I got the 707 during the recent sale, and it's quickly becoming my favorite large aircraft. I absolutely LOVE the VC! In fact, I've never envied Travolta before, but knowing that he's got one of these babies in his garage makes me positively green.

But with love comes pain, it seems. A couple of things have been causing me heartache during the last few flights, and I wonder if you guys and gals have any experience with these problems:

• Flaps: I can't seem to operate them via the normal keyboard commands or controller buttons. Maybe I'm dense or missed this in the docs, but when I use my usual button setup to deploy flaps incrementally, they go from 0 to 14, then all the way to 50. Once there, hitting the "flaps decr" key just bounces them back and forth between 50 and 40, it doesn't actually retract them. The only way I've found to do it is by actually dragging the handle in the VC, which is cumbersome when in the midst of takeoff.
  
  
• Thrust Reversers: For the life of me, I can't come up with a controller button or position on my throttle levers that will activate all 4 reversers. If I press the F2 key and hold it, all four reversers engage as expected, but if I use FSUIPC to send and F2 command when I press a controller button, only reversers 1 and 3 activate. I'm curious about how everyone else does this.
  

I have assigned buttons on my joystick for raising and lowering the flaps and they work fine. When I press the increment flaps down button, they will lower incrementally. The reverse is also true with the raise flaps incrementally button. I don't know why (and can't think of any reason why) it won't work correctly.

As for the Thrust Reverser, I only use the F2 key because it's not possible to set reverse thrust on my joystick. But, like the flaps buttons, I can't see why you can't get it working correctly.

Mark

Thanks, Mark. I might have to try reinstalling the 707. I'm not having flaps problems on any other plane, so maybe it's just a slightly borked installation.

Bill

EDIT: No dice. I just uninstalled the 707, re-downloaded it from the CS site, and reinstalled. It still exhibits this bizarre flaps behavior. I lodged a support ticket w/CS, so maybe they can figure it out once they get over their New Years hangovers. ;-)

I am using the Saitek Pro Yoke and an additional flight control (throttle) unit. I have assigned the lever axis on the yoke to spoilers - throttle 1 - throttle 2. on the additional unit the levers are assigned to throttle 3 - throttle 4 and flaps, via the FSX options - controls menu.

For reverse thrust use a REGISTERED copy of FSUIPC. Select the "Buttons and switches" tab. If you are using only one lever for all 4 throttles move that lever down through the detent and you will see two numbers in the box named "joy". You will see something like joy # 2 20 Button #. Put a check mark in the box "select for FS controls" and select throttle decrease. Then place a check mark in the box named "control to repeat while held.

If you are using a lever for each throttle the procedure is the same except select throttle 1 thru 4 for each lever in the  "select for FS controls" drop down.

That's it. Move the lever(s) tback through the detent for reverse thrust and foward through the detent for normal.

Hope this helps.

Ian

Thanks, Ian. That's pretty much what I was attempting to do, but with one wrinkle: I've got one balky potentiometer in my twin Saitek throttles, and I'm trying to avoid assigning throttle functions to that lever. So, I've set up one lever to control throttle 1 and 2, and the one next to it to control 3 and 4. I can't seem to figure out a way to set FSUIPC to do the throttle_decr action for both engines at once. Maybe I'll hit Pete Dowson up and see if he can think of an answer.