Beginners guide to starting and flying the PMDG Boeing 737-600 in Microsoft Flight Simulator

[Music] hello today we're going to be having a look at the pmdg 737 600. so if you zoom out here and look it on the ground look how short it is it's like a mini version of the 737 and interestingly if you look at it the wingspan is actually wider than the aircraft is long so it's got very good short field performance because of this and it's got very good range because of this so we're going to fire up the 737 from cold and dark on the ground and we're going to have a look around some of the systems on it so let's just have a quick look in the pmdg store it's only 34.99 which equates to about 28 pens in the uk so it's actually really good money and the the or really good value and the reason for that obviously is because it's very very similar to the 737 700 that came out recently the only real changes here are the 3d model and the weights and performance figures for it obviously because of that but otherwise it's the identical aircraft it's telling that the release of this coincided with an update of the seven three seven seven hundred to bring the avionics in line with each other they are both exactly the same version number as each other okay so let's jump inside the cockpit the one thing i have taken a liberty with is setting the panel load state of the aircraft to cold and dark already so i'm going to show you how i did that before we get started so we're sitting on the ground at stansted by the way so if you're wondering you know where we are in the world and what's going on so there's a bit of a trick in the 737 the pmd g737s to get the fmc up and running without having to power the aircraft up you can just hold the mouse down on the menu key and it just powers up the fmc and nothing else okay so i guess it's simulating it running on batteries or something okay from in here to to modify the load state of the aircraft to make it start cold and dark because by default it will start with everything running even if you put it on a parking space go to the pmdg setup menu within the menu and you've got the startup state cold and dark or it won't say cold and dark to begin with so if you click in there you get lots of options so i'm guessing it would say apron typically so we can select we want cold and dark as our startup state and we can execute that and it means next time we start the aeroplane up in the sim we get it with nothing switched on if you want to change the state it's in right now you can select panel load state load and then you can select cold and dark in there which i've already done obviously and you get cold dark okay so if you get lost in the menus just press the menu key and it comes straight back in okay i'm going to press f which centers our view up we are going to go through the basic startup of the fmc and the the aircraft today and do a quick flight now it's worth me reiterating before anybody jumps down my throttle bonus i am not going to follow all of the procedures of the checks and balances you would do with the real aircraft i am purely going to do the functional things required but i will try and describe along the way what we're doing and what happens in relation to those things so let's go and have a quick look first at little nav map we are on the ground at stansted airport and i've roughed in a quick route that doesn't take very long to fly we're only going to fly out to 10 000 feet and we're going to fly from stansted over to birmingham so let's go and we the only reason for doing this is to set a flight plan up in the fmc to show you a little bit of that along the way i'm going to be using shortcut keys as we move around the cockpit to to easily move around and i will say them as i press them and i have got a printed checklist in front of me which i will refer to in the notes of the video so i've waffled waffled on far too long already let's get going with this so the first thing we do to set up a 737 is turn the batteries on so actually i'm going to stop there before we actually get into this there's a shortcut we can follow the main reason for going into the fmc before you start the rest of the airplane is a shortcut to go and connect the ground power so if we press menu and we go to fs actions we can connect the ground power to the aircraft straight away so you can see ground power is here and we can request it okay if we go and look outside you will see there is now a ground power unit and a cable has just appeared between the ground power unit and the aircraft so if we go and look inside this will change from connecting to release there it goes which means we've already plugged in the umbilical outside providing power from the outside world which is great and that will pay off a little bit later on in our procedures so first thing we do we press control and six which takes us to that overhead panel so looking from the cockpit if you look up from where the pilot is this is the overhead panel control 6 gives you a nice flat view of that we're going to turn the batteries on so the battery switch is over here and we switch batteries on and then we can close the lid on it next thing we're going to do is turn the ground power on now typically if we hadn't done that we would have to go and switch on or the the fmc would have come on in you know because the batteries are on and we could have gone and asked for the the ground power to be connected so we've kind of done that backwards so we don't have to ask for ground power now and we can just say give us the crossover to ground power so this whole area here with the bus trans area means to bus transfer