Steeerable nosewheel issues

Question

An 84 yr old dummy who just purchased a Katana DH20 from x-plane store cant figure out what to do with the steerable nose wheel impossible to taxi store lit said nothing about steerable great airplane to fly ugly on the ground thought this would be like all other Tricycle gears Cessna-Piper-Beech.

Answer 1

Hi Herman,

I am not from Laminar Research; just a flight simmer from down under.

I have seen this same issue raised before regarding your aircraft, in this forum, but never seen a satisfactory solution.

Previous advice given is "because you have purchased a 3rd party add-on aircraft from another source you need to contact the reseller and or the aircraft developer/creator".

In your situation you most likely have purchased the aircraft from X-Plane.Org which has no relationship or connection with Laminar Research which is found at X-Plane.com.  Laminar Research is not a seller of 3rd party aircraft. 

You may be lucky to get an answer from another flight simmer in this forum who has experienced your proble.

Good luck

Glenn

Comments

Reply posted in error under the comments section.

Answer 2

Hi,

The DA-20 Katana actually does not have a nose wheel steering. The nose wheel is a free castor type, similar to a grocery shopping cart.  You steer the Katana by differential braking. So rudder pedals with brakes would be needed.  If you don’t have a set of pedals, I believe that you can assign a steering function in PlaneMaker.

To do this open PlaneMaker.exe.  It is located in your main X-Plane11 folder. Once PlaneMaker has loaded, go to File, then click on Open. A list of all your installed aircraft will appear. Select your DA-20 Katana, and click on DA-20.acf. ( I do not have the Katana, so I don't know what the .acf file is exactly called. Could be Katana or something like that)  Then click on Open Aircraft at the bottom of the page and wait for PlaneMaker to load that .acf file.

Once it is loaded, a large picture of the Katana should appear.  Click on Standard, and then select Landing Gear.  Under the Gear Loc tab, go to the bottom, and check if a green tick mark is set in any of the little boxes for castors. Remove that tick mark and your steering should be activated.

It then should look like this:

http://puu.sh/EDYDf/40eb117ee2.png

Save the file before quitting PlaneMaker and then reload your Katana.

Hope this helps.

Werner