How can you tell if your fuel mix is right ?

[Flyfisher]

I'm new to the game and the concept of engine management. I'm leaning the mixture as I get higher and enriching it when I'm low but how do you tell if the mix is optimum. I cant hear a discernable difference in the engine tone unless I make big changes to the mix.

 

[D3adCZE]

Richer mixture keeps the engine cooler at the expense of high fuel consumption.
 

Some planes give most power at full rich settings. Some’s boost is wasted if not using full mixture etc.

 

That is all I know.

 

happy hunting mate

[R3animate]

You’d probably have to use the POH for each plane but honestly you can... mostly get away with full rich. A few of the planes also have a “run” setting (like the P51 if I’m not mistaken).

 

As a side note there’s also a Pilot’s notes Cockpit picture mod that I would highly recommend, though I don’t believe it has mixture info.

[LP1888]

Some planes have auto mix settings. If you read the information tab when you press o key itl tell you there lean mix, rich mix and auto mix settings.

[THERION]

10 minutes ago, Flyfisher said:

I'm new to the game and the concept of engine management. I'm leaning the mixture as I get higher and enriching it when I'm low but how do you tell if the mix is optimum. I cant hear a discernable difference in the engine tone unless I make big changes to the mix.

 

 

If you want to fly in cruise mode, then generally you can set your mixture to "auto rich" at low to medium altitude and at high altitude I'd set it to "auto lean".

And very helpful is also to have a look at your exhaust smoke trail, because if you set your mixture too rich, then you will notice a rather dark smoke trail.

 

But most of the German airplanes have automated engine management anyway - it is very seldom to switch to manual mode. All other nations have - with

some exceptions - complex engine management, meaning that you have/may set your mixture/rpm/radiators manually according to the situation.

Edited February 5, 2020 by -=-THERION

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

RPMs and exhaust colour this especially in the old ww1 crates. When you are to rich or to lean you loose engine power , watch rpms gague and set for higher stable RPS at given altitude. Exhaust color helps when become darker then  mixture is set to rich.

Edited February 5, 2020 by 1PL-Husar-1Esk

[MikhaVT]

As others have said, the pilots notes are useful for figuring out auto-mixture controls. But also for VVS aircraft, you can often look at the mixture lever and see if there are any kinds of labels at the base. US aircraft will have autolean, auto rich marked on those. If you're on the ground you can also adjust the mixture to see when the flame color changes, but this may be different at different altitudes -- i'm not entirely sure, i'm still a massive rookie... 

 

Otherwise at the moment unless the aircraft has some auto mixture control that i can use i just put mixture at around 33% for cruise, 66% for climb/performance, and max in full combat. Exception being the MiG-3 since it seems to get more power at 50% (auto mixture) than it gets at 84% mixture (just shy of the boost) I may just be crazy though.

 

For the La-5 i just fly it on 100% mixture otherwise it gets too hot...

[MasserME262]

or simply fly german?

[-TBC-AeroAce]

The following are an imperfect quick way of leaning aircraft without an EGT gauge.

 

For best fuel efficiency reduce the mixture until the engine starts to splutter and then increase it a little so the spluttering stops.

 

For best power reduce the mixture untill the airspeed increases a little bit. You can only do this accurately if you have reached your maximum airspeed in level flight.

[RedKestrel]

Brief rules of thumb for mixture:

Lean as you ascend - you don't have to be too aggressive with most of the planes.
A richer mixture helps cool your engine, so in combat or in a long climb go richer to avoid overheating
At the same engine settings, a leaner mixture will produce less power, and a richer mixture will produce more power up to a point. Too rich of a mixture wastes fuel and at high altitudes can actually produce less power. 
Watch your engine exhaust (a smoke trail is rich, no trail is lean), exhaust flame colour (in the game, blue is lean, mix of blue and orange is close to best power, and orange is rich), and airspeed relative to your engine settings. If you're going slow for some reason, it may be that you are too lean.
The sim does not appear to model pre-detonation so there is no penalty, other than overheating, for running an engine at high settings and very low mixture. In real life you can kill your engine surprisingly quickly like this by inducing detonation. 
 
All this being said - there are a lot of different mixture controls on the Allied planes. I'm going to do a rundown of those since they're the ones I'm most familiar with.

