Dear Mr. Meyer:

I know you are a busy man, but I am having some difficulty with X-Plane/Plane-Maker 7.30 for Windows. It seems to me there may be one or two bugs.

1) I load “Austins Personal VTOL” INTO X-Plane, and select “Show Mouse-Click Regions.” The han_slider_thro_linear on the lower-right side of the panel seems to have a phantom mouse-click region on the lower-left side of the panel, within the left EFIS_HITS display. One can control the throttle by moving the mouse in the phantom area.

2) I then made some modifications in Plane-Maker, which I am attaching as TestVTOL.acf:
Deselected “all propellers can be linked through a common transmission.”
Changed both propellers from VTOL cyclic to constant RPM.
Deselected the clutched option for both propellers.
Deselected the vectors option for propeller 2, and reduced its radius to 3 feet.

On the panel, I made the following modifications:
In order to free up some room for experimentation, I removed the right EFIS_HITS display.
I moved the han_slider_thro_linear into that newly vacated area.
I added a second han_slider_thro_linear to the right of the first throttle, with a considerable space between the two throttles.

When I load the modified plane into X-Plane, there is a yellow mouse-click region around each of the throttles, and another yellow region between the two throttles. None of these yellow regions overlap, as there is a considerable space between the two throttles. Yet I cannot move the throttles independently. I try to move either the left or right throttle with the mouse and the other throttle also moves.

I have seen this section of the documentation:
Note on propeller-equipped VTOL aircraft: The control that you are used to seeing as a throttle acts instead as a collective pitch, with the computer controlling the throttle to maintain some rpm. This is how a helicopter is typically managed. The collective pitch travel and redline rpm are set in the usual places for prop pitch and rpm in Plane-Maker.

But as I detailed above, I tried to make the second engine and propeller to be non-VTOL. It seems that I should be able to control the handles for the two engines independently.

Sincerely,
Stephen Leibowitz
<TestVTOL.acf>