A320 RNAV Approach Tutorial with a Real Airbus Pilot! Flybywire A32NX MSFS

hello everyone and welcome to another video with me 320 sim pilot and today we're going to take a look at a much requested feature rnav approaches for this video we're going to look at what they are and how we would use them in the airbus and we'll be using the a320 neo in microsoft flight simulator as always i am a real world airbus pilot so hopefully this can give you some extra context on your home simulations but this is not for any real world use and it's just to hopefully help you out in your flight simulators at home there are still some limitations with the a320 in microsoft flight simulator so we are going to use the fly-by-wire a32 nx mod as you can see here in its rather fantastic christmas livery also i'm going to include some footage from other simulators just so that when the mod is updated further in the future you'll have a good idea of what other things we can do in the airbus as not all features are simulated yet we are starting off as you can see climbing for a short flight from east midlands down to london heathrow where we'll fly an rnav approach onto zero nine left and we'll talk through the setup and how we're going to do that so let's get started just before we do i would like to talk about our sponsor for today's video airline experience airline experience is run by four current airline pilots james anna nick and graham and they have a fixed base boeing 737 ng simulator in surrey southern england where you can go and have a go at flying it with them i have done this and it is great fun and a great way to get your hand in with a 737 ng they are currently running a two for one offer on their gift boxes as well as if you use the code 320 sim pilot you can get 30 of your next booking and have yourself a go at the boeing 737 ng with a real pilot next to you back to the video so just to show you some context on what i'm doing here we have the route i'm planning to fly a320 neo selected the fly-by-wire mod of course from east midlands to heathrow east midlands is up here and then flying south to heathrow departing from zero nine with a direct that's not very realistic but that's not the issue today we're going to do a honolee arrival which will take us from the holly vor down towards london and then uh via westcott then we'll fly the anab zuru zero nine left so he says rnav zero nine left zed zulu or zed is designating that as the most commonly used approach if you're doing the rnab zero nine left you'll see that there are yankees as well uh so arnab zero and the yankee which will be the less common version so that is just a quick way to set it up of course you can also set it up in flight in the mcdu as i've shown in my mcdu tutorials our nav approaches are a method of approach like an ils or instrument landing system except they aren't quite as good as that and we'll talk about why arnav stands for area navigation and it's a method of navigating aircraft using its on-board navigational systems so the airbus can fix its place over planet's earth using the onboard systems it doesn't need a signal from outside to do that which is one of the clever parts of it although it can use gps and that's what we'll be using to fly an rnav approach usually for an ils you need transmitters on the ground which the aircraft receives and then uses that to guide itself down to the runway but for an rnav we don't need any transmitters on the ground which is why they're used they count as a non-precision approach a non-precision approach means there is no vertical guidance to guide us down from the outside of the aeroplane in an ils which is a precision approach that would be the glide slope but we don't have that we have to base our altitude on what we expect to fly as we come down the approach there are two ways to fly an rnav approach but we are going to be using the simplest way the final app style approach final app is a mode the aircraft can use to fly and you will see this very shortly in the flight deck when we set it up and when we fly the actual approach if this all sounds a bit intimidating don't worry i will show you the simple way to fly one of these approaches now and then i will take you through it step by step and also show you some of the more advanced features later on in the video after we've flown the approach here we are on the flight deck now heading south if i zoom out you can see that i um about 60 miles away from heathrow so we haven't got long so we have the speed uh right back at 220 knots while we talk about the approach so we set up the approach earlier in microsoft flight simulator's planner as you can see here our approach if i select the airport and arrival is set to rnap zero nine left honolully one hotel um on zero nine left is the important bit and if i scroll through you can see on yankee i have zuru in here so you could just select it like this and then insert so some things we need to be aware of when we're setting up one of these approaches we need to check the coding and by coding i mean check that the approach is tuned correctly into here well it's not really tuned it's just loaded it's going to use waypoints and navigation data based on where the aircraft thinks it is so these are just points that are out on the approach to the runway if i go to plan and zoom in you can see above is a point here and l09 f is here so these are in line