Scared of heights... Until now!

How I Fixed my 767...   

You know when your private jet-airliner isn't performing as well as you'd hoped? I had that problem until this week when I found a fix on an online forum...

For a while now I've been flying around in a 767-300ER. In fact, as I type this I'm 40,000ft up, doing Mach 0.842, with a quartering headwind at 63 knots. And before today, the beautiful bird would climb to 36,000ft (Flight Level 360) and then refuse to go any higher. The engines just wouldn't give you enough power. After FL360 you'd need to put the aircraft into TO/GA (used to take off and perform go-arounds if you can't land safely) mode to get any higher. Leaving the thrust setting in TO/GA for any serious length of time is a guaranteed way to fry your engines!!

So FL360 it was.

So I Googled the issue and came across a forum that described the solution. Apparently I haven't been alone in reaching the giant glass ceiling. It turns out that the Level-D 767-300ER which I have been using to fly on VATSIM isn't alone either. The "FSInn" software used to pull us sad flight simulator pilots into the VATSIM virtual world has a bug in it which means the temperature doesn't decrease properly as you climb. In fact, it typically rises well beyond 60 degrees Celsius as you ascend above FL250.

This has the nasty side effect of killing engine power. Cold air means that there is plenty of oxygen tightly packed together so the fuel can be burned efficiently, but hot air means less-dense air so thrust is accordingly reduced.

The Solution


To fix this, you have to stop relying on FSInn's weather above FL245. Turn it off by hitting the 'CAVOK' button on the FSInn control panel, and then using the Jeppesen real-time weather in Flight Simulator by going to World > Weather.

And Bob is very much your mum's brother.

Oh, and just to clarify, this is nothing to do with the Level-D 767-300ER which I simply can't praise highly enough. If you're a nerd who likes flying realistic virtual iron around the skies you can't beat it.