The ghost in the machine...

[Hans Krohn]

Hi all,

last night I was shooting some approaches in Gander to check out the new autoland features of the PM suite. The first two landings went ok, but on final approach for the third landing Gremlins started to tore into the guts of my simulator.

With other words, weired things started to happen for absolutely no reason I can think of:

2 minutes from touchdown I suddenly observed data corruption on the PFD! Right on top of the PDF's artificial horizon GS, TAS and windspeed / -direction info appeared. It was a copy of the numbers that are displayed in the upper left corner of the NAV display.

I did not want to interrupt the approach, so I did nothing. Some seconds later the PFD went blank. Basically all flight information and the art. horizon were lost and only the frame of the instrument remained.

A restart of the PDF did not remedy the problem. What did was to use the F keys to set some other display mode, for examle with PDF and NAV on the same screen. I could then zoom in on the PDF and it worked normally for a while. But then it blanked out again!

Anybody has observed similar behaviour?

The only change I recently did to my PFD was to get the analogue clock displayed left of the PFD. That clock btw it now totally gone, since the first display blanking incident. I have not been able to get it to display again.

Looks like the ghost in the machine is raising it's ugly head again...

Regards and a good weekend to you all,
Hans

[PeterH]

Hi Hans,

it seems something has corrupted your PDF ini file.

The clock you can set in the pdf ini " ShowChrono=On".
Myself, I had trouble sometimes and therefor I´ve setup all and when things were right up and runnuing well I then closed the PDF and set the file attributes of the pdf.ini and the pdfset to read only.
And - not to forget - make a backup just in case!!

Sofar didn´t have too much trouble anymore.

Best rgds

Peter

[dcutugno]

me too had observed strange things, one time during an approach my displays appeared like a duplicate items scrolling on top of the existing ones...
I had observed this on the latest build.

[Bob Reed]

Hmmm thhis is strange. Please report this information to support@projectmagenta.com They need to know about it!

[Hans Krohn]

done!

Let's see if Enrico has an explanation / solution...

Hans

[dornier]

Hi Hans,

You know what, this issue happened on "real" 744 during an approach to Heathrow. The crew go around and everything get back online after some seconds.

Same incident recently happen on real Airbus fleet.

Anyway, did you try with the new beta 387c?

Alkit

[Hans Krohn]

Hi all,

I found the solution, with the kind help of Thomas Richter:

The problem was a faulty cdutype.ini file. I had toyed around with that file some time ago because my flaps gauge did not show correct values. In that process, I tried out several 737400 files from the PM website.

What I found out now was that my cdutype file did not contain values for the 40 deg. flaps setting. Please don't ask why! But this was the reason why at the moment of engaging 40 deg. flaps my pfd went nuts (or just blank). Here is what I did:

- I copied the content of the original 737400.txt to cdutype.ini
- with the cdu running, I reset the model to the first 737400 in the list.

Now everything is back to normal. The pfd does not dissapear anymore at flaps 40, and as an added benefit the flaps gauge now finally shows correct readings for all flaps positions.

Just wanted to share this with you!

Take care, and smooth landings...

Hans