxi to parking
- RHI push to touchdown
- Switch to load mode in PFD
- Battery switch Off
Note: PFD Load/Fly button starts in Fly mode! Switch to Load mode as first action to prevent accidental control input disaster.
Be sure to watch battery remaining. My flight started at 44%, two miles out and back, landed at 12%.
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You’ve made great use of that manual and seem to have it figured out nicely! I’m still learning but I love that it’s a fast aircraft which is easy to fly but still with procedures to learn and master.
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Make sure to map and use the decelerate to hover/waypoint button, which can be used with the LHI in the 50% position, and this will bring you to a nice station keeping hover in TRC (Translational Rate Control).
A trick I use with dual throttles is to leave one of the throttle levers unmapped and in the 50% position, and map the other to “throttle”, and in so doing, you can find the 50% point by feel, simply by pulling the throttle lever to align with the unmapped second lever.
To map those features mentioned above, note the following:
DECEL TO WP implementation is based on having a defined arrival airport as this will be used as a target, activating it requires a long press of the LHI “DECEL” button, current implementation will default to DECEL TO HVR if no destination is defined in the flight plan.
The following functions can be mapped to your joystick or external hardware by looking for the key bindings in your controls menu
(FUNCTION==>FS2024 KEYBINDING NAME)
SPEED HOLD MODE ==> ARM AUTOTHROTTLE
SPEED SELECT INC ==> INCREASE AUTOPILOT REFERENCE AIRSPEED
SPEED SELECT DEC ==> DECREASE AUTOPILOT REFERENCE AIRSPEED
DECEL button ==> AUTOPILOT AIRSPEED HOLD (short and long press are supported)
DISENGAGE button ==> TOGGLE DISENGAGE AUTOPILOT
synthetic vision should be enabled in the MSFS G3000 for the flight path vector to show. This can be done via the pfd softkeys :
PFD SETTING => ATTITUDE OVERLAYS => SYNTHETIC TERRAIN
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Sorry, Even after a 40 year career as a software engineer, I prefer “stick and rudder” flying than “tell the computer where you want to go and let the computer do the flying for me”
The Joby S4 is a cool concept for sure.