Beginners Guide to ILS in the PMDG 737-700 in Microsoft Flight Simulator

hello today we're going to take a look at the 737 700 in microsoft flight simulator and more importantly we're going to have a look at ils or the instrument landing system so before we get started i'm not going to program a flight plan i've got the airplane just sat here on the runway powered up ready to go so yes i'm not going to program anything in the fmc we're just going to fly it by hand all the way around so if we go and have a look at little nav map we can see we've got an airfield here montgomery regional we're sat on runway 1-0 at montgomery regional now you will look on this end of the runway leading into runway 1-0 there is a big green triangle on the map this is what's known as the ils feather so when the when you're navigating towards the airfield you will aim to get your airplane into this feather and you ideally need to be about 2 500 feet so as a normal ils beam because it's projected from the ground out you know away from the runway is at three degrees above the ground level yeah so by the time you get to the end of the feather we can measure it to show you how far that is measure distance from that position and it's about seven seven and a half miles ish but it's going to be about two and a half thousand feet you need to be at when you get there so when we're coming in to join you know to do an ils approach we need to come in from before the feather at two and a half thousand feet or thereabouts and you also need to have the nav radios tuned in to the frequency of the ils for that runway which in this case is 109.90 and we also need to change the course on the um the master control panel to the direction of the runway which in this case is or the direction of the ils which is 97 degrees it don't take it as red that the ils will be in the same direction as the runway they quite often differ a small amount sometimes they differ an enormous amount okay so we need to remember 109.90 and 97 degrees so let's go and have a look so here the nav radios in the 737 so we want 109.90 so to tune a nav radio you roll the lower knob to get the integers so 109 and there's nine zeros already there and to transfer it all we've done is change the standby frequency this is the one that's actually being used by the aircraft we can transfer and it swaps the two numbers over so we need to do the same on the other one this will become obvious why later 109.90 and swap it over so the standby becomes the active and the active becomes the standby okay so normally when you're navigating with the gps you would program your route into the flight management computer and it would appear on here as a track through the sky to follow we're not going to be doing that today we're going to turn this knob up here that changes the mode of the efis screen to approach mode and what that gives us is a course deviation indicator here and a vertical position relative to or glide slope indicator relative to the the glide slope of the ils these are replicated broadly over here so you get a diamond along the bottom of the attitude indicator and you get another diamond that will appear on the side of the attitude indicator so that they show you your position relative to the glide slope the invisible line through the sky down to the runway so a position across our in across the um air space or our lateral position you might say and our vertical position relative to the glideslope okay so let's get let's take off we'll fly a circuit and we'll weave around on the approach and we'll see these diamonds moving and we'll see this move now it's worth pointing out this works exactly the same as vors but obviously we've changed the course to the runway direction so we can spin this around yeah but we need to make it the same direction as the runway otherwise it will be very difficult to think about what's going on so we want 97 or the same as the um the glide slope 97 degrees and the same on the other one 97 degrees there we go so the nav radios are tuned in and the courses are tuned in we're not going to be using autopilot as i said okay so let's race off them the wrong way so we'll just check parking brake is off flaps are at 15 uh sorry five degrees which is perfect i haven't trimmed us out yet so typically with the default configuration the airplane will arrive on the runway with in flight simulator for the pmd g737 you need about 5.8 5.9 on the trim so we're just going to spin that around until it's in the ballpark so that's probably enough the reason for trimming the aircraft if you do a full workup on the flight management computer it tells you the trim level the reason for doing it shall we get rid of the atc out of our way so all we need to do is detune the com radio and switch frequencies and we don't get annoyed by atc anymore okay i forgot what i was going to say before she butted in there but ah okay i hadn't released the parking brake and i now have so we got a warning straight away as soon as we rev the engines up so i'm not going to go to maximum revs i'm going to go to the high 90s on the n1 number over here so we're having to use a little bit of side stick or side pressure to um hold the aircraft straight on the runway because that there is a crosswind today so we're going to come through our rotate speed so we're going completely manual today gear up and flaps up one position and again notice we're not getting any markers on the indicated airspeed ribbon of when to do things and that's because we haven't programmed a flight plan the um the the aircraft doesn't know anything about our weight or you know the loadout of the aircraft at all interesting the auto throttle came on all on its own we're going to disable that okay so we're going to make a right turn now and we're going to fly the opposite direction than the runway i'm going to put the flaps back down a little bit so we're referencing the vertical speed here and we're referencing our indicated airspeed and we're referencing our direction we're traveling which is the compass rose obviously and the attitude indicator so we're just going to end up about two and a half thousand feet so those can come down a bit and we want to be about 280 degrees to fly the opposite direction than the runway and when we turn back towards the runway we'll be able to talk about the this instrumentation and what it really means it won't make much sense until we turn back towards the runway let's just get rid of some of these things that are flashing a warning that we've switched off