Beta Client 2.6

[Cat]

These are pretty high end for a turboprop aircraft, cost for floats for smaller airplanes would of course be much less.

Gear up on a GA airplane, I'd say hard landing type damage - gonna need new prop(s), some belly skin, and of course the gear bays may need rebuilding as well ... I've seen a youtube video of a Bonanza taking off on a grass strip when the gear collapsed and a bunch of people just picked it up and lowered the gear and rolled it back to the hangar to check on damage. PE - the pilot had the gear lever in the up position and the wings had just enough lift to get the weight off the wheel pins to allow the motors to retract them but not enough lift to fly yet. ooops

Gear up on a jet airliner - LOTS of $$$$$ to put back into service - with older aircraft the airline/insurance company may just write it off as a total loss, part it out.

[joefremont]

Interesting data on the Kodiak, I checked the price we have for it in our database and it’s 770k, so 440k for amphibious floats us more than 50%. But then I looked up what a new one actually costs and it’s more like 2.8m so that is more reasonable. But it also means our price is way to low needs to be updated.

[Cat]

FSA price on the Kodiak II is within reason. The old Quest Kodiak 100 is actually an out of production aircraft now and most used sales listings say "call for price" but I did see a 2015 100 model listed for 1.9 mil. so ya 700K may be a little light.

Those are the most expensive float add-ons in the industry by the way, so not shocking they cost what they do. They are part of the design of the original Kodiak, not just some aftermarket add on where you have to weld in support points. All the float points are included in the original aircraft airframe, so these essentially just bolt on after taking the fixed gear off.

[joefremont]

I forgot about the Daher Kodiak, and we usually do drop the price by 50% when an aircraft goes out of production which the Quest aircraft did, so its not as far out of line as I first thought. It would probably not be out of line to increase its price by 50-100%, but thats a topic of another day. We have not done an audit of aircraft prices in quite a while so thats something that can wait, unless of course someone volunteers to do it.

[joefremont]

I have just released Beta 4, (v2.6-b4), new features listed in the first page of this topic.

The website now supports landing fees also.

[joefremont]

I just uploaded beta 5 which fixes two issues with the 'Gear Up Landing' penally.

First issue is that aircraft with fixed landing gear were getting the penalty.
Second we found that with some PMDG aircraft the gear positions indicator in simulator is changing a lot, often more than a hundred times in the flight and not at the pilots direction. So if the positions changes more often than reasonable, the client will just ignore it.

[cajunjosh]

Installed the latest Beta client today. Appears to have installed properly but when launching the client never actually starts up and never appears in the task manager.

[joefremont]

I just released Beta 6. Only change is disabling the water landing penalty.

Turns out in the 5000+ flights we had since releasing B5, we had 8-10 landings where water landing was triggered but did not land in water. Since these are considered crashes its quite a severe penalty and in the logs of some of the flights where it happened I could see the surface type was not being read correctly. Since its not 100% reliable I can't release it at this point.

I had considered making this the stable release 2.6.0 but since I am going to be travelling between the 25th and Jan 1 without my flight sim computer decided to release this as a beta, hopefully do the official release after the new year.

[Cat]

Beta 6 has some funky weight thing going on - example with FSX Steam Carenado Piper Saratoga it says my airplane doesn't match the FSA Z fuel weight yet the payload and dry is the same and the gross weights match. ???

[Cat]

More funkiness going on with this beta client. I file 3MI2-52I in FSX Carenado Piper Saratoga. I land and get wrong airport, client thinks I landed over at KMBS (19 nm away). The sim lat/long matches where I should be: 52I. It also closely matches FSA's lat/long for 52I (I am at my hangar, not at the center so it's off by a few seconds on the lat/long). 52I airport code is not the issue as it is the same across all sim formats.
I have emailed the debug file to you Joe.

[AdySmith]

Some while ago it recorded me landing a DC3 at EGLC when I was at EGLL. I will have to "move" the aircraft back to EGLL as there just isn't enough runway to get the DC3 airborne there, never mind the climb performance required for obstacle clearance!

[joefremont]

Beta 6 has some funky weight thing going on - example with FSX Steam Carenado Piper Saratoga it says my airplane doesn't match the FSA Z fuel weight yet the payload and dry is the same and the gross weights match. ???

This weight issues has been a problem for some time and I don't think its new in the beta client. But I have not been able to track it down yet. Will investigate.

[joefremont]

Ok, I found a couple bugs relating to various issues, all of which are now released in beta 7.

First I found a bug in reading data from SimConnect, that was effecting the reading of both the ground surface type and the number of payload stations that was causing both the water landing penalty and the display of the simulator ZFW to fail. Fixed both these issues.

I also found an issue in loading airport data from the server, this may be a factor in the recent wrong airport penalties but can't be sure, so I added more logging in the client debug data for location information.

[Cat]

IMPORTANT NOTE ON CLIENT INSTALLS: I was having fueling issues with 2.6.7 so I uninstalled everything involving the FSA client then restarted, then installed the latest beta, restarted, THEN started the sim and client as usual. I was getting lazy and just installing new clients over old ones. 2.6.7 seems to be fine now. Lesson learned - shortcuts don't pay.

[joefremont]

IMPORTANT NOTE ON CLIENT INSTALLS: I was having fueling issues with 2.6.7 so I uninstalled everything involving the FSA client then restarted, then installed the latest beta, restarted, THEN started the sim and client as usual. I was getting lazy and just installing new clients over old ones. 2.6.7 seems to be fine now. Lesson learned - shortcuts don't pay.

Supprised you needed to un-install the old first, I usually just install over, but do need to make sure to do so while both the client and stim are off.