American Planes

As some have stated above - the US Planes (P-39, P-40, P-47, P-51, P-38, A-20) pretty much all have four mixture settings - Full Rich, Auto Rich, Auto Lean, and Cutoff. The percentage of movement is different in these planes for all settings, so make sure if you use tech tips that you look at the lever placement in comparison with the percentage in the tech tips to be sure where you are. In these planes, you only use Full Rich when starting the engine or when your mixture controls fail (which I don't think is actually modeled in the sim). For the P-39 specifically, pushing your throttle and RPM to maximum and going Full Rich induces an 'emergency' engine mode that you can engage for 1 minute. Be careful doing this with the P-39 as it is VERY sensitive to abrupt changes in throttle and RPM due to the torque damaging the long crankshaft. If you pull the mixture all the way back, it engages the cutoff position, starves the engine of fuel and shuts it down.

In a climb, combat, or high-speed cruise, just set the lever to Auto Rich and forget it. If you have a long trip and have reached cruising altitude, set it to Auto Lean. When I run auto lean I also reduce my engine settings - this takes the most advantage the fuel economy and keeps your engine from overheating, since the higher mixture helps cool it. On lean engine settings you will notice reduced power overall, though you might not notice a difference in engine speeds. If you can get your hands on the manuals for hte various planes. they usually have cruise engine settings - for example, the P-47's cruise engine setting is 35" MP and 2350 RPM, with mixture at Auto Lean. 

Spitfire VB and IXe - Mixture is auto at fully forward. You can manually lean it by pulling the mixture lever back a bit to save fuel but it is not necessary to do this to maximize performance. The Spitfires have 'short legs' in general so leaning the mixture once you are at your cruising altitude is not a bad idea if you have a longer sortie to run.

Tempest - the Tempest has a kind of weird mixture control. For starting the engine, put the mixture to 100% (which is the engine start position). Then, once the engine is running, pull the mixture back to 50% (you can see the marking on the mixture lever that shows the detente where this happens. It has a cutoff position at 0. There doesn't seem to be any auto lean position or anything like that, just one automatic setting.

La-5/FN - Mixture is auto when fully forward, For fuel economy, you can pull this back a bit in flight for more economy, and you will probably want to, but if you do pull back your throttle and RPM as well to avoid overheating . the La-5 is prone to overheating if you don't have the radiators set up right and this is exacerbated by lean mixture. Your inlet shutters should always be open 100%, and your outlet shutters should always be fully closed unless you are overheating, because they are extremely draggy. The oil cooler costs very little in terms of speed so I leave that open.. The La-5 wants to go fast and stay fast

LaGG-3 and Yak-1/1b/7b - These have a true, fully manual mixture control. Full rich (100%) is used for takeoff and initial climbout to keep your engine cool, and as far as performance goes I believe you can just run full rich mixture up to 2500 m altitude with no problems. Usually I lean the mixture a bit  in climb and combat and if I am above 3000 m I start to lean a little more aggressively. With these planes, follow @AeroAce's suggestion above for max efficiency and max power.  With the LaGG-3, be careful with leaning the mixture too much - the plane is very prone to overheating.

Pe-2 - Manual mixture controls like the LaGG and Yaks. I always control both engines the same way for simplicity. the Pe-2 Series 35 has a mixture gauage ( the guage with an Alpha symbol on it) and you can obtain ideal mixture by adjusting the mixture until the guage shows a reading of 0.8). This was removed in the Series 84. Same rule of thumb as the Yaks and LaGGs, as well as the generally applicable rules at the top. 

MiG-3 - This one is weird. The MiG has an auto mixture setting at 50%, but you can manually lean or enrich the mixture a little bit from this ideal. A lean cruise setting is somewhere around 35-40% in my findings, and for combat I run at about 84% - the max you can run without going into boosted mode. The MiGs boost setting is actually activated by increasing the mixture to fully forward. I find that when running the MiG at automatic mixture performance is a bit anemic so I usually run richer mixture settings in combat, pushing the boost when I need it.

Il-2 - Basically the same as the MiG-3, as it has a similar engine. However, in the Il-2 I find performance is fine at the auto mixture setting so I just set it and forget it unless I need boost for some reason. 

I-16 - Like the La-5, it is fully automatic at 100% mixture. But you can get better efficiency and performance by leaning it a little bit. Because you can see the exhaust stacks on the engine very easily, I just lean for combat cruise until I see orange and blue flames, and economy cruise when I see blue flames. This plane is extremely short ranged so managing mixture and engine settings is vital to make it to the target and back. 

