I am having trouble landing the King Air 350, and would appreciate some advice.
I had some problems getting FS-X to run right in the first place, but I’ll discuss that in a minute. Suffice it to say that the problem is somewhat related to using the MS Sidewinder Force Feedback joystick. This is the original stick with a Serial Port connecter, not the SW2 with USB.
Anyway, after I got the program to stop stuttering like crazy, I immediately started flying around in the King Air 350 since I’ve always dreamed of owning one.
I’m not really having a lot of problems flying the plane except that I can’t trim it. No matter what trim settings I use, I can’t seem to get the plane to maintain a constant attitude. Some settings are worse than others. I read that any change in air speed requires a new trim; maybe I just haven’t gotten that mastered yet. The autopilot flys the plane nicely.
The problem is on approach. I saved one particular landing and I keep trying to make it over and over to get practice and to try and figure out what I’m doing wrong. Somewhere around 160 Knts the plane seems to become a flying rock. If I didn’t know better I’d think I was flying a F117 (flying rock). I think I’m having a tremendously hard time landing because I’m hitting the ground at around 140 Knts (I converted that to MPH and it came out to like 160 MPH. Ouch.) I’d love to land at around 120 Knts (or preferably lower) but that ain’t happening. Some things I’ve read suggest the plane can fly at 100 Knts, so 120 doesn’t sound unreasonable to me and it’s still about 140 MPH. Other things seem to indicate that I should be able to land below 120 Knts like minimum landing and takeoff runway lengths for the plane. At around 130 Knts or maybe as high as 140 Knts, the plane literally falls out of the air. So, I’m fighting air speed all the way in.
Here’s the landing scenario: Four Corners Municipal Airport, Farmington NM. Early Morning. Autopilot lines up ILS runway 25 for approach. 7500 ft at the outer marker. Approach the runway at 140 Knts. I believe the wind is at 44 degrees at 8 Knts and the runway runs at 256 degrees. Seems the wind is mostly straight behind me but it must be a significant crosswind because something is pushing me all over the place (33 degrees off my tail which doesn’t sound extreme). I’ve tried shooting for the right of the runway and the left of the runway, but I’m starting to think it’s best to just shoot for dead center and apply rudder or ailerons to maintain that as best as possible (which is quite a battle but somewhat do-able). I’ve tried landing anywhere between 160 and 120 Knts, usually shooting for 135 Knts because that seems to work best. I’ve had results anywhere for fighting the crosswind so hard that I’ve gone the entire length of the runway before I’m lined up over the runway (probably at the 160 Knts speed) to plowing through the airport fence and landing about 30 feet before the beginning of the runway (falling too fast probably at 130 to 140 Knts). Technically about 80% to 85% of my landings are “successful”, that is the plane is on the ground in one piece and we can “walk away from the landing”. Only about 35% of my landings are true crashes, most of which involve folding the nose gear or driving the props into the ground. In reality, almost all of my landings are probably ones that you could walk away from but about 60% of them or slightly more would have damaged the plane. Most of my “better” landings involve landing with one wheel off the side of the runway before I finally steer back on to the runway and get it shut down. I can usually throw the reverse thrusters on at touchdown and get it shutdown half way down the strip, but some landings have been “successful” though I stopped about 40 feet after the end of the runway (probably indicating it took me too long to get lined up on the runway or, more often than not, the plane hits the runway at 120 Knts then bounces and leaps about 10 feet into the air requiring another attempt to put the wheels on the pavement often resulting in a crash landing because the plane isn’t moving fast enough to actually fly at 130 Knts.
It’s as if the plane is changing it’s required landing speed during the landing. 120 Knts is so fast I bounce off the runway one second, but so slow I crash hard into the runway the next second. I’ve tried maintaining enough airspeed to not fall out of the air but this requires a landing speed greater than 140 Knts.
Mind you, the plane is under a full load, because I wanted to simulate the effects of having 9 passengers and their luggage aboard. After all, what’s the point of having a plane like this if you aren’t going to haul a bunch of people around? Also, I’ve been flying around New Mexico and all the landings are “short jumps”, so inevitably, I’m always landing with a full load of fuel (Hmmm… maybe that’s the problem). (The weight is distributed 220 lbs at every point.)
Why is the plane falling out of the sky at 135 Knts? All measurements are in True Airspeed. Maybe I need to take the sim off of that default and put in on Indicated Air Speed, but I’ve tried not too mess with the defaults too much until I get the hang of flying.
I usually come in well below the glide slope for the landing, so my landing angle should not be so steep as to warrant bouncing off the runway or driving the nose gear into the asphalt. So, it almost has to be a problem with airspeed. The plane just won’t fly if the speed is less than about 160 MPH.
What is up with that? Why won’t the plane fly at speeds that everything published says it will fly at? ( I can take off under 120 Knts! Why won’t it fly at that speed during a landing?) Why is it pretty much impossible to get the plane to maintain any sort of attitude no matter how I trim the plane? Why is it such a struggle to land in an 8 Knt crosswind?
Oh, I mentioned in the beginning that the program stuttered like crazy. I did everything I could think of to get things under control including defragging the harddrive. In the end, the problem was definitely related to the Sidewinder Joystick. With it the game stuttered, without it the game ran ok but then I had the impossible task of flying using the keyboard. The problem seems to have been a conflict with the “sound card” although nothing in Device Manager indicated a problem or even gave a hint of conflict. I tried different base addresses and BIOS settings to little avail. Finally after getting it as best as I could, I turned off the music in Flight Simulator (which seems to have made the biggest difference), and everything ran ok since then. I left the sound effects on, mind you. Just no Symphony playing for me while I fly around Texas and New Mexico (not a big loss). I should mention that I have a somewhat odd “sound card” it is a MOTU. I suspect it’s a MIDI conflict where it can’t figure out whether the MOTU should be in charge of MIDI or the Motherboard. I know originally MIDI ran on the COM ports on computers and having MIDI capability AND a joystick caused problems because they would fight for control of the ports.
Any advice that anyone can give would be appreciated.
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