what it really means is you're telling the aircraft where to get its power from so we've said ground power okay and in relation to that you can see lots of things have powered up fans have come on for calling for the electric and we can get on with the rest of the the programming okay so let me go further overhead the first thing we're going to do is turn on the inertial navigation system so we turn both of these knobs to nav so i the irs system is the inertial navigation system it uses the system of gyros to figure out how fast the aircraft's traveling and where you are in the world and then we can move this knob here to hdg sts and that gives us a status number of how many minutes until the aircraft's ready it takes a while before it updates it so we're not going to hang around watching for it to update we are going to go though back down to the overhead panel we're going to turn the emergency lights to armed which is this switch in the middle and close the lid on it we're going to turn the window heats to on so this prevents condensation building up inside the the cockpit windows and we're going to turn the probe heats to on so pro somebody asked me the other day what the probe heats are all about if you look very closely at the front of the aircraft there are these various sensors or they're tubes that relate to pieces of hardware inside the aircraft that measure air pressure and they are used for your indicated airspeed primarily and your altitude so they're measuring the obviously the air hitting the aircraft and the pressure of that air so if those get frozen up when you because obviously at altitude the air is much colder so if there is any precipitation in that air or condense any uh what's the correct word for it if the air is dense enough it could freeze and form the water and you know freeze up those sensors so you turn probe heats on so they are kept warm above freezing basically okay i'm just looking to my checklist figuring out where on earth i am so on to the next page so we're gonna press control three at this point we're back down to the fmc so control 3 gives you this nice view of the fmc we're going to prepare our flight plan so to do that we go if you're lost in here again you just press menu which takes you to here and you can see it's saying enter irs position so we go to fmc so the bottom line of the fmc is both a message line and what's called a scratch pad so if we were to type something in it would appear in that bottom line we'll see that in a moment but for the moment it's saying enter irs position so to do that we go to pos init one of the kind of conventions in the boeing fmc is it usually leads you to the next thing at the bottom right particularly during setup so if we say pause in it the soft keys next two options will take you to those screens okay so you can see pausing is here and it's got a row of square boxes here for the set irs position so what this really means is the inertial navigation system wants a reference of where it is in the world because inertial navigation measures the movement of the airplane and figures out where you are now so you need to tell it where it is to start with so if we go okay so we need a longitudinal latitude to put in here where do we get them from we can see some up here they're our last position of the aircraft but that's no good because that might not be where we are now so we say next page and you can see there are two gps systems on the airplane which have readouts we can borrow one of those numbers so we just select the soft key next to it and it keys it into the scratch pad now remember i said you can key in here so i can look i can type in so all it's done really if i type clear it will just remove those letters so all i've really done by selecting a value that already exists is copy it into the scratch pad so then i can go to previous page back to where we were and if i select the soft key next to an empty field it will copy whatever's in the scratch pad into that field and it's done it okay notice it's already got a reference airport which is interesting so i'm going to re-key that normally that would have hyphens maybe because i've been messing around with the aircraft just making sure it was all working so we're going to put egss back into that reference airport and we'll go to roots yeah it's good it hasn't got anything in here okay so notice when we went to the root page it carried over the reference airport in the scratch pad that's a nicety of the boeing because the next thing you're going to do is put that same airport straight into the origin of the origins where we're flying from and the destination is where we're flying to so let's have a look a little that map the icao code for our destination birmingham is echo golf bravo bravo so echo golf bravo okay and we can say what wrong way we are taking off from at stansted and it's runway 22. okay remember i said square boxes are mandatory field hyphens means that mean fields aren't needed we can put a flight number in though don't touch company route it has some secret source in it for loading flight plans but we're not going to get into that today so we're just going to make up a number and stick it in the flight number okay that's the sun is shining on the legs button making it very odd um okay so we've done the route next thing we might do is go to the performance initialization so it's quite nice in the 737 that a lot of this is done for you so there's not too much going back and forth from a tablet or anything like that so if you select the zero fuel weight obviously the plane knows how much it weighs without fuel so you can select that it