Ideal Flight Accessibility phase 3

[Steve Waite]

Taxi off the runway is straightforward to implement.

At the moment Ideal Flight auto-throttle shuts off if you change the throttle or use the hot-key. You can change the VS or Altitude that does not affect the auto-throttle. Remember that at the moment, after the sim starts first time, the first input from any controller axis or button will send current axis positions for starting calibration. The throttle calibration position sent to the simulator looks like a change to throttle which will shut off the Ideal Flight auto-throttle requiring a single CONTROL+SHIFT+S to return to the last position in use. Before starting off jog a control or press a button on a controller so that the controller is calibrated already. I will see if there is a way to ignore the first input of the throttle.

[Orinks]

A few posts back, you mentioned you now implemented a climb assist ffeature into IF. After takeoff it will adjust for climb as per the flight parameters page. To switch it off, you had said that entering a manual altitude into the autopilot shuts it off.

That's what I was referring to. If that's not a feature sorry for the confusion.

[Steve Waite]

Yes, what I said was if you adjust the climb-to altitude down to where you are or climb to your climb-to altitude the climb assist shuts off. If you wind down the altitude until it meets your current altitude the climb ends. Therefore you can adjust the climb-to and vertical speeds without upsetting the climb.

[Orinks]

Think you can have the preview out for the weekend?

[Steve Waite]

That's going to be tight. I'm looking at the move off runway and the 250 knot, 10,000 ft limits to the speed presets today.

[Steve Waite]

...with the speed limit the auto-throttle needs to avoid going too fast. The Lear45 goes from 230 to 330 knots in 120 seconds to stable speed, but during that time it oscillates 3 times and reaches 347, 340 and 332 knots. I'm working on that right now to maintain speeds below the asked for speeds. The Lear45 has a speed control but the Ideal Flight assist must work the same for all aircraft...

Then I'll put in some off-runway code and hope to get something uploaded for the weekend. Looks tight though...

[Steve Waite]

..i'm not going to have time to upload just yet.

I have got the speed control working right without topping over the asked-for speed by more than a few knots and works quite quickly.

I'm adding the speed limit preset to appear for ascent and descent speeds over the limit - see Restriction just below the flight plan types on the Flight Generator page. Generally that's a limit of 250 knots below 10,000 feet.

Then I'll add the options to move off of the runway and to stop just off the runway when holding short at the start.

There's a lot gone into this new build and I found a few few issues to repair and a bunch of minor improvements under the hood. For example the Speeds in MPH checkbox was being shown as set by the AI Exclusion value at the bottom of the Flight Parameters page, that's now showing the correct value. Only a few aircraft show speed in MPH.

[Steve Waite]

With the climb assist enabled it automatically assumes the vertical speeds as set in the Aircraft Flight Parameters page and with throttle assist enabled it maintains speeds really well and keeps below the speed limit, 250 knots below 10,000 feet then automatically increases to the desired ascent speed. On descent it throttles back early to stay within the limit. So it will say for example 330 knots but will only do 250 knots below 10,000 feet.

I'm now going to add the ability to hold short and move off the runways to satisfy ATC.

[Orinks]

Well, what that restriction really should say is 250 knots at or below 10000 feet. Tramp starts slowing down at 11000 feet or so and never gets there because it puts 250 into the auto-throttle way too late.

The IF auto-throttle should start slowing down at 13000 or so depending on the descent/cruise airspeed.

[Steve Waite]

Yes that's correct, thanks for the input. I F will calculate the descent speed over 3 minutes plus 500 feet and start reducing speed from there. So at 1500 fpm or 25 feet per second descent, I F auto-throttle will increase the 10,000 feet by 25 x 180 seconds = 4,500 = 14,500 feet + 500 feet = 15,000 feet. This gets down to 250 knots from 300 knots. So, when cruising above 300 knots, it might be better to step the descent by reducing the descent at around 11,000 feet to a descent of 200 fpm whereby I F will continue to operate in descent at 180 fpm or more and the aircraft will be sure to get down to 250 knots.