Beta 7 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours or so.

This is another small update. We have a few more tweaks to the flight model NaN crash reporting to help us track this down, a couple bug fixes, and improvements to AI airliner landings.

Release notes here.

About Jennifer Roberts

Jennifer came to X-Plane to update the manuals and stayed for the bug testing. You'll most likely see her answering bug reports or making video tutorials.

17 comments on “X-Plane 11.40b7

  1. v.b7 working on my iMac27. Is it possible to stop the superfluous download of the 5 airport sceneries during every upgrade ? Can you offer them and the Global Airports folder as a separate option?

  2. So what happened to the heli flight model this beta? I’d file a bug report but “completely broken after it was working nearly perfectly in b6” isn’t the kind of bug report helps anyone is it? some kind of regression?

    1. Meh, Soo many times I held off even mentioning it since downloading… Real world conditions… gusts of 31kts. “probably” nothing wrong.

    2. I´m kind of confused….
      Heli flight model seems to change in strange ways. Had severe problems with ver. b1, b3, b4 and b6. As soon as you lift of the helicopter flips over to the left, even on a calm day without any wind at all. If you manage to handle this ( and that´s more luck than skills ) the same thing happends when you descend and almost touch the ground hovering. Seems, so far, to again be “back to normal” ( like in ver. b2 and b5 ) in ver. b7.
      Flying with DF´s Bell 407 ( that´s supposed to have one of the best flightmodels for Helicopters in X-plane 11 ) and Active Sky XP. Have tried to fly both with these deactivated and in a lot of different conditions ( Custom mode ( no weather at all ! ) X-planes weather, ASXP activated and with different payload ) but still got the same result. Hope now that ver. b7 and further on remains stable.

      Have made bugreport on ver. b6 covering even earlier versions.

      1. “its complicated”

        Do you have flight experience?
        ->As soon as you lift of the helicopter flips over to the left

        Depends on the rotation of the blades, in take off to hover, anticlockwise main blade helos tend to drift to the right, and you have to counter this with “left ski low”, main blades with clockwise rotation are opposite aiui. -> sounds like the 407 is clockwise -> not sure.

        there’s a “lot” of unintuitive behaviour for the helos into hover that takes a ton of practice,
        //www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXR1olg_I0w
        I burnt about 6 hours of real fuel “just” practising auto-rotation from hover.

        Once you are out of translational lift, out of ground effect they behave almost exactly like airplanes.

        From take off up to and beyond translational lift, lots of things to remember -> and getting it “smooth” is as least as much about incredibly fast reactions as it is about expected behaviour.

        b6 seemed to hit “real world” almost to the bullseye, b7, not so much, we’ll see what b8 brings.

  3. Using Planemaker for checking the new features I again stumbled on an entry for the engine.

    See Standard/Engine Specs/Engine 1

    The C90 (and all other PT6 powered aircrafts I used) has the setting:

    “loss of oil press fails propeller” to “to feather pitch”

    As far as I know on a PT6 oil pressure is used to unfeather the prop against the power of a spring and flyweight governor.

    But I can’t imagine all these aircrafts are wrong.

    So how is this property to use?

    Thanks

    1. I think the settings do exactly what you express. The setting says that a LOSS of oil pressure feathers the pitch, and as you said, the oil pressure is used to _unfeather_ The prop – the feathering behavior you get when oil pressure is gone is due to springs. So the kingair is set up correctly.

      1. Just to note one more thing about this: the feathered prop has the least drag, which makes it a great choice for failure in the air, especially with those huge turboprop blades that would be like a speed brake if left unfeathered. The feathered prop has the _most_ drag when starting the engine. Since the coupling of the prop and gas turbine on the PT-6 is not mechanical, this isn’t a big problem – the engine can just “slip”.

        For a geared engine like the garrett, failing to feather is still a great idea in the air for safety reasons, but starting the engine with a feathered prop would make things harder for the starter motors – they’d have to spin up the prop as well as the turbine. So geared turboprops typically have prop mechanical prop locks that stop the engine from feathering when you shut down at the gate. X-Plane can simulate that too.

      2. I read: loss of oil pressure FAILS propeller to feather pitch

        not: will feather the prop

  4. Hey Jennifer (and Ben)… I heard today from a customer that users with Mac’s running Catalina are running into some kind of security issue with 3rd party plugins — if they are not signed with a “valid Apple developer key.”

    Have you run into this? Naturally developers will want to get on top of the situation right away if this is the case, but I haven’t seen any related complaints in the X-Plane.org forum. I wonder how many 3rd party devs even would consider themselves “Apple Developers,” especially since being one is not free ($99 per year).

    1. We have seen this. If a plugin is not code signed AND has the quarantine bit by being the result of an unzipped web download, it won’t run with SIP on Catalina.

      We don’t have a definitive fix-it guide right now…users can remove the quarantine flag with xattr but even a validly signed plugin apparently will squawk if it’s not notarized, and I don’t know how to notarize a dylib so…this is definitely in the “investigation” phase.

      1. Confession – my meteroric Mac cross-platform experience extends to arguing with X-Code until my MSVC developed plugins build and run politely. So Mac terminology goes past me — but I get the drift and understand that this is known, which is good news. I’m sure we’ll eventually hear more about this when it percolates up past all of the Vulkan/Metal efforts. And there may be more to learn to add to my Mac game. Thanks! I think!! 😉

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