the auto throttle that's absolutely fine yes we meant to do that okay so we're now flying the opposite direction on the runway we've gone a little bit higher than we intended but we can lose that altitude easily i'm just going to trim the aircraft out so i'm not having to hold pressure on the stick while we're flying along that's perfect okay so if we have a look at little nav map we can see we took off we accelerated around the turn and now we're flying the opposite direction than the wrong way and we'll fly out to the end of the feathers and aim to come in at about two and a half thousand feet and then we'll be able to see what this course deviation indicator means and what these diamonds do notice we haven't got a vertical diamond yet when we turn back around it will appear so we just trimmed out the aircraft flying along in a stable manner there's no autopilot or anything so we can trim a little bit now and again if you listen to professional pilots they will warn you against micro kind of trimming the aircraft so don't try and fly the airplane with trim okay so i'm making our way back slowly we've got a caution that's come on why would that be just ignore it so we're going to do this twice we'll do once with a manual approach and i'll wiggle all over the place to show you the instrument instrumentation changing and then we'll come back in and we'll do a full auto land just to illustrate how that works so where are we on the map now we're coming up towards the end of the feathers we're starting to turn gently that's the wind what's happening there the reason our nose is going right notice the wind is coming from our right so it's hitting the tail plane and pushing it left so if our if our tail is pushed left our nose goes right so the plane is slowly weather cocking into the wind and the reason for that of course is look at the size of the tail plane okay so we're slowly descending actually we need to climb a little bit but it's fine okay we're going to turn back towards the airfield now if we do this by looking at the instruments what we'll do is we're turning we're looking at the vertical speed to maintain the same sort of altitude we've been on the compass is rotating so we're just looking at the artificial horizon the vertical speed the indicated air speed and looking at the compass as we turn so what we're aiming to do is line this line up with the gap here so at the moment is telling us that we are to the right of the runway we're getting a bit low so i'm just going to raise the nose up again i'm trying to turn quite tightly so that we don't line up exactly right i'd like to be as off i'd like us to be offset if i possibly can so we're coming around towards 100 degrees which is the same direction as the runway and the reason i'm not looking up is because i want you to prove to you what's going on right we're at 2500 feet which is perfect so we're going straight towards the runway except we're not this line is to the left of us which means we are off to the right of the line down to the runway so what we need to do is dog leg across if we look on the map you can see that see we're off to the to the right of the line so we're going to dog leg across and when we do that we don't have to keep turning we just pull a slight angle notice this line is coming in now and that corresponds with the diamond here it's coming in just gonna level us up so we don't descend anymore so the diamonds coming in but remember we're traveling at an angle to the runway so we need to start turning back towards the same direction as the wrong way should we do that now and now if we look up now we should find directly in front of us there's the runway okay so the vertical line what does that diamond mean if you imagine there's an invisible line down to the runway that climbs at three degrees away from the runway and gets higher and higher the further away you get so that diamond represents where we are in position in association with that line or so at the moment we're saying we are above where we should be so i'm going to pull the throttles back because obviously we're going downhill we're accelerating i am going to have to put the gear down at some point so i'm going to put the air brake same 1000 i'm playing with the flaps as well so you can see look we're descending towards that line so that's the warning that we haven't got the gear down so i'm just going to put the gear down to excuse the noise for a moment so we're slightly high according to the glide slope so we're rotating the nose back up and we're trying to balance that line down to the ground the gear will lock out in a moment and the noise will go away there it goes it takes the gear a while to travel too low too low there we go and if you do it perfectly you'll hit the wheels on the markers on the runway so there we go we're down so we're going to accelerate again let's center our view up so full thrust again and rotate and gear up so we're going to go back out again and we're going to come in on the full auto land with the ils just to show you how it's done so all you're really doing is looking at your lateral position relative to the runway which is easier to see here and your vertical position relative to the glide slope which is the invisible line down to the runway so let's turn around back to 280 degrees and this time we're going to switch the autopilot on in the correct mode to land so we're going to start getting things ready on the master control panel for that to happen so we're climbing gently as we come around this corner and we're slowly accelerating out there's no hurry so we're going to get approach mode ready is it going to let us actually well we haven't switched the flight directors on there are two parts to an autopilot there's the actual autopilot that controls the aircraft and there's also the flight directors so there's two systems really one is figuring out what to do with the airplane and that's the flight director the other one is just doing what it's been told which is the autopilot okay so we're coming around to 280 degrees we'll just focus on that for a moment before we start playing with buttons and we've come up we've gone a little bit high so we'll just level out and cut off the speed a little bit so at this point we can start playing with some of these controls so you have the auto throttle here say if we wanted to be doing 180 knots and we turn on the auto throttle and we go to speed mode the throttle starts moving all on its own so we don't need to touch the throttle anymore and say we