Class 4: Fokker 70

[EHM-2198 Didimo]

I find both a/c of Class 4 (Main division) just fantastic, the Embraer only misses the side views (as the Fokker does) . Anyway this post is about the Fokker 70 in its standard configuration.  This is not airplane bashing! but what I experienced on this 2.5 hour flight, comments are welcome.

I installed it yesterday and took it for a manual ride at MPTO and back (offline). It seemed to behave well, loved the cockpit (although some things too small to read) and the a/c behaviour and sophistication. Checked radios and (air/speed) brakes, ILS, etc.

Today I did my 1st official class 4 ride on this F70 from EHAM to LIRQ (now that I am in jets I do longer flights) and my God, what a stressful and eventful flight it was!!!! I chose FL310. Now I tried to use its automation things and a LOT of weird things happened:

1. Upon departure I set the ALT to 31000' and enabled AP and ALT. It would refuse to climb. I tried setting VS but it had a life of its own choosing a negative number. I was unable to use the VS setting.

2. It did not climb to the set altitude on autopilot. Basically i had to take it there manually and when at FL310 then enable ALT on the A/P and THEN it would hold.

3. For takeoff there seems to be no working button to set takeoff configuration (no docs either). I do 100% and get some red thing on the display and a TAKEOFF warning (if I remember correctly).

4. With AutoThrottle enabled (as well as disabled) when in AutoPilot the plane would tend to go into OVERSPEED and issue this warning (voice, very cool).

5. Ocassionally when in A/P at cruise level the plane would suddenly jolt to one side as if smacked on the cockpit by a MEGA HAND. It even issued a bank angle penalty even though it was doing A/P.

6. On 3 or 4 ocassions while in A/P at FL310 it would go out of control. Sometimes it would veer off left (or right) and dive or tend to go upside down (pfew, had my hands full handling these emergencies). Severe dives and bank angles, I would then act by disabling the autopilot and regain manual control of the plane.

7. At FL310 I tried to initiate descent by setting throttle to idle (no autopilot) and it would not descent. I tried then by setting ALT to 5000' (the VS thing does not work) and it would still NOT make a controlled descent. In fact it went very unstable. It seemed overpowered at cruise level even with throttle idle. The only way I could take her down was by lowering the nose when speed permitted and a lot of speed brakes to reduce speed.

8. The panel is kind of confusing, It does not seem to follow the "dark is off" consistently. So it is very confusing to figure out whether a toggle switch is ON or OFF.

9. When in northern Italy the a/c suddenly went up to 31920' even though it was set to fly FL310 and then out of the blue, both engies STOPPED (no I did not touch anything) and started to glid and tend to stall. I had my hands full initiating a manual engine startup at high altitude.

Basically in manual mode (no automatic anything) it felt very unstable. My approach on manual mode once I put her down to 5000' went ok.

I don't know if the 3 extreme unstabilities that send me diving left or right were just technical in nature (faulty autopilot algorightms) or WINDSHEAR. When I was up there in the alps on Unicom another guy reported "hating his a/c" and also mentioned there was heavy windshear above FL310 in Germany (I was already in Switzerland an north italy but it also ocurred before that). In one of those the a/c banked more than 45 degrees (penalty was issued).

After the 1st major unstability (happened in A/P) the simulator reported the "aircraft is damaged".

Now, If FS can simulate windshear it is great but if it happens like that in real life I don't ever want to be in a plane when it happens!!! believe you me, my heart even skipped some beats (like arrhytmia) when I had my hands full with these flight emergencies.

Good thing is, with manual control I managed all of them without crashing. But has left me thinking whether this was windshear or just instability or maybe something I did not do properly. I doubt the last because I "fly" the B767/767 without such problems but maybe this F70 is sensitive to some switches.

You can see, I had my hands full and had some very scary moments (and missed some heart beats as well, no kidding!).

[EHM-1465 Dominic]

I've flown the Fokker 70 lots of times and never had any issues with it - the AP and all systems work fine on my setup. If you are having problems with it have a look at http://fokker.avsim.net/F70100.htm - this is the Project Fokker page and has some FAQ's as well as the link to download their full package with manual etc. Perhaps this will give you some ideas.

It does seem odd that you keep having these problems with various aircraft - perhaps there is something wrong with your FS setup?

[EHM-2198 Didimo]

Like I said this is not a/c bashing. I too find it odd that it happens but sadly, I only experience this with EHM a/c Then again it could be that some of them (the unstability) were just the bad cosmic karma that *I* had to be in a place of extreme windshear (as the other guy said he experienced).