with the runway and that is effectively the final approach course to land so that's what we're going to use that's what we loaded in by selecting arnab zero nine left in the real aircraft we would also need to check a few other things it would show you the inbound course direction so obviously we're landing on runway zero nine left so we need to check it matches the runway somewhere in the region of zero nine zero degrees but that's not shown yet in this mod also we would check the angle over here on the right to show us what's how steep the approach will be normally it's a three degree approach for an ils as a standard and typically it's the same for an rnav approach but it can vary so you have to check that carefully the easiest way to check these things sadly is not available in microsoft flight simulator but we can use navigraft for charts so i'll bring up the charts for you now and as you can see if i go to approach scroll down at heathrow and then select r n p zulu four zero nine left if i can find it there we go r r p zero zero nine left so here we go there is that abavi and then l zero nine l f so those points match and we can see that the altitude we expect to start the approach from is 2500 feet which is here then it's a three degree descent which is shown here on the chart uh sadly we can't match that into the coding yet and then we're going to fly down the approach you'll notice the distance and altitude are drawn here this is the distance to the runway 0 9 left we aren't using this vor but that can be useful for situational awareness anyway we are using purely the gps and the aircraft's ability to navigate so what i'm going to do is make sure i meet these altitude constraints 2500 feet being the last one as you can see here above the minus 3000 so that's below three thousand and then minus two thousand five hundred l zero nine lf now it says minus two thousand five hundred if you can't see that pink number make sure you have cstr pressed constraints pressed up here now actually we need to be at 2500 feet at l09 lf and then we can start our descent we then need to check our outshoot as we descend and you'll see we should have a vertical scale on here showing that it does not work yet in this mod but you will see it later in the video we would also on modern aircraft have a lateral scale like it so it looks very similar to a glideslope like an ils but it's not the same thing so we need to get to 2500 feet at l09 lf and then start our descent to do that same as an rls we will press approach we are not going to fly the ios so we will not select ls we do not turn this on or it will not work in the real aircraft anyway we're then going to check our distances by looking at distance to runway 09 left which will appear hopefully on the top right of the navigation display after l09 lf and i'll talk about that as we get lower the next very important thing is that we know the q and h so i know the q and h is one zero one three if you aren't sure you can go to air traffic control nearest airport or however you want to do it and get the uh weather at the airport you're planning to go to or you can see it if you go to weather and i can see here that the q and h pressure is one zero one three so very important we know what our q and h is when we descend to an altitude as we get lower we're currently at flight level one five zero using standard when we descend to an altitude we will select the q and h and make sure we're at the right altitude the reason is it's so important because there is no glide slope from the ground to confirm how high we are above the ground so we need to know our altitude is correct using the correct q h as i said this approach is based on the aircraft's navigation systems so we need to go to the mcdu progress page prog and check down here that we have the accuracy required so required at the moment is 3.4 nav accuracy is high if that goes to low we cannot fly this approach using the mode we're going to use it means the aircraft is not navigating sufficiently accurately it is not sure of its position you can see my estimated accuracy is 0.07 nautical miles so the airplane knows where it is over planet earth within the 0.07 nautical miles so very accurate but like i say that could reduce i also want to see gps primary this means that the gps is working on the aircraft and is sending the signals to the navigation system so it can monitor where it is and that helps keep this accuracy high so we need to have gps primary and accuracy higher displayed on the mcdu also in the real aircraft i could type in the threshold so zero nine left and put it here and it would appear and give us a bearing and distance does not work at the moment sadly if anything that i'm talking about here is not working in your simulator it could be that you are not on the latest version of the fly-by-wire mod i am using the latest development version as of the recording of this video so i'm using the development version of the fly-by-wire model so there we go we have our route to westcott abavi l zero nine lf runway zero nine left if i leave the airplane flying it will navigate itself to that point at the moment it's going from westcott and then uh via bobbington and so on a few other points i can actually skip out make it a bit easier i'm going to go direct to a baby a baby there yellow line shows the right direction insert and now we have nav and the bavi is in