were wanting to be at 2500 feet we can change the altitude so we're only at 1700 feet at the moment which kind of did on purpose so you get to see this 2500 feet is now dialed in now we have to tell it how to get there so we'll go for vertical speed mode and we say you roll the wheel next to it and see we'll climb up a thousand feet a minute and then we engage the autopilot and give it a chance to correct its trim it's quite slow at reacting you're not really supposed to play with it this low there we go it's catching up now so i held it on the stick there until it caught up with itself so we can say get us back up there at 2 000 feet a minute ignore the caution now notice we're going the wrong direction because we were busy focusing on that we weren't there focusing on the direction we're going so we're good to heading select mode and that's going to be wildly outlook because we want to be going 280 so we'll spin this round and you can see the the required direction of travel changing so we want the opposite direction than the course so we'll go a little bit more this is quite good that we're getting angles all over the place because then you get some appreciation of seeing the symbology appearing so the plane is climbing back out to 2500 feet so this is a good illustration the autopilot can't work wonders it's slow at responding it won't save you if in doubt if you're in trouble you can't switch the autopilot autopilot on and expect it to work wonders you're better off going to fully manual and disengaging the throttle and the autopilot and doing it yourself and then re-engage it when you're ready to use it okay let's let's see where we are so we'll fly off round in a loop and come back in and then you'll get an opportunity to see the auto land in operation so this is where it becomes important that we've configured things you can't use auto land if you haven't got both nav radios tuned to the ils if you've only got one of them it's called single channel mode if you've got both you've got what's called dual channel mode so on one nav radio you can use approach mode which is the app button over here yeah and that means that the plane will fly itself down the glide slope to the runway if you've got both nav radios tuned in you still use approach mode but it changes on the way down and goes to dual channel mode and then goes to flare mode and we'll see all that happen on the way we're still only doing 180 knots so we can actually drop the gear it's not going to make any difference how far away are we now okay we're going to make the turn so we're going to manually spin ourselves back around to 110 degrees we could tighten the turn a little bit by coming down 270 knots now you need to be wary if you're using selected heading mode if you go beyond 180 degrees of the direction you're facing the plane will start turning the opposite direction because it will take the shortest route to the heading you have chosen so we actually want 97 degrees don't we on the heading so let's see how that's doing so we're turning in towards the runway the reason i've come out all this way i want to illustrate something else to you you can't use approach mode if you are above the ils beam you have to come in from below it so if you imagine the beam is coming up from the runway just wait for this turn to finish until we can see the runway then i can kind of draw a line with the mouse in the sky to illustrate this okay we're coming around so we're off to one side yeah you can see we're not if we look on the map we're off to one side so if we go and engage approach mode now and take off heading select the aircraft should start turning towards the runway is it going to do we have to have voi lock on as well no just approach mode should be good there we go is starting to roll very gently because it hasn't got to correct by a lot and you will notice now or it may it maybe it's not going to capture because we have not got the diamonds lit up so what we're going to do is fly the aircraft across ourself until that yeah we have to get the diamonds lit up before we can do it so that's another really good point that i'd forgotten all about okay they're both lit up so let's go for approach mode now there we go it's captured it single channel at the moment if i turn on both autopilots it will take a while to happen because there was a delay associated with it capturing it remember we can also start slowing down and we can watch the magic happen so did you notice that there was quite a delay associated with switching on approach mode and it capturing the ils beam get into the warning [Music] still again even further [Music] so did you notice as well on the display here it's now saying flare so we've switched on both autopilots you can only do that when you've got approach mode activated and it's actually switched off so it's it's switched over from approach mode it's on auto land that's where flare has appeared so something else you might want to have a look at if you're using this mode is there is a knob under here that says auto break so we can turn it up to max and the aircraft will stop itself so i'm not touching any controls so we'll just watch what happens well actually should we watch them outside because it's an opportunity to do this so as soon as it lands i will go inside the cockpit so we need to steer to get ourselves on the center line we could always use um thrust reversers if we want as well can hear them then once you've slowed down you can raise the flaps and slowly roll off the runway so there you go we've looked today at a manual ils approach and we obviously weaved all over the place to see the symbology changing and then you saw some of the problems that you have to conquer in terms of using a full-on ils approach with auto land so in order to capture the glide slope you have to have these diamonds lit up with solid and not hollow we saw that happen and i'd forgotten completely about that because normally you you are in the neighborhood when you enable it and i did it offset on purpose to try and make the aircraft skew itself back towards the runway but i'd forgotten you have to have what's called a capture of the beam for that to work so there we go i think that's probably enough for today isn't it there you go 737 700 in flight simulator we've been looking at ils i'll see you again soon

Channel: Jonathan Beckett

Views: 16,421

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Id: TJoSW3bJ-uc

Length: 29min 22sec (1762 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2022