Beginners guide to programming the FMC in the PMDG Boeing 737-700 in Microsoft Flight Simulator

good morning today we are going to have a quick look at the flight management computer in the pmdg 737-700 in microsoft flight simulator so we're just going to look through how you program a flight plan the various parts of the flight plan and how you can configure the fmc for flight or the flight management computer so let's go and step inside the airplane we're cold and dark at the moment so we're just going to do just enough to get the fmc up and running and then we'll get going with programming and flight plan so the first thing you're going to need to do in 737 is turn the batteries on and then if you have ground power available you can use it which we will so i'm just going to go down to the fmc and in fs actions you can go to ground services and you can request the grand power so what that does is connects the cart outside so you can see a cart has magically appeared with a generator on it and a cable has now magically appeared connected to the aircraft and in a few moments instead of saying connecting here it will give us the opportunity to unplug it there you go so release is the option now which means it's connected so we can go back overhead and there's the ground power we can switch that to on so we now have power to all of the aircraft systems so we're just going to sit here on ground power today while we're playing with this okay so let's go and look down so you can see nothing much has come on in the cockpit yet it will do it takes a while for all of these screens to boot up we're not really worried about those so we're just going to go straight into here actually what we could do before we do that just so we can go overhead and so we can see some of the features later we're going to go back to the rear part of the overhead panel and we're going to go and turn the nav so the um inertial navigation system to nav so wait for them both to say a line and this will tell us how many minutes when we move it to hdg sts so that will change in a moment to about eight minutes which is how long it takes for the initial navigation to start up so you can see the systems are in the process of booting up obviously there's no actual data on them yet the reason you don't have an attitude indicator yet is because it relies on the inertial navigation system to know you know the movement of the airplane so that's not going to be there yet and obviously the the map as well relies on that you know knowing where it is in the world and all that kind of stuff so let's go back into this initial sorry the flight management computer and you've got the ground power there obviously we got to that page by the way by clicking on menu if so if you've gone elsewhere and you don't know how to get back to there press menu and that gets you this top level menu so the external power cart was in fs actions and it was in ground services okay so what we're interested in doing today is actually programming a route so let's go back to menu so we actually want to go to the fmc the flight management computer so we click on that page and this gives you all the versions of everything um about you know the the fmc itself and the data of the nav data that you're working with it's called the air rack so that means 22 is the year 0 4 is the month so it's the april 2022 data that it's using first thing we need to do and on the boeing fmc's in common with lots of others actually you tend to have the next thing you need to do at the bottom right and also it's prompted here so this bottom line is both a message panel and what's called a scratch pad where we can key things into so we can type on here and you can type things in and then you can press the clear button to clear out or you should be able to there you go so it does one character at a time okay so the first thing we need to do is set up the position of the aircraft in the world so we go pause init and you'll see there is a row of square boxes here on the irs position in general as you go through configuring the flight management computer if you see square boxes that is a mandatory field that you have to fill in in order for the aircraft to operate correctly so how do we get the gps position of the aircraft what we can do is go to the next page you will see at the top right this is page one of three so we can go next page and this page shows there's two gps systems in the aircraft the left and the right one if we click the soft key next to one of those gps positions it will copy that straight into the scratch pad for us and that's the same of anything you see on the screens around the aircraft unless you're actually performing an operation if you just click on the key next to something it will copy it in the scratch pad for you so then we go back to the previous page which is page one of three and we've got that field we need to fill in so to transfer this from the scratch pad we just press the soft key next to the field that needs to be filled in and it copies it across and that vanishes because it's not needed anymore okay so reference airport this is an optional field but we're going to fill it in anyway so this is egss we are at stansted okay and it's obviously it's from its own database it knows the the place in the world that the airport is just before we go any further let's have a look at the flight we're going to program we are going to fly from stansted airport we're going to fly out across the north sea or around the edge of the north sea and go up to entou which is torp airfield in norway just just near thunderfjord okay we're going to use a standard instrument departure so if we zoom in you can see the orange part of this flight plan this is little map by the way it's a really nice free navigation program that ties in with the simulator so we are the yellow aeroplane so this is a standard instrument departure so if you've not seen flight plans before think of a standard instrument departure or a standard approach route as a pre-configured or predetermined sequence of waypoints and in this case altitudes that you need to be at those waypoints and speeds in some cases so if we look at these restrictions from this standard instrument departure at various points it