the top right 28 miles away i need to be 3000 feet there so i'm better start my descent i'm going to descend to 3000 feet dust lever thrust it was not quite right let me just set that that should be there there it is uh so threshold open the sense flightable zero so let's set uh q and h not like that like that q and h one zero three as i said incredibly important we set the correct q and h so either you get it from a traffic control or your weather setup if you press b in microsoft flight simulator it will tune so for example if i accidentally set the wrong one and then press b it will set it to the correct one just pressing b on the keyboard by default so now we have the sending down to be leveled at 3000 feet and we're going to need to increase our speed i talk about how to descend and when to descend in another video which i will provide a link to if you need help with that and let's just uh wrap up then what we're going to do we are going to the center baby at a baby we need to be as we can see from the pink 3000 we need to be at 3000 feet by l09 lf the next waypoint i need to be at 2500 feet and i need to then arm approach i can as i will today just arm approach i will get down to 3000 feet in an arm approach before a baby and it should do the same thing intercept final app we will not press ls because that would ruin it in terms of configuring the aircraft so what speed and distance do we want to be it's very similar to an ios we're actually a bit high here so how can i fix that let's go for some speed brake i'm going to use full speed brake it won't work only half speed brake works in the 320 with the autopilot in real life but here we are so descending through 10 000 feet now i'm going to put those landing lights on and this is where we would turn on the ls button if we were flying an ils but we are just doing an rnav so we will not do that also we should do 250 knots at the moment although if you're high air traffic control sometimes let you use a higher speed so it is possible to be at this speed at this point i've got the correct q and h set very importantly and before we reach these points and before we can press approach i need to also activate the approach in here so if i go to perth next phase next phase and go to the approach phase i need to make sure i have the weather loaded in oh yes and the one last thing let's make sure we get that mda set in so if i go to charts again and i can see down here we are doing a straight in landing zero nine left and i'm going to do an lnav vnav because i'm using final approach mode which covers uh lateral navigation and vertical navigation so i can put in 570. okay we're getting very close to our abavi point so definitely time to slow down this is very fast in fact so manage speed and now i need to activate that approach phase now i've entered the information and this way it will target green dots i want to be 3000 feet by abavi it looks like we'll be pretty much there if i'm worried about it i can pull the vertical speed and let's do 1400 feet per minute vertical speed 1400 and that will force the airplane to descend at 1400 feet per minute i'm using the speed brakes to slow down we can configure as we descend on the approach because we're using final approach mode so that means i can configure pretty much like an ils but it's important i know how far away i am to landing so about 10 miles away i want to be 200 knots flap one as we descend on the profile and around two by two thousand feet above the runway at the latest i want to be flat two okay we're reaching 3000 feet now looking good i've just let it go into out start and level off there it is speed out start now i'm going to press approach and we should see it would normally say app nav final these modes would arm here but it doesn't work in the simulator so we'll look at that later in x-plane but here you go glycemic localizer goes to localizer but it will work when we come around the corner it just looks a bit funny for now app now there it goes so approach navigation so it's lateral navigation is now set for the approach we'll keep it slowing down we are a bit fast here in fact we're below 250 knots we are fast let's put the gear down now and that will give us more drag 250 knots is the limit for extending the gear extension 250. now very shortly at some point before l09 lf there we go final app because it can actually intercept that glide slope and normally in the real aircraft let's put out the first stage of flap flaps to one and we'll bring the speed brakes in in the real aircraft you would actually see a vertical sort of glide slope but it's not accurate as a glide slope it's just a scale to show you if you're at the altitude the aeroplane thinks you should be now we're below the next speed target or sorry the speed limit so we'll put out flap two and we'll keep descending and decelerating we can see our distance to a bavy so that this this number sadly doesn't work as well as it does in the real aircraft so this is where it gets tricky to judge your height so for example six miles from the runway and i can see the runway is about 6 miles now i want to be around 2000 feet so we're pretty close but in the real aircraft you would have a distance up here to your landing let's go to flap three so we can only just use this so we're soon at five miles to touchdown i can bring up the chart there's another way fs 2020 charts and you'll see that