When Failures Go Right

I am the world’s worst Airbus pilot. You could put a blindfolded Orangutan in the cockpit and they would have just about as much chance of getting the flight entirely right as I do. So it would be odd that I chose the Fenix A320 as the jet for my baseline jet testing (drivers, betas, sim updates, etc.). The reason is that the Fenix works (or has so far) in all of the betas, whereas historically, my preferred PMDG 738 has not.

That being said, I did a baseline test flight the other day, MKJS-KFLL (Sangster, Jamaica to Ft. Lauderdale, FL) in SU5, using my stock settings and driver 610.47, which is the best driver I’ve tested so far. This will be my repeated baseline jet test flight. All went well, save for my -430 fpm landing, which delighted local spinal surgeons. Today I did the same flight with the new driver, 610.62, which was a hair worse than 610.47 in my baseline GA flight test around Anguilla and St. Maarten. I goofed this flight big time. I had a discontinuity in the flight plan that I didn’t remove before TOD, and subsequently totally messed up the arrival. Not only that, I further messed up the approach and wound up doing two 270-degree turns over Ft. Lauderdale (which has photogrammetry) while getting lined up on final. So what that means is that I spent significantly more time at low altitude over dense photogrammetry scenery in this flight than in the baseline test. Which would normally invalidate the test.

But something interesting happened.

The results showed that, despite spending more time over dense scenery, the frame times for the 610.62 flight were WAY more consistent and stable than the 610.47 flight. Like not a little bit, a lot bit. I don’t want to say 610.62 is definitively better because objectively, the flights were different. But the flight that should have been harder on the system actually performed much better.

Make of it what you will, and I haven’t put together a video on this because it’s not a 1:1 comparison, but it sure is interesting. I will fly the flight again and try and see if I can’t get a more representative comparison.