I don’t know what I’m failing to do — I keep getting a notification that these two tasks are not completed. I follow all the instructions, but apparently I’m still missing something, though I don’t know what
Maybe issues is beacuse i didn´t recover from descent properly.
Make sure that, when you are preparing for the lesson to strictly follow the instructions.
For power off descents, make sure to
- Power to idle
- Pitch for best glide speed (68KIAS)
- Trim
Power on descents,
- Reduce power to 2000RPM
- A little left rudder
- pitch down for cruise speed
- Trim to relieve the control surfaces.
The throttle position is very important. Make sure you are completely at idle when you are performing a power off descent.
I’m experiencing the same issue as @FlyingSlave672. I’ve repeated the exercise several times, but it continues to mark the Power-Off Descent and Turns in Power-Off Descent as incomplete.
I’m confident I’m performing them correctly, throttle fully to idle (verified), pitching to reach ~68 KIAS, then trimming to maintain the glide. As a test, I even intentionally performed the powered ascent and powered-on descent incorrectly, and those still registered (just with a poor score). For reference, I’m running MSFS 2020.
A few additional notes that may help with troubleshooting:
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I’ve confirmed my throttle axis is calibrated and actually reaches full idle.
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I tried restarting the lesson and even restarting the sim entirely; the issue persists.
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I’ve attempted the maneuver both with hardware throttle control and with the on-screen virtual control to rule out hardware anomalies.
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The task appears to complete correctly in-flight, but the lesson summary still shows it as “incomplete.”
Questions for support:
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Is the lesson looking for a specific time duration at idle or at 65 KIAS before it registers the task as complete?
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Are there required bank angles, pitch attitudes, or altitude changes that must be held for a minimum period?
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Is this a known issue with MSFS 2020 for this specific lesson or aircraft?
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Is there a diagnostic view or debug overlay that shows what the lesson engine is detecting (or failing to detect)?
Thank you!
Thanks for the reports, guys, we will look further into this asap.
Hello.
I have the same issue as @FlyingSlave672 and @Feldegar . I’ve repeated the exercise several times, but it continues to mark the Power-Off Descent and Turns in Power-Off Descent as incomplete and also Turns in Climb.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot for the reports, guys. We will look into this lesson asap.
Hi! Thank you for your detailed report. Could you provide a link to the flight’s debriefing page? That will allow us to check the detailed detection levels. We will then look into this. To answer your questions:
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We are looking at descent with power idle as the differentiator between power on and power off descents. As long as this occurs while descending, we should register a power off descent. I am suspecting a bug in the detection that causes your descents to not be registered.
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The minimum time is very low, around 5 or 10 seconds, just to remove small deviations in altitude for other reasons.
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We have no known issues specific to MSFS2020 or MSFS2024. Both sims have performed well in playtesting internally.
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We have an internal tool and can look into this more in detail if we recieve your link to the flight in question.
I would love to dig into this ASAP to hopefully solve this problem. Everyone else who reads this and has the same issue, please link the flight link and we’ll investigate. Note that the link is safe to post as it will not allow public access to your profile.
Here is a link to one of the flights: Navigraph Academy
Thank you!
Hi Feldegar. I have checked this flight and on your last two descent segments (flown at 68 knots), throttle has been recorded as being on 23%. This is why these are not detected as power off descents. Do you have any memory of more details with regards to this or other flights?
What type of throttle control device are you using?
Would it be possible for you to take a screenshot or a screen recording of the attempt? If not, can you report the RPM indicator when in idle power off descent at 68 knots?
Thanks for checking the flight log. That actually helps a lot, I didn’t realize the sim was still reading my throttle at around 23% during the power off descents.
I’ll run the lesson again today and specifically verify whether my hardware is truly reaching 0%/idle in MSFS. I’m using a Thrustmaster T.16000 with the TWCS throttle, so it’s definitely possible there’s a calibration issue or a deadzone at the bottom end that’s preventing a full idle reading even though the physical lever is all the way down.
I’ll double-check the calibration, sensitivity curves, and raw input display to make sure it’s hitting a consistent 0%. I can also report back with the RPM value I’m seeing at idle when trimmed for ~68 knots.
I ordered a Velocity One yoke, throttle and pedals which should be arriving soon, this will hopefully give me a cleaner input to compare against as well.
That sounds great and thank you for your help in narrowing down the issue here. Good luck and I hope we can get to the bottom of this shortly 
I was able to get the power off descent to register correctly. It turns out my TWCS throttle wasn’t consistently holding true idle even after adding a small deadzone.
I increased the extremity deadzone to about 0.25, which helped, but I also noticed something interesting in flight, the throttle in the cockpit (the Cessna 172 throttle knob) was visibly moving slightly in and out on its own. Even though the RPMs were sitting around 1100, I think the simulator was still seeing small fluctuations above idle, which prevented the lesson from detecting a true power off descent.
I had to grab the throttle knob with the mouse, wiggle it a bit, and hold it fully aft to get it to stay at 0% long enough for the task to complete. I will note that adding in the deadzone also seemed to introduce the jitter where without the deadzone there wasn’t a jitter but it wasn’t getting to zero even though it looked like it was.
I believe this confirms the issue was hardware jitter/noise rather than the lesson logic itself.
Since this seems to be an input stability issue with the TWCS, I’m going to hold off on continuing the remaining lessons until my new Velocity One yoke/throttle/pedals set arrives and hopefully that should give much cleaner and more consistent throttle inputs.
Here is the link to the successful flight log in case anything stands out in the data on your end: Navigraph Academy
Thank you for your help!
Hi again. Great that we managed to narrow down the issue for you! Thank you for reporting back with your solution.
If anyone else is still experiencing this issue, please let us know and we can check your tracking data as well. I would recommend going over your throttle settings and its behaviour as well.
Thanks for the replies so far. I've been busy lately and haven't had time to try again. I'll try that thing you mentioned about the throttle not being at 0 and see if I have the same problem.
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