at five miles from landing i want to be 1730 written there so just gone through five miles we're about 1800 so not far off let's go to flaps full on the ground spoilers get the last of the lights on taxi and we'll bring the cabin crew and there we go ekmemo landing no blue and we're using final app mode so we're in a good place so the aircraft is now flying using its own navigation system to track us towards the runway unlike an ils however it doesn't work as low down it's not as accurate down to the runway which is why we have this mda of 570 which is a bit higher than you would have on a normal ios approach finally then what do we do as we get lower and as we get through that mda so once we're down at sort of 500 feet how do we land from there well we're going to disconnect the autopilot we can't auto land off an approach like this so we have to disconnect the autopilot and then we're going to turn off the flight directors because they won't be giving us useful guidance now in modern airbuses it is possible to leave those on depending on the sort of approach but the simplest way is to just turn them off we're not using them so it's important that you can see we are doing our nice three degree approach we're using about 700 to 800 feet per minute which makes sense probably 700 is enough we've got a ground speed 134 so about 700 feet per minute so what we're going to do is make sure we try and keep that vertical speed seven to eight hundred feet per minute after we take off the autopilot and fly visually down to the runway as you can see not quite as perfectly accurate as an ils because it's not a precision approach as i said earlier right so time to try it out then let's take out the autopilot take off the flight directors because we're no longer following them and now just keep that vertical speed as best we can about seven to eight hundred feet per minute two whites to read out the window you don't need to do anything basically because the airplane should be pretty much trimmed because it's an airbus it's auto trimming and you just need to fly visually to that touchdown zone it's keeping 800 feet per minute i think the puppies are slightly sensitive here in real life that'd probably be good so we're descending a bit fast there let's make sure we get that under control and now you can just land visually as we talk about in my landing tutorial video hold it there and touch down spoilers reverse green and hopefully some sort of deceleration there we go so that is an rnav approach on two zero nine left at heathrow just to recap then what did we do well we set up the approach in the mcdu we checked it with the charts if you have that available if you don't check the altitudes that you want to be at on the on the navigation display using the constraint button to show you those purple magenta numbers we will activate the approach mode in the fmgc just as normal or the mcdu we can configure a bit like an ils and we will arm the approach as we get closer to those points we will then descend checking our astute for a rough check in this case but just checking it sensible and then we will when we are able to visually land turn off the autopilot turn off the flight directors and land the aircraft now let's have a look at x-plane and see some of the other tricks we can use to help us in the airbus which will hopefully come to microsoft flight simulator in the near future okay so here we are now in x-plane 11 in my 320 sim pilot manta livery we're doing the same flight so we've just departed from east midlands to head down to heathrow for the arnab zulu zero nine left we've already seen the charts we've already seen the approach let's just have a look at some other ways we can help ourselves okay here we are in the flight deck of x-plane 11 and if you look here we can see on our tablet um i can bring up the charts here which is quite handy rnp zulu runway 09 there so i'm going to select that in here and it's the same chart as we saw earlier abavi 3000 feet l09 and 2500 let's bring up our mcdu which i have here and our navigation display which i'll put to plan mode and zoom in if i go to flight plan and i have a constraint selected up here as you remember from earlier i can scroll through and see what i'm doing let's select the airport select the arrival and now let's just make this a bit bigger for you guys if i can maybe i can't nope uh selected the arrival and now i'm selecting arnab zero nine left zuru it appears on the navigation display in plan mode there we go and you can see the same way points as before let's insert that and now i can check in here as i said earlier the inbound track zero eight nine degrees which does not appear in microsoft flight simulator but it is something we would check in the real aircraft it's zero nine zero degrees on the chart so one degree difference is okay any more than that and we wouldn't fly it although realistically in microsoft flight simulator or x-plane or whatever simulator at home you're using they could be different it depends on magnetic variation charts and so on but in real life we would check they are within one degree we still don't see the vertical angle angle here which should say minus 3.0 because it's a 3.0 degree approach hopefully that comes in the future to these uh these add-ons once again i see 3000 feet shown at abavi 2500 l09 lf importantly though as you can see not below just at you don't want