Airbus Autothrottle

[luisgordo]

Hi guys,

I have a question regarding the setup of the Airbus throttle system. I managed to set up the gates (TOGA, MCT, CLB, ...) via the PM FCU menu. That works flawlessly. The problem I have encountered is that when doing an approach and having the position of the throttle at approx. 50% (which according to my PM FCU setup was on CLB gate), the autothrust system commanded the engines to IDLE but that seemed to interfere with the actual position of the throttle lever (50%). Result: the aircraft could not lower down the speed to the necessary figures.

What may I be doing wrong? How can we actually "tell" FS to use the throttle lever position when the autothrust is OFF, but have the gates "command" over the actual position when it is ON?

Thanks.

[dodiano]

Not sure how does Project Magenta Manage that but did you activate teh Approach Phase on the MCDU?? So that the plane Deccels to VAPP??

Regards,

Roberto

[luisgordo]

Yes, I did. I've flown the PSS Airbus for years now, and am quite familiar with the procedures. The problem is that the plane was not able to reduce thrust, even though the target managed speed was as should be (ie. about 134 knots, in this particular case). The speed could not be lowered because the position of the lever seemed to be comanding a thrust of about 45-55% of the maximum.

Any clue someone?

[ryanf]

Hi Luis,

I am not sure I understand exactly the problem you are having but I can say that PM A/T does not always work correctly, especially in approach mode.

My setup works fairly well in most situations but sometimes, the auto-throttle seems to get confused e.g. not reducing speed below S speed with managed speed in approach mode (regardless of aircraft configuration) or commanding full climb thrust for no reason in speed mode or not disengaging autothrust and reducing to idle when the thrust lever is brought to idle position.

Usually if I cycle the lever back to idle and then back to the position I want and manually re-engage auto-thrust (via FCU) then it works but not always.

This is probably not much help to you in solving the problem, but I do believe that there are some bugs in the software that need to be sorted.

cheers,
Ryan.

[luisgordo]

May these strange behaviour be caused by some settings conflicting in FS2004 / FSUIPC / PM ?

I've sent an email to PM Support. I will keep you updated.

[luisgordo]

It turned out that I had 2 instances of FCU running on different computers. Closing one solved the problem.

Thanks to PM support!