Community Discussion > Flight Operations
ProPilot FAC
EHM-1749 Hector:
With all due respect I think that whatever we do in ProPilot should stay in for ever. Good and bad things. If we start to discard the penalties, we will never be able to assess whether we are becoming better pilots, which is the major goal of going ProPilot. Whatever we did, should stay there. Otherwise we would become less careful (not wanting to say lazy) because we would know that our mistakes would be washed away. It would be like if we never had had it. Keeping them in our file should serve for us as a reminder. For example, I will never forget that because of my failure to check the weight and balance I crashed a B763. Ever since I have never failed to do that. That paragraph in my flight history I read every time I lock a flight reminds me of that day. However, there are certain penalties that should be reviewed before being applied:
The following two penalties should be applied only at start up. Chances are that in cruise you may hit the wrong key or spot and you are penalized.
1. Engines ON and strobe light not turned on.
2. Engines ON and beacon lights not turned on.
The following is the one that is probably the most hated by ProPilot pilots:
1. Airplane was at overspeed
Before applying this penalty I think that the ACARS should be checked. Of course, I don't have a clue whether this check is possible within the logistic of ProPilot.
Overspeeding may result from either a pilot genuine mistake or when flying on-line and the connection is lost. The latter would be easy to detect in the ACARS because the window column goes to zero and the speed column shows a change in value. We all know that when this happens, the autothrottle may not react in time to avoid overspeeding. No matter how the changes are set in FSUIPC it happens.
I don't know if this type of occurrence could be flagged out in ProPilot. From this I could even think that this penalty is rarely applied in off line flights.
If overspeeding occurs whitout noticeable wind changes or without disconnected for sure could be ruled as a genuine pilot mistake. He must pay.
EHM-0654 Murray:
The penalties issues (including the three you mentioned, for there are very many) are being addressed in FLv4/PPv3 - it's something that cannot be corrected in the current flight logger. Plus we are hoping to have the individual penalties be "toggleable" in the back-end management panel, so that after the fact, management can remove penalties from flights in a simple way (something that is currently almost impossible to do...)
It's interesting that you say penalties should be forever Hector, might be worth running a poll to invite more opinion on this matter. At present, we have flight penalties with you forever, and extra penalties (crashes for the most part) expunged after a year. Would you (both you Hector, and you the general ProPilot flying membership) prefer to see both groups of penalties being "forever" or time limited, or perhaps just keep it as it is?
EHM-0975 Ragnar:
I don't mind if the penalties are included in the calculations forever, but it should, as indicated by Murrays first post, be at all possible to get back to the positive side. You can be unlucky a few times today, have problems with scenery, cats on the keyboard, and it will never be fun to fly PP again.
One thing that should be done is also to change the message given when reporting a PP flight. 'Your FAC was changed from -13000 to -12997.2 since you got a total of 0 for this flight' is just wierd, you should show the numbers in the same way as you did in the first post, then pilots can understand what is going on. Today PP penalties is to me just a black box that makes some weird math to prove I'm a bad (and unlucky) pilot.
A thing that should be provided for in Flogger4 is that some panels (provided here) does not have a (working?) switch for all the lights, don't remember which one I flew just a few weeks ago where there was no way (except switching on all lights with 'L') to avoid one of the '...lights not on at engine startup' error. I wasn't in PP at the time, but I noticed the notification on screen.
I'm @ FAC -12037.20 and counting... If I understood correctly I need somewhere around 40000 perfect flight minutes=666 hours=1.7 times as many hours as I've flown since 2004 to get to 0. Hmmm...
EHM-2383 Ian:
I do believe that penalties should be removed after a decent length of time as it seems unfair to be penalised time and time again for the same errors. I can't agree with a previous entry that keeping the penalties acts as a reminder not to repeat mistakes. I absolutely hate, for example, the constant reminder on the records that states, "You crashed an airplane ..............." Who needs to be constantly reminded of the shame? I, for one, never forget getting penalties and do my utmost not to repeat - not always successfully of course!!
I agree with others about the much hated overspeed penalty. I constantly get this one - not because of pilot error - but due to the limitations of FS9 with real weather when you get very sudden and powerful changes of wind speed. I now don't use real weather when flying PP which I think is a pity. Please, please, can something be done about this? Is it not possible, for example, to increase the time limit a bit before the penalty kicks in to allow the pilot to return to acceptable speed?
Ian
EHM-0654 Murray:
As I said in reply #6 Iain, there's nothing we can do about the penalties with the current flight logger (other than make them "cost" more or less); the next Flight Logger version, with it's associated changes in how the FAC will be calculated (positively, rather than negatively, with "skills demonstrated" bonuses as well as "errors made" penalties) will correct all the current problems that we all have with the penalties.
All I'm thinking of here is to adjust how the current FAC is calculated, hopefully to make it a little easier to correct a negative FAC, as an interim "fix" while the new FLogger is in development.
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