will pre-key it in and drop that number into zero fuel weight for you and off the back of that it's calculated the gross weight so it knows what weight it is there as well based on the fuel you've already put in so there's a few things here that are kind of automatic which are quite clever um we can put in how much reserve fuel we want we'll just say one that's that's in thousands of pounds typically and cost index the cost index refers to a formula which is how aggressively the plane can accelerate so it can be anything from a low number like 10 up to in the hundreds and you typically get it from your operational flight plan so if you've planned your flight on something like sim brief that turns out this huge report at the end called an operational flight plan which has all this data in it so it'll be telling you how much fuel to put in the aircraft therefore you know all your numbers for this cost index so we'll just put in 50. we're just going to stick a number in because we again like i said we're not following proper procedures here we're just functionally getting this plane up and running cruise altitude we're going to fly at ten thousand feet now you can enter at the altitude into the fmc either as a flight level or as a number or a feat number flight levels times 100 are feet so divide your feet by 100 and you get the flight level so if i put in 100 for example that means 10 000 feet and it will understand that that's what we mean so it knows that's ten thousand once you get above ten thousand say if we went for three six zero it will actually say fl see but if we put 100 in notice that's working out the outside air temperature for us automatically as well based on the altitude which is quite cool and we can execute those changes so the next thing we might want to do is the n1 limit so this is the acceleration on the runway and the climate basically so by default it's going to go for full beams for once of a better phrase you can de-rate it so you can choose a different climb profile to not use as much fuel so we are going to then leave that alone then and we'll go to the take off data so this is where we can set the the flaps for takeoff so we'll say we're going to use five degrees flaps so our key in five into the scratch pad to copy into the flap field and that has automatically calculated the rotate speeds for the aircraft so as we accelerate down the runway we'll get the call outs from the co-pilot of the the rotate speeds and we can transfer those across just by clicking on the numbers so those are the calculated values and those are the values it's put in the reason it's able to calculate them is because we've now chosen the runway we've told it about the acceleration parameters it knows the weight of the aircraft so it can work out you know when the aircraft would be airborne based on a flat level as well center of gravity is an interesting one so if we just select it it will pre-calculate it based on the weight and where the fuel is in the aircraft and the passenger loadout you can say this is the center of gravity and you can drop that in and it gives you a trim number so if we then go and press f you can see that trim number was 5.57 it relates to this gauge here and the wheel this is the the main trim wheel for the elevators so what you're doing here is setting the aircraft up so it's already trimmed for equilibrium on the runway and what that means basically is as you accelerate towards the speed at which the aircraft can rotate the aircraft is not going to balloon around and suddenly gain lift on the runway so we're going to hold the mouse down on this trim wheel and move it until this needle gets to about five points so we just if we zoom in on this just so we can see a bit bit better so we're pre-programming the trim so the aircraft is in equilibrium equilibrium sorry as it accelerates along the runway and the reason for doing that yeah like i say is to stop the nose lifting in an unanticipated manner so press control three again okay so we've done that next thing we're going to do is set up the departure and arrival as our route now there's something interesting about this we'll get to it in a moment so we're going to go and click on depart and click on departure so we're setting up how we are leaving stansted so it already knows runway 22 because we specified that earlier but we can use a standard instrument departure route if we want so all they are are pre-programmed a standard instrument departure is a pre-programmed sequence of waypoints so and they have names so this one that follows this route here out of stansted is called nugb1r so you can't see it here on the page but there are three pages of them so we go next page and next page there it is nugb1r so we'll select that standard instrument departure and then we can click on root and activate and execute that so this might seem very strange that we've been able to activate our route with only half of the route filled in and that's absolutely correct because in a real aircraft the flight crew would not program the destination before they've left the departure airfield they would do it on routes because they're going to be talking to the destination and they would be confirming that the destination the standard approach route into the airfield because there might be all number of reasons you know or manner of reasons why you can't choose your routes ahead of time you may have been vectored somewhere completely different because of something going on at the destination for example or because of weather even okay excuse me for coughing i've got very dry throat um next thing we're going to do then is