Simviation Forums

Newbie here working on first plane in fsds.  Plane is for CFS2.

Created a biplane tail dragger.  Had to move entire plane in fsds so that front wheels would set on ground.  Plane starts out half buried in the runway at beginning of free flight and single missions.  After 3 seconds, plane jumps off the ground by about 3 scale feet and slams down onto runway (somtimes this causes plane to crash).  If no crash, plane works fine.

I've fiddled with the COG but changes to that variable in the .air seems to do nothing.

Also, no matter what I change the fuselage angle to, the tail will not sit on the ground.  I have created the gear points in fsds and used the appropriate tags but does not seem to help.  Have manually changed the fuselage angle in .air but it has no effect.  tail remains about 1 or 2 scale feet off the ground.

Can anyone help?  Thanks.

Tim,

This is how I set my aircraft up. The COG, in top view, is placed 1/4 of the cord back from a point projected to the centerline of the fuselage from the leading edges of the wings and on the centerline of the fuselage. In front view, up and down position, even with the centerline of the prop or a line between the two inboard props on a multi-engined aircraft. This is with the fuselage horizontal centerline parallel to the ground in side view.  You can calculate the angle between the bottom most point of the main gear tires and the bottom most point of the tail tire to get your fuselage angle then subtract that from 90 degrees and since the nose would be UP, it would be a positive number.  I still use a little program that came with SDLEdit called Degrees.exe. The gear height is the distance from the verticle COG to the lowest point of the main gear tires when the gear is fully extended. You may have to play with this a little due to terrain mesh, usually adding around 6 inches to the gear height measurement. You can tell when it is right when there is very little movement when switching slew mode on and off. Also observe your wheels from about 3' to 6' altitude and pan from side to side. You should not see any "slide" on the runway.

Happy Contrails,
Lou

Try altering the COG in the aircraft.cfg.  This entry overrides the one in the .air file.

Lou Firestriker and Ender Baron,

Thanks for your help gents!

Fixed and flyin'!!!

S!