[MasserME262]

12 minutes ago, RedKestrel said:

MiG-3 - This one is weird. The MiG has an auto mixture setting at 50%, but you can manually lean or enrich the mixture a little bit from this ideal. A lean cruise setting is somewhere around 35-40% in my findings, and for combat I run at about 84% - the max you can run without going into boosted mode. The MiGs boost setting is actually activated by increasing the mixture to fully forward. I find that when running the MiG at automatic mixture performance is a bit anemic so I usually run richer mixture settings in combat, pushing the boost when I need it.

I gonna take this. Im learning the Mig and I find this quite helpful

[MikhaVT]

7 minutes ago, ME-BFMasserME262 said:

I gonna take this. Im learning the Mig and I find this quite helpful

I dont know about you, but i have around 100 hours in IL-2, much of that being the MiG-3 and I still have troubles with takeoffs and landings. At this point my takeoffs are all over the runway but I dont ground loop or end up off the runway most of the time. Landings i no longer prop strike, but i often bounce heavily and ground loop. I can hop in a La-5, or Yak and my takeoffs are fairly straight, and landings are buttery smooth compared to the MiG-3...

 

49 minutes ago, ME-BFMasserME262 said:

or simply fly german?

I tried this once, but found myself confused by all the gauges. How does one use this "ammo indicator"  or the "vertical speed indicator"? ? 

 

on a serious note: I did take a 109 out for a bit and had trouble since i didnt realize i was supposed to apply a bit of rudder at all times to counter the rotation on the aircraft. I'll have to take one out for a spin again sometime.

Edited February 5, 2020 by Kataphrakt

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

2 minutes ago, Kataphrakt said:

I dont know about you, but i have around 100 hours in IL-2, much of that being the MiG-3 and I still have troubles with takeoffs and landings. At this point my takeoffs are all over the runway but I dont ground loop or end up off the runway most of the time. Landings i no longer prop strike, but i often bounce heavily and ground loop. I can hop in a La-5, or Yak and my takeoffs are fairly straight, and landings are buttery smooth compared to the MiG-3...

You didn't fly it when they released it ,  take off  was roulette for many pilots , devs  made video  how you should do it but ppl still failed , then came patch and now is much much easier.

[RedKestrel]

48 minutes ago, Kataphrakt said:

I dont know about you, but i have around 100 hours in IL-2, much of that being the MiG-3 and I still have troubles with takeoffs and landings. At this point my takeoffs are all over the runway but I dont ground loop or end up off the runway most of the time. Landings i no longer prop strike, but i often bounce heavily and ground loop. I can hop in a La-5, or Yak and my takeoffs are fairly straight, and landings are buttery smooth compared to the MiG-3...

 

I tried this once, but found myself confused by all the gauges. How does one use this "ammo indicator"  or the "vertical speed indicator"? ? 

 

on a serious note: I did take a 109 out for a bit and had trouble since i didnt realize i was supposed to apply a bit of rudder at all times to counter the rotation on the aircraft. I'll have to take one out for a spin again sometime.

The MiG-3 is a handful on the ground - I never played it pre-patch for the ground handling so if it was worse before it must have been a nightmare. It's the weird tailwheel locking mechanism combined with the fact that the rudder is super touchy on it. The tail wheel unlocks when you depress the rudder more than 50% of travel and I find on takeoff you need more than 50% to counter the initial torque, so you end up with a rotating tail wheel that you have to counter very quickly. You need a light foot to stay coordinated in the MiG-3.

For takeoffs, I set a pretty aggressive rudder trim to counter the initial torque, that way you limit the amount of rudder you have to use to compensate. I use a reduced mixture setting and don't try to generate full power until the tail wheel is raised, to mitigate the torque on takeoff. When the tail wheel is up I smoothly increase power and counter slightly with rudder.  

For landings, on the MiG-3 I find it critical to be as coordinated as possible when landing and try not to bounce. If you land with significant yaw or bounce too much, as you slow down on your roll out the plane will start yawing and you find yourself in a ground loop. If that happens at the end of the roll I get very aggressive with the rudder to counter any yaw, so often the end of my landing roll looks like a hilarious zig-zag as I counter the yaw going back and forth.

I'm not sure how many hours I have in Il-2, but I flew quite a few career missions in the MiG-3, probably at least 50 or 60 hours total, and a bunch of online missions. If you fly it a lot the takeoffs and landings become a lot easier. If I jump into it after flying Yaks, or P-47s or other planes that are easier to takeoff and land, it becomes a pain again until I get used to it.

The simple remedy to landing issues is to a)Fly online and b)not be very good at it. I have tried this extensively and can confirm that my need for landing skills is almost nonexistant!