wants us to be at different heights and at different speeds so a means above for the altitude b means below for the speed okay and then when we get to the other end so we're on under our own navigation in between so i've just put in one waypoint into it or a couple of them actually a couple of vor stations in just to illustrate things then at the other end we've got a standard approach route or star that leads us into the airfield so i've chosen these completely well i've based them on the weather i've checked the weather for each airport so we're flying into the wind both for takeoff and landing so the standard instrument departure and the standard approach they have names so you can see there is the cln2e departure is this one the reason for standard approach routes and standard instrument departures if you imagine all these airports are near each other and they need to have safe routes for aircraft to approach the runways so they are planned in advance with the aviation authority that you imagine kind of invisible corridors through the sky otherwise it would be mayhem if it was a free-for-all everybody can go whatever direction they like it would be an absolute you know nightmare and you'd see air crashes all over the place okay so let's go back inside the aircraft and this is the fmc we've just set the reference airport to egss and that's the icao code for stansted so you can see each of the airports around the map has a code associated with it so the next thing we need to do is set up our route so again remember this bottom right key takes us to the next page so the origin of our route is egss and we key that in and then the destination of our route if we scroll down this list of instructions was torp or ento so e-m-t-o so echo november tango oscar so that keys into the scratch pad and then the soft key next to the field fills in so that's done so the next thing you might want to do is go and set up the departure and the arrival so if we click the dep r button on the um fmc you get this screen so this lists the airports involved in the flight plan and you can set up the departure and arrival for each so departure from egss we click over here and we can choose the runway and the standard instrument departure or sid so looking at our plan here we're taking off on runway 22 and we're doing the cln 2e standard instrument departure so runway 22 now notice when we clicked 22 it filtered the sids to only the ones that apply to runway 22 and there's the cln 2e said so we select it and that's done sometimes you get variations of a sid that end at different waypoints and they're called transitions this one doesn't have any so we don't have to choose one and again if you see a transition you don't have to choose one but we're going to choose the runway and the seed and then go to the root page then we can activate that root because remember an aircraft might not program the the destination at takeoff it's not needed until you're in flight but if it is like a scheduled route you might have and if the weather is very clear at the other end you might have a very you know a very definite approach route so activate and then you have to execute that change and that becomes part of the flight plan and now you can say it's the active route okay next thing it wants us to do is set up performance initialization so we're going to click on that so we this is the fmc asking us about the aircraft the simulator helps us a lot with this we can put in our zero fuel weight so this is the the weight of the airframe now the airplane actually knows it already so we can shortcut that if you've got an operational flight plan all of this data would be available on the operational flight plan so if i've just clicked on zero fuel weight and it's keyed it in automatically into the scratch pad for me so then i can go and click on that and you can see now it's figured out the gross weight because the simulator knows how much fuel is in the aircraft already it's got 25.3 tons basically you could then go and put in how much you want for your flight plan yeah or how much you are estimating for your plan alongside that but it's an optional field we're not going to bother with it we can put how many reserves we need so how many thousand paint or kilograms of reserves so we can put in one cost index determines how aggressively the aircraft can climb or accelerate or how aggressively it will chase a given speed when it's on the auto throttle so a normal number you might see is 20 it's actually based on quite a complicated formula but generally you'll see on an operational flight plan it's dependent on the operator about you know how much economy they want to make on the operation of the aeroplane generally you'll see about 20 it can be anything up to about 200 i think but if we put 20 in and that may influence as you just saw it just calculated the flight level we're going to get to so we're going east so typically that would be an odd number so we're going to ignore this kind of uh flight level it's chosen a flight level is times 100 feet so this is asking for our cruise altitude so that would be 36 900 feet so we're going to fly at 35 000 feet so we'll put in three five zero we could key three thirty five thousand and it would understand that if we just type three five zero it will anticipate that we mean flight level not altitude in feet so there you go it's keyed it in so we've got the trip and the cruise altitude there okay so that's it for that page if we go to the n1 limit page now you can now see oh that's a good point actually we haven't executed that we can execute each part we don't have to we can wait until we've programmed everything so we have execute that go to n1 limit this is determining our climb basically so climb parameters so you can configure that and you could de-rate your climb if you wanted to or you can just choose you know the absolute the best performance so then we can go to the take off and we can configure the aircraft for takeoff so you can see how many degrees of flap you're going to use typically with a 737u you you will use five degrees of flap the reason you might use more is for a short runway for example you can then calculate the center of gravity yes you can sorry you just click on it next