Hi there XPilot

There is an organisation called Avialogs who maintain an extensive on-line library of aeroplane manuals of all kinds from all over the world. For a modest fee you can join for 6 months and download what ever you want. Forum rules prevent me from including the link here but it is a standard web address using their name ...avialogs dot com...

I downloaded the flight manual for the EC-130G which is the Navy variant, and has -423 engines which as far as I can make out have roughly the same performance as the -15 engines. I think as far as we're concerned, the main difference is the designation.

From this book I have learned that the primary methods of setting power in this airplane is by TIT or torque, and in some instances by setting fuel flow. TIT is not modelled accurately enough to work in this simulation, and the INDICATED torque seems wildly off the mark too. But I've been working through the graphs and tables to find out what the fuel flow should be at the power setting required to maintain a particular airspeed at a certain weight and altitude. After trying a whole bunch of weights and speeds at various altitudes, I found that by setting the flight manual fuel flow, the speed acieved was up to 30 KTAS too slow, and flying at the correct speed required around 15 - 16% higher fuel flows. Hence the proposed correction to the specific fuel consumption. All that really does is change the indicated fuel flow back to something closer to the book figures. It's not 100% accurate over the whole flight envelope, but it's not bad.

Using the flight manual data, I've made a text file for Professional Flight Planner X which seems to work ok, and I will slowly add more tables to it as time permits. Bear in mind these are the book figures, so if you don't "correct" the sfc in the aircraft.cfg file, you will need to tell the flight planner to add about 15.7% to the planned burns.

Using these tables from the PFPX file, I'm working on producing a set of tables that can be used in the "cockpit" as power setting tables.  Feel free to contact me if you want some more info or the files.

Cheers,

Chris