Simviation Forums

greetings again.

i have upgraded my plane of choice to the lear 45, the same thing my father flies. i thought it'd be fun. here are a couple oddball things that have happened.. i was going to embark on a flight from Quito, Ecuador (SEQU) to Miami, Florida (KMIA). I had just read how to navigate properly using intersections/VOR etc.. I also printed out the NAVLOG and was going to note my times precisely so I could "navigate in the blind" without the assistance of GPS or the automated flight map.

anywho, before taxiing i set in my cruise altitude of 16,000 feet into the autopilot. one thing of note about quito, ecuador is that its in the mountains.. so my altimeter was showing 9500 feet or so already.

at about 500 feet (from the ground, not sea level) or so after take off i went to enable the autopilot to smoothly take me up to my cruise altitude. the nose actually ended up going DOWN and crashing.. for some reason i think this has to do with the altimeter, but im probably wrong.

the other issue i ran into with the lear was speed. according to the reference info, the learjet's max operating speed is .81 mach. Upon taking off and reaching my cruise altitude, i set .81 mach into the autopilot and engaged. As i reached my speed i was getting overspeed warnings and soon after the aircraft fell apart in midair.

am i just running into problems with the aircraft imported into the game, (design flaw) or am i personally doing something wrong?

- cam

Hi Cam, well its sounds like the model has one or two issues. A quick thought, but at higher altitudes you need to lower the angle of climb as the atmosphere gets thinner, and you risk stalling, and then turning into a rather large dollop of strawberry jam.
I don't use APs personally....
As for the aircraft falling into pieces, I'd recommend that you turn off the stress feature, its one of the worst and most innacurate parts of FS after the lessons....

Ozzy

cam-make sure your Vertical Speed is selected to a positive number. For some reason, it defaults for a descent instead of a climb sometimes. To answer your Email question, the requirement you specified is for the Military, not Riddle.
                    Pat

yeah, this lear is a bit odd in some ways. any recommendations for a different one?

pat..
thanks for the reply on that. i still have to talk to some people about it before i make a decision. ive only got like 9 credits of college done anyway.

I've seen both of these symptoms with virtually all aircraft,, default and addons.

You can't just switch on the autopilot and let go of the stick.  You have to manually maintain a positive rate of climb until the autopilot can catch up to it.  Just keep the stick pulled back enough to climb, however slightly, and autopilot will eventually take over.

The MS manuals always overrate performance.  Set your Lear for 300 KIA and you'll be fine.  If you want to bump it up a little from there you can probably go to about 310 before it overstresses.