go back to depth r and we actually conversely we are going to program our approach route just so we don't have to because we're just doing a demonstration flight so if we go and look at birmingham we are going to just use ils we're not going to use a standard approach route we're just going to use ils into runway 33. so ils for romwe 33 at birmingham and we're not using a transition we're not using a start so we just execute that change now on route we would like to do some extra waypoints just to line us up nicely so if we go and look at the links page you can see here's the first few waypoints leaving stansted and if we go next page you can see there's runway 33 at birmingham and in between the standard instrument departure and the approach into birmingham there's a discontinuity so the flight computer won't figure out what to do in between you have to instruct it what to do so we want to go via the daventry vor which is dty d t y so we key it into the scratch pad fill it in and it's filled it into our flight plan and push the discontinuity down one so we also want to go via the off dove waypoint ovd o v d o v and we can insert that into our flight plan and that's again it's inserted it and it's pushed the discontinuity down so we now want to close that discontinuity up so what we do is we select the next waypoint and then we select the discontinuity and what that will do is pull up everything below here up one line yep so it's pulled the rest of the flight plan up over that gap so now we know it is looking good notice it says here that's the modified route so we have to execute it and it becomes the activated or active route and we can have a quick look through and we can just see that there are no more discontinuities if we flick through the pages which is good so that's basically the flight plan done i haven't gone into detail about the weather in here or anything like that yet so we're we're not going to today because otherwise we can spend an hour talking about the flight management computer and we're not going to be using vnav either for the same reason because we don't want to get into how all this works because we could be here for an hour talking about the ins and outs of flight management computers and you just want to see the airplane work and get up and running okay next thing we're going to do is press ctrl 1 which gives us a nice view of the master control panel for the autopilot and we can go and pre-configure things so on takeoff we haven't got too much work to do so first thing we're going to do is turn the flight directors to on okay so the flight there's two parts to an autopilot there's the flight director and the autopilot the flight director figures out based on the flight plan what the airplane needs to do to go the direction you have planned the autopilot follows what the flight director has worked out so you can see when we're in flight you'll see crosses on the displays which are the flight director um but we won't see them just yet so we won't worry about them just yet so we are going to prepare now for flight so we take off the runway we're taking off on is 2-2 at standstill the actual direction of that runway is 222 degrees so we're going to go and pre-program the heading of the aircraft to 222 degrees we're also going to set target altitude is already 10 000 feet that's fine we are going to set a vertical speed to see how we get there now this is pretty useless i'm just showing you that this is how vertical speed works really because at the moment we activate the autopilot it will take the vertical speed up that moment yeah so this is pretty much a useless thing to be doing something we will do though is set up switch on lnf so that's lateral navigation basically it means the airplane is going to follow the flight plan yeah v nav which we're not going to use today relies on filling all the data in on the computer which means the aircraft can do vertical navigation on its own as well so it will change flight levels throughout the the plan but you still need to have a cruise altitude plugged in okay um again today we're not going to be using the n1 or the toga settings to take off we're just going to use max throttle because there's something else i want to talk to you about on the way of doing that um set the barometric pressure so you will notice at the moment this might no it's not quite correct um we can set the barometric pressure remember we talked earlier about measuring the air pressure outside for the altimeter if if we we can change this between inches and hectopascals there's two different number systems so if we look over here at this if you watch the number here it's in inches at the moment if we switches over to hectopascals it changed the number here so it's the difference in america they tend to use inches in europe they tend to use hectopascals for the barometric pressure and you can roll the knob here and notice the altitude changes as the the rating changes so basically you configure the altimeter for the local uh atmospheric conditions so you would look at this on a chart or from a ask for atc they would give you this information typically on the way to the runway or you just press b in the simulator and it pre-configures it for you which is just done for me okay so we're going to start getting the airplane ready for flight so overhead we're going to turn on the seat belt sign so seat belts are here we switch it to auto we turn the your dampers to on if you ever wonder what your dampers are the if you look at an airplane you've got the ailerons on the ends of the wings and obviously as we move the stick around obviously it's not