Which version does the EHM Fokker 70 is? v2.x or v3.0? I noticed there is a v3.0 update on their site. Apparently a few of the other issues that I experienced have been solved (toe brakes). Apparently some autopilot issues have been solved as well, I wonder if that is mine. I am not sure whether to install this 3.0 update on the EHM installation.

I wonder if their "checklist" is for a real a/c or truly for the panel as implemented by them, any ideas? Their documentation unfortunately seems to omit a lot of the gauges such as how the a/p works on this a/c (like I said, it fails to attain altitude by itself).

Do they have a forum somewhere? I once had issues with their turboprop but never got any answers from them.

[EHM-2155 Mariano]

Wow at the moment the F70 is one of my smoothest fliers... I dont see how you got so much adrenaline pumping situations hehe.
Its a very stable plane and lovable while landing. Ive done kiss landings as low as 100 feet/min with it.
Sometimes the autopilot is tricky to set but once its locked, never weird happened up there.

Do you run FSX?

[EHM-2198 Didimo]

Nope, I run FS9.1 It does indeed flies lovely, at least manually. Anyway, I think this "bad" experience (yes, adrenaline rush and all) was due to two things:

1. The extreme windshear above FL300 in Germany/Alps as also reported by another user flying another plane and of course me being there in the right place at the wrong time

2. Some technical issues that arise with v2 of F70. That it does not happen to one means not that it does NOT happen (I am not crazy). Their site report various things, including weird VS (vertical speed) behaviour.

For the moment I simply updated my FSUIPC, FSSound and GaugeSound DLLs to those in the v3 package.

Let us not forget that people run miriads of different computer configurations with FS9, FS9.1, FSX various add-ons that sometimes screw things up (like that crappy Abacus thing), etc. It is the nature of software and it is thus naive to disregard things as "not happening here".

[EHM-1465 Dominic]

Originally posted by EHM-2198 Didimo

1. The extreme windshear above FL300 in Germany/Alps as also reported by another user flying another plane and of course me being there in the right place at the wrong time

If the problem is due to extreme winds then there isn't much we can do about it

Let us not forget that people run miriads of different computer configurations with FS9, FS9.1, FSX various add-ons that sometimes screw things up.

That's a fair point about many different set-ups bit it is also your answer - you report many extremely unusual issues in this thread that others have not experienced...  If it is to do with your PC and sim set-up we are unlikely to have an answer for you...

Basically, we will try our best to help all our pilots here. We can give help on flight techniques, layout of the panel, places to get useful downloads etc but if your PC has some component that disagrees with a particular aircraft there's not much we can do...

Out of interest, you have made reference to normally flying the jets like B757/767 - which planes and panels do you use and have you ever experienced any odd flight behaviour from them?

[EHM-2198 Didimo]

After further examination I think I have come up with an explanation about the weird behaviour exhibited by the a/c on this "maiden" flight.

It was a ProPilot flight, the server did not take notice of it but that is beside the point of this thread. However, my local FlightLogger client DID grey out the ProPilot button, so as far as it was concerned it WAS a ProPilot flight. The server does not program failures (or it may), it is the task of Flight Logger (which actually connects to FS) to generate these faults at random times. Pretty interesting if you think about it.

The ProPilot system introduces "a complex algorithm for aircraft failures based on the amount of hours accumulated before a maintenance cycle".

My a/c was not so "virgin" and I guess I was given some failures to keep me entertained [as it indeed was]. Under normal circumstances this would not be the case as I had flown it manually before.

I recall that sometime during the beginning of the flight there was a mention of "aircraft has been damaged" and hell broke lose at random afterwards.

Some of the causes of the weird behaviour are the windshear encountered with the "real weather" at that time but mostly due to the random failures programmed by FlightLogger in the PP algorithm (as expected).

The behaviour exhibited by the a/c during the "extreme circumstances" seem to be in accordance to some failures I experienced before with a "damaged" aircraft using the FS Passengers trial add-on as well as with the rudder getting stuck either left or right or ailerons getting stuck. The latest also consistent with failures I have seen described in Discovery Channel/National Geographic "Aircraft Crash Investigation". One of those rudder failure episodes was actually on TV just last week if I remember correctly.

And the "horrendous experience" was not mine -I think there has been a misunderstanding there-, it was experienced by the virtual passengers on the flight.

If you haven't experienced those failures then lucky you yet at the same time you have certainly missed the oppty. to attempt to handle these situations, luckily mine didn't crash.