problem with the Howard

[Marlin]

I just downloaded the Howard, (hw5vc4.zip) what a fantastic looking and flying machine, and am having this very minor problem.

I keep getting the box that says you are critically low on fuel press Ctrl x to refuel, or something to that order.

I know for sure that it has plenty of fuel, both on the gauges and the alt, aircraft, fuel and payload.

How can I get it from saying this?

And yes, it will still say press Ctrl x to change the mixture settings.

[Brett_Henderson]

It's been a while since I flew the Howard. What I remember and like is that it makes you manage the fuel if you fly long flights. I believe there are 6 tanks and it always started on the tip-tanks (smallest) and they can run dry pretty quickly, especially if you have a long, full-power climb.

Just pull up the tank selector and switch tanks. If I remeber correctly, the largest are the wings.. then the auxs.

I suppose if you fly it realistically, you'd start out

[Marlin]

Thanks Brett for the information, well taken.

But by the lack of responces I can tell that no one has had this problem, which is a good thing.

Maybe I didn't explain myself well enough, but the box that I'm talking about is like a flight tip box.

Well anyways, I'm not sure what happened but the problem cured itself, I guess. I didn't do anything but reload the game again ?? Beats me, but I know for sure that I really like this plane.

It's very flyable with my POS controller, you have to give it some serious rudder to make it respond. Unlike the F-16, just touch the rudder and it is like slamming on the E brake on ice. A real pain to try and control, so much so that I just can't fly it anymore.

Thanks,
Marlin

[Brett_Henderson]

Yeah.. that Howard is VERY fun to fly. They did their homework on the flight-dynamics. Everything, though not easy, is predictable and realistic. When you turn final and start lowering the flaps in a cross-wind.. it's about THE most fun/realistic sim-plane I've come across.

I can't even really think of a thing that's not, under the limitations of FS9, "As Real as it Gets"..

[Marlin]

Brett and anyone else that might know,

How do you open the cabin door?

I had it open once, but once again I have no idea how I did it.

Yes the flight dynamics are fantastic. You really have to crank on the rudder to get it to go.
I wish I knew how to fix my other planes like the F-16 so that I could actually fly them.  That would be to reduce the roll rate and rudder responce. Oh well for now,
Marlin

[Brett_Henderson]

You can edit the aircraft.cfg file with Notepad or Wordpad.

There are several ways to accomplish roll, pitch and yaw modifications.

A quick, unrealistic way is to simply make the MOIs ridiculously large, but that has side-effects (can make a 172 as sluggish as a 737).

In the flight tuning paragraph, you can "force" changes.. like reducing control surface effectiveness. Or, in the geometry paragraph, you can reduce a control surface's area.. or maximum deflection.

I think you can even force stability by increasing (get this) the roll, pitch and yaw stability numbers.

I'd experiment with all of them, keeping MOI increases minimal and working with surface area and deflection numbers.

Oh.. "Shift+E" opens the cabin door. "Shift+E", release and QUICKLY hitting 1 or 2 or 3 etc. (if there are other doors) toggles the others.

[Marlin]

Brett, I just found this over at the howard 500 site. While I haven't used it yet, it seems to be another answer.  Here ya go, just might be the answer to an over sensitive  joystick.

"""OVER-SENSITIVE CONTROLS: The aircraft appears over-sensitive, almost like a fighter. It would seem that more movement of the joystick would be required in turns for a heavy aircraft like this.
ANSWER: Some joysticks seem to make all aircraft appear over-sensitive. There is a parameter to "de-sensitize" joystick inputs. In the FS9.cfg [CONTROLS] Section, add the following statement: stick_sensitivity_mode=0

This will make your joystick inputs more like a flight yoke."""