going to work yet we've got no hydraulics switched on but as the ailerons move to roll the airplane they create drag but it's not an equal amount of drag from the aileron moving up and down so the plane will yaw from left to right when you roll the airplane to prevent that yaw the the roll dampers or sorry the your dampers um introduce some rudder automatically to stop that yaw from happening in response to the ailerons okay so that's what your dampers do cabin pressure so down here we've got the cabin pressurization system so typically when an aircraft climbs to high altitude the cabin is lowered in air pressure until i think it for most airliners the the passengers would experience an altitude of about 8 000 feet maximum so when you're say if you're cruising at 38 000 feet in the airplane the cabin pressure internally is held to about what you would experience at 8 000 feet so it doesn't continue to hold the pressure of ground level because the airplane would have to be built so strongly and it would require so much air pressure to do that they don't bother it would actually put too much stress on the airframe over time so they actually you know they they bring the the passengers up to 8000 feet which is why you feel your ears popping and stuff if you go on a long-haul flight okay so we've done the cabin pressure the rf fuel pump number one to on so we turn off pump number one to on the reason we do that is that will provide the fuel to the auxiliary power unit so if you're going to need the auxiliary power unit to on and then to start and then it will flick back to on on its own you will see this little needle here will start moving around and it will go all the way up to seven and then fall back to four if you give it a few moments it's saying low oil pressure which is correct that's just flickered so this will move all the way around to seven and then fall back to four so we'll wait for that to happen what's actually happening while we're waiting for this is there's a jet engine in the back end of the aircraft starting up which is the auxiliary power unit so wait for that needle to move is it going to move today let's go and have a look outside it hasn't switched on has it let's try again it's interesting that it didn't switch on let's give it a moment i can hear it that's going to start pumping heat out any moment there it goes so if you look outside there we go look so that exhaust port on the back of the aircraft is the auxiliary power unit so the the purpose of the auxiliary power unit is to provide kind of bootstrap electrical power for the rest of the aircraft and compressed air so you've probably heard the term bleed air you can vent the air generated from the auxiliary power unit both to warm the cabin up if we were following a full procedure we might warm the cabin up using the hot air from the auxiliary power unit also you can use that compressed air to spin up the main gas turbine engines so if we look inside something we've missed there while we were looking outside is the gen off bus light has come on in response to this being ready the um the apu being ready so this is the bus transfer again so we are going to say now that we're going to derive electrical power from the apu not from ground power anymore so the bottom two switches we flick them down we are now using the apu for power we're no longer using ground power so we go and turn the anti-collision lights to on because we're telling people on the ground we're getting up and running there's all sorts of um conventions around using particular lights to mean particular things to the ground crew and typically once we got on the aircraft you'll notice the position light was on steady straight away on cold and dark so basically what that would mean is as soon as we provided power the position lights came on outside the aircraft which basically tells the ground crew there's people on board and they're configuring the airplane um collision lights it's another convention basically means we're getting ready to start engines we've already got the apu up and running yeah okay pax uh where are we sorry i'm jumping ahead of myself so we are going to do bus transfer we've done that so then we go back down to the fmc and we're going to disconnect that ground power unit because we're no longer using it so if we go to the menu button and we go to fs actions go to ground services and we can release the ground power okay so if we can have a look outside you will see this is going to magically vanish right at least the the umbilical has gone it's still there at the moment and we're also going to remove the chocks while we're here so okay saying it's removed does it how much it gets magically vanished so we can now remove the chocks now that is a trigger in the simulator when we remove the chocks it will close the doors which you can see happening and the stairs will be retracted away from the aircraft so we are now running on internal power and everything is getting out of our way because they know we're getting ready to start you know to get the engines running to get up and up and going so first thing we need to do then to get the engines up and running let's go overhead we're going to turn all the fuel pumps on because without fuel we can't run the engines we're also going to turn on the apu bleed so remember i said the auxiliary power unit provides compressed air to spin up the engines so we turn on apu bleed and you can see the duct pressure climbs so this is the amount of pressure now if you go flicking switches randomly around the cockpit and you go and turn the packs on for example you will see that you don't have enough