Using Forum to vent....
I know it's tedious to use a forum to vent frustrations, but, if anyone can offer any insight into my struggles with FS, I'd be grateful.
I've been trying to practice wind correction angles, using a Charles Wood practice flight. Origin, The Gabreski, on Long Island, destination, Meriden CT. (It's in the "Tracking" article in his "NDB navigation" section.)
I set the weather to stable mode, with an unchanging wind 324/30 magnetic. (I used WCAs as given my Mr. Wood, and missed the airport by miles and miles to the west, so the WCA was overcompensating.) But that's not my real hangup. During that flight, the airplane was a breeze to fly: it was practically hands-off, remaining stable on a heading, and I was able to trim the airplane for stable altitude. Pure pleasure, even though I missed the airport by miles. This was an experiment, after all.
OK, I immediately tried the flight again, not closing down the program, using a lower WCA, the one that I calculated, not Wood's. No other changes that I can discern. This time, the airplane was all over the sky. I could barely keep the plane under control, I couldn't trim it for a stable altitude, plunging and then nosing up, and it banked and veered left and right beyond my ability to fly a steady heading. (Interestingly, the map showed that this WCA was giving me a much more accurate track to the destination airport.) But the airplane was uncontrollable!! It's happened before and I knew I hadn't a prayer of landing correctly, so I cut the flight off, frustrated, exasperated, you name it.
My computer should run this program!! Is that errant second flight just a normal occurrence of aviation that I'm still too much a newbie to appreciate or understand? Should a 6 degree heading change to the right turn a 172SP into a bucking bronco? This is beyond me not just to figure out, but to even begin to troubleshoot.
HL
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I am far from certain here, but I suspect that the problem is with FS's memory management (or lack thereof). I've seen things run well for one flight and if I loaded another flight in the same FS session, I had assorted problems.
Try closing FS and bringing it back up again. If that works, I'll look good. 🙂 If not, I have to sit in the corner wearing a dunce cap. 
CrashGordon, thanks. I'll try that. I was actually thinking on the opposite tack, i.e., by not closing FS and simply restarting the flight, I would have the best chance of good performance.
I was in a cruddy frame of mind when I wrote the above post!
HL
HardLanding wrote:
I was in a cruddy frame of mind when I wrote the above post!
LOL! We'll get along just fine. 😂
FS has some quirks that can be really annoying. You may find that problem doesn't happen all the time.
Just be glad this doesn't happen. I was completing an 8-hour flight (no compressed time). I was three miles out when FS just disappeared. No error message. I was just back at the desktop.
CrashGordon wrote:
I was completing an 8-hour flight (no compressed time). I was three miles out when FS just disappeared. No error message. I was just back at the desktop.
You don't have an X-Files game installed, too?
I tried the only thing left to try, deleting and reinstalling the joystick. Software from Logitech erases all the calibration data from the registry; deleting every bit of Logitech software from the PC and then reinstalling has helped - I still veer left on the runway sometimes, but I can live with that. In flight performance was stable.
More important, I flew the Meriden practice flight again and landed smoothly in a 310/30 knot wind. My own wind correction angles for the flight headings were fairly on target, also.
HL
Veering left on takeoff with a single engine prop plane (and to a lesser extent other types) is not uncommon and is a reaction to the torque and other dynamics of your engine.
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