to it and it will work it out for you and when you put the center of gravity in it works out the trim setting for the aircraft we'll get back to that in a moment you'll notice also when we chose the level of flaps it gave us our rotate speeds so that's basically it knows now the weight of the aircraft and the flap settings and the amount of thrust we're going to use so it can tell us about the the speed to rotate on the runway so to transfer those into the actual numbers so these are predictive we can then transfer them across just by clicking the soft keys next to them and it's all good to go so coming back to this trim if we come back to the pilot's viewpoint in the cockpit it said 5.99 if we go and look next to the trim wheel there is a stabilator trim gauge and you can roll the wheel with your hand and you will see the needle moving so you're getting this ready for takeoff so you can hold the mouse down on one side we need to get it to 5.9 so we wiggle the mouse around the tooltips really useful here it tells us the exact number the reason for doing this is to stop the aircraft ballooning around when you're accelerating down the runway obviously if you're trimmed with too much you know nose up for example the aircraft's going to try to take off before it's really able to or if you've got too much nose down you're going to have to really pull back to get it to rotate so this means the aircraft's actually going to be balanced on the way down the runway so at the rotate speed it will be kind of in an equilibrium state okay so let's go back into the fmc so we've set up the departure and we've set up the performance numbers we can actually go and do the arrive the approach route so the arrival into ento we are going to come in on runway 18 we'll use the ils and let's go and have a look at our flight plan again we're going to come in on the ulm u2s standard approach route so there it is if you have got there's more than one page of results here so if you can't see the approach you're looking for you can always go next page and previous page to step through them so we can do that here look so ulmu2s is the one we want so we've selected ils 18 and ulm u2s notice we do have some transitions here see if any of them apply i don't think they do a robu uh next no that's fine so we just execute that change so that's become active and then we go and look in the legs page so now we can see there's our standard instrument departure route out of stansted is programmed in here so we go next page that's coming through we can we can correlate that with what we can see in the similar insight in little mouth map so if we look in here these are these sequences look s e 0 6 11 18 23 26 23 26 here ending at the vor cln which is clacton which is over here so you can see that's the difference in color in little nav map that's just how it represents it so that's the end of your standard instrument departure ending at clactor then we can see that here now interestingly look that's the end of the standard instrument approach sorry instrument departure and that's the beginning of the approach room into ento and in between the fmc doesn't know what to do so it's put a discontinuity into the flight plan in other words it's not going to guess how to get there it wants us to help it so in line with that i've just picked out a couple of vors so we're going to go to dhe first so we'll key that into the scratch pad dhe and we click on the discontinuity line there's only one in the world called dhe so it hasn't asked us which one we mean which is fine we can execute that and again we still got another discontinuity to deal with so if we scroll further up our flight plan across to the coast of norway we've got sva it's the next one s v a and we can program that in notice it's it's kind of calculating based on our a root root what speed and what altitude we're going to get there we can contradict that and change it to what we want but we're going to leave it so it's figuring it out all on its own what speed and altitude to be at the waypoints okay and that's the mach number by the way so once you get to your cruise altitude or once you get above the transition level which is 18 000 feet in the us um in europe it varies all over the place so you have to check your flight charts you don't change to the mach number representation until you get above what's called the transition level okay sva is in there if we go to the next page we can still we've still got the discontinuity and we've actually got another one there or another blank area of plan so yeah another discontinuity so how do we get rid of discontinuities because we put our way points in that we wanted to use now what we have to do is click on the waypoint that you want to close over the gap so you're going to pull the flight plan up so i've selected olmog and then i just click on the discontinuity line and it moves everything up and shuts the discontinuity same here look so we click on ci 18 and then we click on the discontinuity and everything will be pulled up to close the gap okay so the changes we have made are highlighted but it hasn't actually been made yet it's a modification to the route if we execute it it becomes the active route and at this point you can see the flight plan is on the um the primary flight display over here we can have another look at that in a moment so we can see there is our route and it's all programmed in we can flick through the pages and see all of the steps of the route so while we are in flight we might use the progress page and what this does is quite clever you've got a few options here you can see the route page which gives you the overview you can see the legs page which shows you your list of waypoints and the distances between them and the instructions for each waypoint yeah because it's the the root you know your plan so this is the speeds the altitudes with any restrictions shown and this will highlight the next part automatically as you fly through the route so it will be highlighted but where it's quite clever if you look in the progress page not only do you get the list of waypoints you get the distance you also get the eta and you get the fuel burn down so it's saying by the time we get to ento we're going to have a certain