[MasserME262]

1 hour ago, Kataphrakt said:

but i often bounce heavily and ground loop

Yeah the Mig can be a little tricky, he seems to be fine and suddenly the damned wants to ground loop. You have to be very cautious and be ready for the slightest deviation, so you "softly" smash (if that's even possible) the opposite rudder, being careful to not to make it ground loop that way. You will get it eventually

 

Btw, I still can't land the Spitfire. Landing that plane successfully is like being a God

[Lusekofte]

In short. Description say what gives best performance. I usually look what setting not giving black exhaust. And normally it is auto lean

[Flyfisher]

Thanks all for the replies especially RedKestrel. That's a mine of useful info !

[Jaegermeister]

On 2/5/2020 at 11:08 AM, ME-BFMasserME262 said:

 

Btw, I still can't land the Spitfire. Landing that plane successfully is like being a God

 

Ive flown the Spit Vb quite a bit and the trick when taxiing and landing is to just not reduce the throttle all the way to 0. If you start to yaw, instead of applying brakes, use power and rudder to turn away from the yaw. If you are rolling straight, don’t touch anything. On takeoff, you get a feel for how much rudder to hold in and then ease off it as speed builds and the tail comes up.

[MasserME262]

30 minutes ago, Jaegermeister said:

 

Ive flown the Spit Vb quite a bit and the trick when taxiing and landing is to just not reduce the throttle all the way to 0. If you start to yaw, instead of applying brakes, use power and rudder to turn away from the yaw. If you are rolling straight, don’t touch anything. On takeoff, you get a feel for how much rudder to hold in and then ease off it as speed builds and the tail comes up.

I tried before but with no results. I even leave RPM and a throttle both at maybe 15% or more, I tried different "settings" but always fail. Taking off is not the problem tho, nor is taxiing. Its only the damned landing, that I almost never could achieve. I gave up with the Spitfire for this reason

[ZachariasX]

In this game, As far as I can tell in general engines produce a smoke trail below a lambda of 0.9, which gives you "best power" mixture. You can see this in the Pe-2 Series 35 that features a lambda gauge. Going lower than 0.9 makes it produce smoke.

 

What you can do is in essence (in case you have a misture lever allowing to gradually change misture ratio) give the power you want and then you lean it to the point where you will not produce a smoke trail anymore. This should let you fly very near best power.

 

Downside is that your engine will produce more heat. You can cool your engine by enriching the mixture. Or by opening your coolers (as detonation is not modelled in this game).

 

In the P-38 you can fly without any punishment whatisoever at ~47% mixture, saving fuel and not producing a smoke trail for less visibility as well not giving away you flying on emergency power to catch up with someone.

 

The Spitfire V only lets you select two settings, lean and rich. I've seen no downside (in game!!) for going lean at high power. In real life it would kill your engine quickly.

 

Same with the Yaks. Set them full rich, but if you see you're producing smoke trails, dial back on the mixture until they are gone. Not producing a smoke trail is far more usefull than a speed loss of 5 km/h or so.

 

As for FC planes with mixture, start the engine at 100% mixture, then most engines on the deck want ~85% mixtuer. This will depend on temperature and most of all altitude as you have to dial back in the mixture in the same way you're having less air up there. Check your rpm in flight on autolevel, dial back until you see rpm drop, the dial back up until you reach a maximim. Then you have optimal mixture. Running ~70% at 6'000 ft instead of the 85% you have when taking off in your Camel will make a difference! also you're saving a lot of fuel and you can fly a long time with that pinte of fuel that you put in your tank.

 

 

4 minutes ago, ME-BFMasserME262 said:

Its only the damned landing, that I almost never could achieve.

It is most important in the Spit  that you land her absolutely straight. Same as the Mig3. This means in case of crosswind, you have to tilt one wing down toward the wind and hold it straight with opposite rudder. You will land on the windward wheel and only as she stelles the other main wheel with touch down.

 

In our game, it is critical not to hit the brakes when you thought you are slow now and about to come to a standstill. Do the oppsite open a bit the throttle and keep her with the rudder.

 

What really works against us is that the bicycle brakes are usually toggled rather than gradually applied, as the pinky switch is a toggle and not an axis. like this it is very difficult to just do 10% brake force. You don't use more in the real one. You can just make very short clicks for the lever never going more than 10% of the travel.

 

In short, we have the wrong input device for out Spit. It makes it very difficult.