Aircraft Aviation

Hi Joe, We certainly will see it completed one day. We have actually done a huge amount of work on it, but with quite literally nothing to show! All of our work over the past few months has consisted of re-wiring everything to sort this flickering input problem out. As such, there has been no new progress on the panel itself.

Hmmm... Seems the images have come back to life without me having done anything!

Hi Joe, Unfortunately I don't have A2A's Cherokee, if they were to bring out an Arrow version that'd be fantastic, it shouldn't be too hard to develop as it's pretty much the same airplane as the one in the review with a couple of extras! When/If they bring out an Arrow version, I will definitely buy (or review ) it!

Hi Joe, 124 knots is correct for this aircraft, even then you'd be pushing to get that in the real world. The Arrow has a very similar engine (same model and rated horsepower but fuel injected) with the added bonus of a variable pitch propeller and retractable undercarriage and that cruises at 130 knots; so 124 for a fixed gear, fixed pitch prop Cherokee is very generous! But yes, "by the book" it's 124 kts, around 143 mph at 75% rated power. I assume this is what A2A have modelled it after like you say As an interesting side note, all of the Cherokee POHs were published at a time

Cruise speed 142 KIAS! Where did you get those figures from Joe?

Hopefully there will be some updates in the foreseeable future. We have had some significant problems with the cockpit regarding "flickering" inputs; there seems to be some sort of electrical interference causing SIOC to detect "ghost" inputs which have not actually been commanded. Until we can get this fixed there can be no further progress. Rest assured, we have been working on this problem since April! I am also in the progress of transferring all of my images over to Flickr instead of Photobucket, and so images will be unavailable for a short time.

Joe, did you know it may actually work out slightly cheaper if you took a flying lesson every few months or so instead of a trial flight? Most places usually charge very slightly more for trial flights than lessons, and you may get more out of it if doing a structured lesson. The time can also be logged (in fact, so can your trial flight time) towards any licence (including the less-strenuous NPPL) should you ever change your mind.

Thank you Christian and Brett!

Cheers Hifly.

Thanks very much for your kind words Joe. What do you mean by "I flew in Inverness a few weeks ago with Brian", was this a trial flight or something? He is indeed a good passenger, I'll give him that . I let him start the Arrow's engine at Bembridge and he was immeasurably proud!

Haircut is booked for next Tuesday Brian . Regarding Cosford, we have been plauged with problems with our overhead panel that we absolutely have to fix before we can do anything else. A shame, but these things happen!

NOTE: This is a very(!) long post with a large number of images. Hello all, Last Wednesday I flew myself and my father down to Bembridge Airport on the Isle of Wight. We explored a fair bit of the Island and stayed overnight on Wednesday, before flying back late Thursday afternoon. This was my second flight to the Isle of Wight; I flew down there last summer in a C-150 Aerobat (G-PHUN) with my mother, however that was a much shorter visit and we returned the same day. Our aircraft for this journey would be a lovely Piper PA-28R-180 Cherokee Arrow, G-AVYT. I was recently checked out

Quite honestly I am amazed to have gotten anything, I always thought these claims procedures resulted in nothing. Credit to customs though, most of the letters they sent me were personally written (ie you could tell that they hadn't just copied and pasted it from a stock letter), so they must have put some effort in!

I think that'd pay for the outbound leg to Bembridge in a C172, but not the return!

Hi all, Just thought I'd let you all know. I got a letter from customs today stating that they are willing to offer £304.60 in compensation due to the damage caused to the throttle quadrant, no further questions asked. Very pleased with this result!

Is that an old Nav-o-matic 300A sitting in the middle?

Alright Gabriel, let me know how you get along.

Hi Gabriel, HD44780 is a standard type of LCD controller used worldwide. The Ebay link you provided clearly states that the LCD you purchased is HD44780 compatible, so I am not sure what the issue is.

Hi Gabriel, Potentially some good news here. Apparently you are not the only one to have this problem: http://www.mycockpit.org/forums/showthread.php?t=19238 "I have wired up a 20x4 LCD Display, when i plug the card via USB in the display will show up and shows me on each 4 lines and 20 blocks, black blocks." "Than started IOClcd.exe and the display is still showing black blocks. also when i run sioc, the same, black blocks." As you can see, a similar issue. Furthermore, I actually remember experiencing a similar issue (it's hard to remember all those years back) with black b

Hi Gabriel, One thing to check is that you have definitely connected pin 6 on the LCD ("E") to pin 29 on the USBLCD card. You may have accidentally connected it to pin 30 or 31 (in which case this case still be fixed through software); please check this. Also, have you connected pin 10 ("D3") on the LCD correctly? I believe the OC manual has an error in it whereby the wire for pin 10 is blanked out on their diagram. I have done some digging in my old files, and I found that I made a diagram of how I wired the LCD card all those years ago. Here it is: I'm sure you'll agree

Hi Gabriel, Could you post a picture of your wiring, the LCD, etc? And the Ebay listing if possible?

Mine does exactly the same, and my previous yoke from Saitek eventually had the display just pack in altogether! Interestingly, I have a third yoke that I keep connected to the PC, but have it disabled in the device manager when I'm not using it to avoid hardware conflicts. The display flickers when the device is not active, but when I enable the device in the device manager, it goes back to normal.

Hi Gabriel, Indeed, the LCD will not work unless it is definitely an HD44780; otherwise it should be fine. I see you have "IOCLCD.lcd" set as your config file. This is the default setting, and this file is blank. Have you definitely overwritten this file with your desired LCD settings? Or did you make a fresh .lcd file, in which case you need to set your config file to this new .lcd file. Also, make sure to remove the "./" from infront on IOClcd.lcd.

Hi Gabriel, Indeed the if the LED has blown then unfortunately that particular LCD won't work. You say the other LCD backlights correctly; this confirms that the USBLCD card IS supplying the correct voltage to the LCD. When you say that "no characters appear"... Have you configured the IOClcd.ini file correctly (this is usually found in the same installation folder as IOClcd.exe)? You must make sure that the deviceUSB=XX entry is done correctly. Open up SIOC, and read off the device number for your LCD card from the main window. If, for example, it says 32, then you would edit your

Another thing that struck me about the Saitek radio panels when I had them is that they were insanely large for GA-style radios! Literally more than twice the size of any real radio unit.