Unreal SUKHOI 80

[EHM-2198 Didimo]

After being used to flying my B737-800 and B767-700 I joined EHM only to be downgraded to a turboprop flyer

So I just did my first flight as turboprop in the Sukhoi 80GP from Torino to Zurich and noticed the following problems:

1. The used fuel reported by the Flight Logger appears realistic but the FS9 log showed a much lower (unrealistic) fuel usage.

2. The torque lever works weird, lowering it from Max lowers the torque up to a point after which it starts increasing again. This lead to various weird conditions during the approach.

3. Has a tendency to pitch up

4. Then I tried the a/c (after the official flight) and at a certain altitude I shut down the engines. The aircraft kept up its pitch up tendency, started dropping then stalling and then it starts climbing again (no engines!), then it starts dropping again, stalling, and then up again.

Doesn't look like a very stable model, I hope I get promoted soon because flying this a/c is no fun at all.

[EHM-2029 Sotiris]

Hello Didimo,

welcome to the EHM family.
This is a first...
I have flown the Su-80 for countless hours and never experienced any issues like that.
Saying that, we recently had new planes for FSX which I haven't flown.
Is your Su-80 an FSX or FS9 model??

[EHM-1001 Robert]

Hello Didimo,

welcome to the community. First of all, if you do not like flying the Sukhoi, you can choose the Beech 1900 which is very popular.

Unfortunately FS can produce unbeliavable things on certain PCs, so I cannot answer all these problems.

1. FlightLogger reads out from FS the fuel quantity. If you realize you have more fuel left than the Logger reported that is almost impossible. It happened to me once when I accidentally parked next to a refuelling station, and I filled my tanks within a second.

2. On turboprop planes, just as on large jets, the thrust is reversable. It depends on your flying style, you can push the levers to reverse mode, for example by the mouse. I fly with a joystick, and it is calibrated, so the 0 lever position equals hitting the F1 key (zero thrust) . But if I try to manipulate the levers by mouse (it is possible even with a live joystick on the desk) I can accidentally push them to reverse position.

3. Mainly small planes can be very sensible to the center of gravity. A not optimal point can cause a high nose. Although I do not remember I realised it in the Su80.

4. Unfortunately FS is a simulator only, and not the real thing. You can do many many things in it with unreal input, which results unreal things. Tuning the flight dynamics can cause situations, that under real conditions the plane flies nicely, but under unreal conditions it will fly unreal. I mean, if you shutdown engines on the air...how can we except a plane to fly ? The Su80 wings produce very high lifting force, and maybe it can cause the unreal situation: it can glide in FS without power.

[EHM-2198 Didimo]

Well, it is an ok plane but I guess I did not expect that sinusoidal behaviour while engines where off.

Pity the a/c has greyed cabin windows rather than a translucent window with some fake pilots as some models

In the meantime happy with my EHM flight though I have to get used to the fact that I can't fly wherever I want due to the routes. I finally had ATC (Milan) but unfortunately Swiss Radar lighted off before I arrived to their airspace

Still learning about the logger, unfortunately I first put the plane there at the gate and since I did not want to let the 5:45AM time advance I put the sim on PAUSE while on ground and when I submitted the PIREP it said "We will discount the 19 minutes your simulator was on PAUSE" !!! Also had another first, somehow during the flight my sim went into half speed rather than normal speed.

My problem now comes to PC overload... I have IvAp and IvAe on the secondary (laptop) but my FS PC not only runs now the simulator but also Flight Sim Commander X, FS Realtime, a browser AND EHM Flight Logger. Would love to move some of those to the secondary but €23 for WideFS (and then only for ONE FS version!) seems a bit excessive.