to be below those altitudes i can do the same thing as before i can go direct to abavi which is what i would do direct abavi and insert i'm just going to enter the destination data as before so i've entered the destination data and now to clarify i'm using elnvena minima 570 oh five seven zero into mda not into d8 and mda because it's the altitude we're using we're not using the height above the ground we're using the altitude which is above sea level so we are going to have to be visual with the runway by 570 feet above sea level which is about 490 feet above the runway because the runway is not at sea level it's slightly higher i've got to check these distances as we descend and something else i can do to help myself check those distances is go to the progress page and as i showed you earlier egl09 left and i can press it here and now you see that distance figure appear here 63 miles away perfect i now have a distance to aim for or a distance to judge my height on otherwise it's the same things as earlier we have gps primary accuracy high we will not press the ls buttons and we will activate the approach phase in the mcdu when it's suitable and once we've done that we can arm approach as we get towards a baby you cannot cut in on rnav approaches so you cannot go to the l09 lf waypoints the reason is this is our effectively our final approach fix so from this point we are going to be descending we can't be in the turn and descending because it's not safe so what we need to do here is make sure that we are already established inbound that's why we can go direct to abavi but not to this waypoint because from this waypoint we're beginning our approach so we already need to be on the right roughly the right heading this is sort of technical stuff though obviously in flight simulator we do our best what i want to show you then is how we can be at the wrong altitude in this case because there's nothing to confirm it on the ground so i said it's important we are on the right q and h which i know is one zero one three today if the q and h on the ground in heathrow is one zero one three and i accidentally select an altitude of for example one zero one or one zero two three for example if i get it wrong and accidentally sets a higher q and h than it really is but the problem here is my aircraft now thinks i'm higher than i actually am because each millibar is about 30 feet so you can see now if i wind this back to 101.3 this is my actual altitude 7100 feet and descending if i wind up to 1023 the airplane actually thinks i'm 7300 feet and descending because we're flying this vertical profile based entirely on this altimeter there is a big risk here that we would be too low on the approach and we would think we are in the right place because when we look at our chart we would see our altitude on the chart for example at six miles we'll see two thousand feet two thousand feet and we'll think that's fine but it won't be 2000 feet it could be lower or higher depending if you get it wrong so incredibly important you get the right q h in there 1 0 1 3 today just to demonstrate this i'm in managed speed mode 250 knots target we're about to pass over that magenta d so the approach phase will activate as we do that and you'll see the speed suddenly go from 250 and it will disappear down and you'll see it appear as our approach speed but actually it will target the green dot speed there it goes so now the approach phase has activated we get the v dev scale and the ldev scale and this is what i was saying is missing in microsoft flight simulator at the moment if i accidentally turn on the ls button you can see that we get the localizer and glideslope scales of the ils but that is not useful to us and it means we can't fly the approach we're trying to fly and you'll see v dev flashing in amber because it's warning us it can't fly the approach that we have tuned you see up here our nav approach is selected so i press ls again and there we go we get those scales back which is great i'm going to descend to 3000 feet now because i want to be at 3000 feet nice and level by the time i reach a baby because at a baby i want to be 3000 feet because shortly after a baby i will begin my descent you can see on this chart that the baby to l09 lf is 2.6 miles 2.6 there now it's only 500 feet on a three degree approach every one mile we descend about 320 feet as you see here so 7 miles 23.60 six miles 2040. so 320 feet descent so we only need to we only need about one and a half miles to descend from three thousand feet if we do three degrees so actually if we get to above three thousand feet and arm the approach we can expect to fly past abavi and then start a descent shortly after down passing l zero nine at two thousand five hundred alternatively we could descend straight to two thousand five hundred feet and then um descend from there it's it's your choice really just following the procedure in the chart now we are approaching a bevy which we can see here abby and what we're going to do is our approach so i'm going to press approach and now you see app naming green it's already activated the lateral navigation line and final in blue because the vertical profile is the final profile when it intercepts the final mode it will go final app all across the top in the real aircraft we would actually get a little arrow here that would show us when we're planning or when we expect the aircraft