AI Aircraft Backtrack

[bvanhout]

Hi,

I have noticed strange behaviour at one of my airports (OBBI) in P3Dv4 and P3Dv5.
Aircraft, both military and civilian, stop on the runway, turn around and backtrack to an exit behind them when there is an exit less than 500 ft ahead after landing. The exit behind is often further than the one ahead.
I presume this is an ADE/AFCAD file issue.
If anyone has any ideas as to what I can check on the ADE file please advise.

Thank you
Brian

[Firebird]

I am not aware of any specific every time solution to this. Especially as each sim has its little differences in the AI engines.

What I do know from my own experience is that a lot can depend on how far down the runway the aircraft reaches its taxy speed. What I mean here is that I have seen Typhoons land at Coningsby and continue quite happily to the end of the runway, whereas the BBMF aircraft turned back around to exit down the lazy runway. The only logical conclusion is that those aircraft passed to the taxy part of the AI engine before a certain distance or percentage of the runway was reached, and so it turns back to the beginning.

Now to test this out try see what happens when the aircraft land in the other direction. Next try reducing the toe_brakes_scale parm in the brakes section of the aircraft.cfg. If the parm is at 1.0 you are lucky and have a lot of leeway, try going down to 0.1 or even 0.05 to test this theory out.

Please remember that you shouldn't leave it at 0.05 and you will possibly cause overrun problems at other sites.

What you should do, one you prove the case. Is gradually move the parm up towards the original setting. You should find a sweet spot at some point that will allow your aircraft to operate at that airfield and hopefully not cause you problems else where.

Remember that the chances are that all aircraft will have their own sweet spot.

[TimC340]

As far as I am aware, the AI engine will route aircraft by the shortest route to the allocated parking. The only way I've found to prevent backtracking is to disable the taxiways that the AI is trying to go for. It's possible that you can avoid the issue by making a fully-plumbed inbound and outbound taxi route system, but that's a lot of work and you need different versions for each runway configuration.

Another way of getting more realistic AI landing performance (which might mean you avoid the backtracking behaviour) is to use Roland Foster's AIGround app, which gives you a lot of control over AI landing behaviour. Different AI give different results, so it needs a bit of work to get a reasonable compromise across all your AI, but it can produce very realistic landing rolls. Roland produces a couple of other SimConnect apps to regulate arrival flow and to thin out certain AI. They're worth a look. There is a thread over at Avsim where he issues updates and takes suggestions.

[bvanhout]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the feedback. I suspect it is possibly as Tim mentioned, the shortest routing to the allocated parking, as the aircraft does not taxi all the way back to the beginning of the runway but generally to the taxiway behind it.

I used the AIGround etc on P3Dv4 but have not installed it on P3Dv5. I'll give it a go.
Thanks again for the advice.

Regards
Brian