amount of fuel left yeah okay so 16.5 tonnes we can starting with 25 i've obviously haven't fiddled with the fuel of the aircraft at all i haven't configured that at all so we're starting with far more fuel than we need but it's saying we'll have 16 tons left when we get to ento okay so the other thing i want to look at here just before we stop because again all we're doing today is programming the flight plan this primary flight display has many modes that it can operate in and we have got it in map mode which is the default when you start the aircraft from cold and dark if we change this to plan mode which is on the far right it centers on a given waypoint we'll ignore that that was just my controls i accidentally just knocked the plan mode for the primary flight display so you can see there's several modes there's plan map vor and approach obviously they're not going to make any sense because we haven't set up a radio at all to you know to tune in so but map and plan reflect the flight plan so map follows the aircraft so the triangle is your airplane so the map will spin around with this compass rose around the airplane so you get a good orientation of what's coming up on your flight plan if you go to plan mode this shows and i'm trying to zoom this in to show it specifically this shows the aircraft in the center and it's north oriented we can zoom in and out by the way up here so we can go to 40 miles 80 miles and you can see you can see more and more of your plan but obviously it becomes more cluttered and you can turn on data like waypoints i'm not sure if the weather will show up no it won't because the weather radar isn't working in the 737 yet there is a terrain radar but obviously that's not going to do much until we're in the air and the terrain radar does work so when you as you turn options on and off you'll see them light up then the side of the aircraft but anyway coming back to what i was going to talk about i keep going sideways here if we go look at the legs page when you're in plan mode on the primary flight display a step option appears at the bottom right of the legs page so you can step through your flight plan and you can see a center marker has appeared so this this is the waypoint that is centered in the plan view so we can step through and just double check our flight plan to make sure it makes sense so then we get to clapton and then dhe sva ulmug and this is going into the standard approach route into the airport and then you've got the the approach into the airport or into the airfield i should say so step again and then step again and there we go there's the final the landing at ento so there you go that is the fmc the basics of the fmc in microsoft flight simulator with the 737 700 so all i've gone through there is the basics of programming a route really i've not done much else there's a hold button that's quite interesting so let's for example say we've got this approach root and we're going to end up at dhe we said on route say we wanted to put a hold in at dhe if you use the hold key you can program holds if you've never seen a hold it's quite interesting so yeah i'm not going to get too much into it on this it's probably a bit too advanced to get to be getting into to it it's a lot to explain but you can if i just illustrate quickly to give you an idea this is homework for yourself to go have a play with it's great fun if you right click on the map on little knife map i'll show you what a hold looks like you would be given instructions if maybe if you were you know outside of an airfield waiting they might put you in a hold at a given way point and that's what a hold looks like it's basically a racetrack pattern that you will fly at a given speed with a given radius turn and you will stay rotating if you've ever you've been on an international flight and you've been near the destination airfield and you might be told by the captain we've been putting a hold for 10 minutes or something waiting for you know a gap in the approach for the airfield so you can do that anywhere and you can do it in the simulator so i'm not going to get too much into that today the other thing you can do is fixes so you can program particular waypoints on the map to have special um symbology what else can we do there's all sorts of things we can see the cruise data here it's um it's very very good descent information you can go to the forecast and you can put in all of the altitudes and the wind speeds so yeah if you can do the same for climb to be honest anyway there we go that was the flight management computer the main drive of today was just to go through programming the legs of a route in and a standard instrument departure and a standard approach route so hopefully that's been useful to you i think one of the most useful things is the plan mode where you can then step through obviously when you come back to flight you will go back to map mode and then you get the moving map while you're flying obviously you don't get the map working if the irs system isn't working so the you know the inertial navigation system we fired up when we got in the aircraft and notice now everything is aligned on the inertial navigation not only do we have the map but the attitude indicators have all lined up so obviously none of that works without the inertial navigation system okay i think that's probably enough um i'll do another fl when i do an actual flight at some point when i get a chance i'll work through you know programming a route and actually flying it but i don't want this video to go on for too long okay if you like this please like it please subscribe to the channel you'll see i've done a startup of the aircraft from cold and dark already i've done a basic uh flight around edwards air force base just with selected heading and altitude mode playing with the autopilot and doing a manual landing um but yeah over time i will be doing a lot more videos about the 737-700 so we'll all get a chance to to see how it works and how to operate it and it should be interesting okay i'm gonna leave it there see you soon

Channel: Jonathan Beckett

Views: 44,302

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Id: ObOtFbN4_hk

Length: 27min 49sec (1669 seconds)

Published: Wed May 11 2022