to descend but that's not going to work today now what i'm going to do is have a look at my progress page and i can see my distance to touchdown is around 11 miles but i'm actually slightly off track here but even so time to start slowing down let's put out flat one speed is checked and flat one and then when this v dev scale meets me i'm going to make sure i have flat two outs by the time we are descending that's just a rough guide on some uh distances so you'll need to adjust that as you see this as we turn now on to final we'll see hopefully soon the video scale come to life and start uh coming down to meet us as i said shortly after abby is what i would expect so there's a final app it's fully engaged now and here comes that green uh vertical deviation bar so now let's put our flat two flaps to two this is much more like how you would like to fly one of these approaches not like our first one which was far too fast speed is reducing and i can see my distance to the runway is currently eight miles so eight miles from the runway i want to be around about 180 knots seven miles 170 knots six miles 160 knots uh 5 miles 150 knots and so on that's just a rough guide as i said okay so we are now descending didn't do a great job of that intercept but it's uh it's getting back onto track now so we will be on the lateral profile which is our navigation line here as we pass over l09 lf at 2500 feet as we expected from the chart now let's put the gear down certainly by five miles to go at the moment around seven miles now i actually get my distance to the runway here 6.7 it's the next waypoint egl9 left the real aircraft will actually write that here egl09 left to tell you you're getting close to it or to tell you sorry that that's the next waypoint we still need to check our attitude so six miles 2040 the chart says six miles 2040 looking pretty good next one five miles 17.30 let's finish by putting out flap three and flat full gear goes down so we can arm the ground spoilers oh these lights should all be on and of course same as earlier you still want to have gps primary accuracy high that's just bing bong the cabin and there's our landing memo is all green and ready for landing so four miles 1410 altitude is what we want to see so pretty much the same as earlier you can see bringing us out on a nice final approach to zero nine left at heathrow there is another difference now once again we have our minima at 570 we don't and cannot use the autopilot to land so what i'm going to do is same as earlier take out the autopilot turn off the flight directors and this time i can bring up the bird and i'll show you what that is shortly so we are now visual let's go autopilot off once again flight directors off because i'm not going to use them and bird on which is this button here which does not work in microsoft flight simulator track fpa this now gives me the track not the heading and the bird and i have videos on this on my channel if you'd like more help look at my raw data ils video on the channel where i talk about the bird it effectively is showing us our angle through the air so the wings are showing me three degrees at the moment and the tail shows me my track through the air like i say that doesn't work in microsoft flight simulator but same principle i need to keep a similar rate of descent and just fly myself towards the touchdown zone visually at this point so just looking to keep that 700 feet per minute but it's just another way of confirming that you're at the right angle so the wings here about three degrees because you can see the five degree marker below it right let's bring ourselves in for another landing you can see we are still getting that v dev scale so still giving us useful information on modern air buses it is actually possible as i said uh on certain approaches to use the flight directors all the way down to about here or even lower they're quite impressive actually so just keeping that 700 feet per minute vertical speed keep the approach stabilized as we can entering the flare structure to idle hold the pitch and let it settle onto the runway reverses spoilers reverse green and d cell hopefully there we go reverse screen and there we go another landing of the non-precision rnav approach that's all for today's video i hope it's been useful for you more tutorials to come on the channel as i said just a rough guide to help you out in microsoft flight simulator and then a bit more information for x-plane that will hopefully come to use in microsoft flight simulator in the near future as always there will be more tutorials coming soon on the channel as well as live streams in both simulators and other sort of tips and tricks videos so do please subscribe and like the video if you did enjoy it otherwise we'll see you again in another video soon thank you very much for watching keep safe bye

Channel: 320 Sim Pilot

Views: 89,016

Keywords: real airbus pilot, real pilot tutorial, microsoft flight simulator 2020, MSFS2020, MFS2020, A320 NEO tutorial, airbus tutorial, microsoft flight simulator tutorial, real pilot msfs2020, rnav tutorial, msfs rnav, a320 neo rnav, a320 neo tutorial rnav, rnp approach, rnp tutorial, rnp microsoft flight simulator tutorial, real airbus pilot rnav tutorial, rnp real airbus pilot tutorial, x plane 11, toliss a321

Id: aqOvzNufyxw

Length: 33min 30sec (2010 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020