Hopefully I have another exciting flight, I lost the screenshot of my 1st EHM flight with a night dawn over the alps

[EHM-1001 Robert]

Well, that nasty PAUSE problem can be annoying. Therefore there is a simple trick:

Load the game, prepare your aircraft, fill in cargo and fuel, start multiplayer software if you want, and start the Logger only when you are ready for pushback ! Also, you do not need to place your plane to starting spot by the Logger. Just select aircraft and flight, and that is enough This way you will not lose paused time, and you will not mix the things in FS

I do not know your specs, but you can see my at the bottom...I think my PC is a quite old machine, but runs fine all the programs at once you mentioned:

- FS2004 fully packed with scenery and AI
- FS Navigator
- FS Screenshot
(- FS passengers) sometimes
- ActiveSky weather
- Adobe Reader for browsing charts
- FlightLogger
- browser for EHM ProPilot portal
- browser for surfing...
- Messenger

and occasionally the multiplayer overload:
- IVaP
- IvaE
- TeamSpeak

sounds terrific much, but works fine ... and sometimes I am even watching movies when get bored

[EHM-2198 Didimo]

Mine is a Pentium 3.0GHz with 1GB memory but it already shows signs of what I call "Windows XP Alzheimer and Parkinsons"

Did my 2nd flight, still not very satisfied with the Sukhoi 80 performance on approach, perhaps it takes a bit getting used to. I don't have such problems with the Beechcraft and Cessna or most other turboprops I "own".

A problem I noticed with the Sukhoi 80 default panel (that of the Dornier I read) in addition to some small letters is that apparently one cannot select and change the QNH. I looked all around with my mouse and could not find the hotspot to change the QNH.

[EHM-2097 Andrei]

Hi Didimo,

That's good advice from Robert to start Flight Logger as late as possible (= before starting the engines), this avoids several nasty problems.

Especially the surprise you can get as FS9 sometimes starts flight with running engines and sometimes with them stopped (it either depends on the last SAVED flight or it is completely random). It's very frustrating, in ProPilot flights, to be "greeted" from the very beginning with "PENALTY: engines started without parking brakes set".

Starting the flight without the Flight Logger gives you all the time you need to ensure the acft is in the proper condition when Flight Logger starts recording.

Cheers
Andrei

[EHM-0654 Murray]

Hey Didi,

Obvious suggestion (to me) is double your RAM if you can afford to, and then again if you can afford to, get a new hard drive and do a brand new install of Windows to it, installing as little as you can other than FS (I call this "gaming XP" on my machine)

I'm always amazed at just how quickly XP gets slow after a brand new installation, but if you force yourself to keep your gaming installation "clean", you can keep fair performance for quite some time (even on older hardware)...

[EHM-2198 Didimo]

Thanks for the suggestions, I guess the upgrade to 2GB might be more feasable and perhaps buy a new Quad Core PC in a few months.

The problem for me is that since I am in IT my PC not only has the usual flight simulator stuff but also runs a whole development environment installations as well as one or two database servers . Should not be much of a problem in a quad core. The problem is as usual.... Windows....

May I ask why the Dornier 228 was retired (vanished)? the operations manual mentions several Class 1 a/c that are not even available in the site Probably try out that Beech 1900D, recently read an article about it on Airliners magazine.

And who is in charge of the website? I was wondering why all (or most) links open in a new window even when they are in the same (EuroHarmony) site, makes navigation a bit confusing. Other than that, great work on this VA!.

[EHM-1001 Robert]

Hi Didimo,

well, in the past we had 3 airplanes per class, which made an enormous fleet. It was very hard to maintain that much aircraft, also there was not a real Fleet Manager position, almost everything was done by the website developers (Maarten and Gergely). Then we decided to cut the fleet, and in every class, the mostly unpopular airplane was retired. In class 2, that was the little Dornier.

The website is under continous refreshing, although the developer guys put more energy to the new, more coherent site. That is why you can find for example a little outdated Ops Manual... (outdated means for the Fleet section).

I think it is weird what oyu mentioned. I think we almost no have pages that opens in new window. :| Every content works inside the blue frame that you can see on the opening page. As I know the Forum is the only page that opens in a new window...and some links to external sites.