X-Plane Tips

This tip is actually 7 tips all parceled up in an anecdote. There have been many posts about a handbrake being stuck and refusing to disengage. Here’s a story that happened to me a few days ago. I was installing a brand new copy of X-Plane on a new machine. The latest released version – NOT a beta version. This was the most basic of installations – I simply downloaded the installer with a minimal amount of scenery. Once the installation had completed and the introductory tutorial had automatically started, I listened to Austin for a few moments and then skipped the rest of the introductory tutorial. I then shut down X-Plane and restarted it, fully expecting everything to work perfectly.

To my annoyance, when I began the first flight with the Cessna 172 Skyhawk, starting with all engines running, the handbrake would not release. There have been many posts about such weird behaviour so I began the usual search for the offending settings.

• Tip 1 – The first and obvious thing was to press the [B] key or the [V] key while looking at the handbrake in the virtual cockpit. Nothing happened. Moving the mouse over the handbrake changed the icon to the hand symbol as expected, but clicking it had no effect.
• Tip 2 – The next thing was simply to shut X-Plane down and restart it. Back in the cockpit, the handbrake was still stuck. At this point, I want to emphasize that this was an absolutely virginal download, with nothing extra installed and nothing configured at all.Next, I decided to shut X-Plane down and reboot the computer itself. No joy.I then tried shutting down again, but this time shutting the computer down completely [instead of just rebooting] and killing the power to the PC. After waiting 30 seconds or so for any stored charge in the machine to dissipate, I restarted the computer and restarted explain. Nope, the handbrake was still stuck.
• Tip 3 – In the virtual cockpit, looking down at the pedals, I pressed each pedal down and watched the pedal image follow my physical movement. Pressing both pedals down and releasing will usually disengage the handbrake in X-Plane. Not this time. (By the way, on a first installation you sometimes need to reverse the pedal movement axis – you can see if this needs reversing by simply looking at the pedals in the virtual cockpit while depressing them)
• Tip 4 – The next step was to see whether a button on one of the controllers had been somehow bound to the handbrake. The usual shortcut to release the handbrake is the [B] key – break normally on, or the [V] key – break fully on – Parking brake. So I started looking for some control bound to one of those keys. No luck. I checked every single button on the yoke and the throttle quadrant. Nothing was bound to [B] or [V]. I then repeated the process checking for every single switch. No luck.
• Tip 5 – Next, I had a look at the key bindings themselves. In the Settings –> Keyboard section I selected the “Currently Assigned” filter and scrolled down to the basics section, looking for the two “toggle brakes” key bindings.
  
  They appeared to be correct [b and v].
• Tip 6 – Next, I went to look again at the control buttons and switches, this time flipping each switch and clicking each button and checking on the joystick screen that the buttons were actually functional. No errors there.
• Tip 7 – Now having checked all that I could think of to check, I started scratching my head. What what’s going on? The only thing that remained in my mind was that somewhere somehow some erroneous piece of data must have been stuck in some memory cache somewhere. So I decided to change aircrafts. I loaded up the C172 digital G1000 instead, and tried the handbrake again. It worked perfectly! I then shut X-Plane down, and restarted again with the original C172 analog skyhawk – and lo and behold, the handbrake worked correctly!  So this non-intuitive tip is a simple one. If all else fails, load a different aircraft. X-Plane should then load that aircraft’s settings instead. Then reload the original aircraft again.