AI Seaplanes and Flying boats

[speedbird591]

It might also be worth reading this exchange in the Glacier Bay forum. It's me asking Holger Sandmann about the disappearing AI problem at one of his bases. You may find something useful in his answer.

Glacier Bay forum

Ian

[511Flyer]

Ray Shepperd (Shep) over at VFR Forums, produced a landing strip in Plymouth Harbour for FS9. It included an AI Catalina which lowered the undercarriage to land on water. Presumably because there is a hard strip under the surface?

I think it's still available from Shep's site if you would like to try it.

D.

[GHD]

It's trivial to make seaplane traffic, even in FSX:

[dswanson]

Hi,

Work in progress but here's an update. The AFCAD was fine but is now in review mode for other reasons.

The ability to "water AI" seems to be dependent on the [contact points] section of the CFG file. I successfully amended the Sunderland cfg fileto make it work. The main thing seems to be to have a tricycle set of wheels (point type "1") with the wheels being about 1 ft longer than the floats. Tailwheels don't seem to work. The plane won't register with ATC at the hold node unless the wheels are present.

My next snag is that the Sunderland takes an age to get airborne - well beyond the 3000ft runway !! Will be trying a few cfg tweaks to improve this as the usual ops mode was to lower the flaps to help unstick from the water and this is not possible with AI in FS9.

[Garry Russell]

HI Degsy

I would expect a Sunderland to use well in excess of 3000 feet so maybe that's not too bad

ATB

[speedbird591]

Thanks for the update, Degsy. Looks like you've proved that the black art of AI floatplanes lies in the config rather than the AFCAD - as I suspected

When you talk about wheels, I assume you are just talking about entries about imaginary wheels in the contact points section? It looks like you're putting a lot of work into solving this problem so please keep us posted. Perhaps you'll find a way of making AI flaps work for take-off as a side effect!

Good luck!

Ian

[petermcleland]

Just a note that some modern FS9 AI airliners do put some flap down for take-off. I have several and they select about 15 degrees before take-off and then retract it when they get above about 200 knots or so in the climb out. However, I have no idea how it is done and have not researched it. I suspect they might have it built into the model but I suppose it could be something in the Aircraft.cfg Flaps section

[petermcleland]

This is my favourite AI floatplane, much tuned and tinkered with by me...It is operating up in the wilds of Canada, this morning:-

http://www.petermcleland.com/video/FavFloat.mp4

That is a short MP4 video...I play it with WinDVD. It runs without sound on Windows Media Player but runs well on Apple's Quicktime. It plays for two and a bit minutes and shows the wake and spray well. Clouds and water by REX

[GHD]

I have had some success in converting a Sunderland to AI in FSX, but can anyone tell me whether parameters 4 and 7 in the contact-points section are additive?



George

[dswanson]

George,

Not sure about those numbers in FSX but in FS9 4 is the vertical speed impact damage threshold and 7 is the steer angle - don't thing they're connected.