duct pressure to spin the engines up all of a sudden so don't turn the packs on before you started the engines as the the moral to that story okay we've got ap lead on we're now going to start the engines it's quite straightforward in the 737 so just having a look around the cockpit to make sure we've got everything in the right places so all you do say we start with engine number two the reason we start with engine number two is actually a good story to this if you go reading on the internet you can see several accidents that have happened with this engine 2 pre-arms or pre um pressurizes the hydraulics so there's some funky piping on the aircraft the engine number two pre pre-pressurizes the hydraulics for things like the brakes if you started engine number one first there is a risk in the real world that the aircraft would start rolling even with the brakes on if it had been parked overnight for example and it's actually happened in the real world and the aircraft has rolled into the um the ground crews because there's a small amount of positive thrust as soon as the engines are running obviously if you don't have working uh parking brakes you're going to roll into the the tractor for example okay so we turn this to ground you can use ignition left or right we're going to use one at one of each now as soon as we switch that to grd the n2 number would have started climbing n2 is the gas turbine and you will notice it will flatten out i'm going to let it flatten out to show you it will get to about 25 on its own so that's the compressed air spinning the engine round yeah to get the engine to actually kick in and start running we have to provide fuel and that's done with the starter levers so we move the starter lever for engine number two and it will accelerate past that topping out it was about 29 i didn't think it would get that fast normally you do it as soon as it gets to 20. and you can see the fuel flow is increasing the exhaust gas temperature is rising on engine number two and the turbo fan speed is now increasing so there's a gearbox between the gas turbine and the turbo fan so if you have a look outside of these engines there's two parts to the engine there's the gas turbine in the middle and then there's this huge fan at the outside which is the turbo fan so that's the n2 that's sorry n one yeah n1 is the turbo fan n2 is the gas turbine okay so something we've probably missed here yeah notice that switch automatically went back to off so it does that so we can now go and switch this to grd switch this over to the left one again you can leave these on the same side i think they vary them just for wear and tear purposes of the actual parts that they're related to for ignition so you can see n2 is coming up as soon as it gets to about 25 we can move the start lever for engine number one and you will see the fuel flow increases exhaust gas temperature comes up and n1 starts to increase notice we have this is an interesting one i didn't think we had this much fuel on board we got fuel in the wings and it's saying there's a config warning here that's because we don't have the central fuel pumps on so that's the center tank it's telling us a number four so if we come up overhead and turn on those central fuel pumps and we look down here now that warning's gone away so just uh the only reason we saw that is because i didn't actually fill the plane with fuel i took it as red it would have some fuel in it and just jumped in and started programming things okay so we had a click there while i was talking that was the starter moving back to off okay so we've started the engines normally it's worth pointing out i'm on a parking spot here normally you wouldn't start engines until you have been pushed or are being pushed back okay just to get that clear before anybody again before anyone jumps down my throat we are following just functional stuff here we're not following proper procedures [Music] overhead bus transfer to the engines so now the engines are up and running we can transfer away from the apu we no longer need it so we're kind of using apu as a bootstrap just a temporary source of power to get the engines running and then we can use the engines for everything and not the apu so we use the two outer switches on the bus transfer panel so we are now using the the main gas turbine engines to generate power for the aircraft so we can turn off the apu okay hydraulic pumps to on so hydraulic pumps are up here we turn them all on so this is the control surfaces you know the or the the pumps that provide the hydraulic power for the control surfaces around the aircraft packs can go to auto at last or we can turn the apu bleed off now pax can go to auto so that's the you can hear the fans coming on that's the air conditioning inside the cockpit and inside the cabin taxi lights can go to on so we've got lights down here taxi lights can go to on slowly working our way down we're almost there so we could start taxing this point but we're going to do a couple of other things first we're going to move the flaps to takeoff position so i've moved my flap lever here if we go and i'm not sure if the numbers are actually demarcated on here they are so we said five degrees didn't we so i'm just moving my flat lever one more and you can see the flap travel on this little meter here so the needle it takes a while for the flaps to arrange themselves because the winds are complicated so you can see that's just very slowly moving and it's now got to five degrees which is what we said on the flight plan if you remember um okay so we're going to taxi out so we're going to come off of the parking brakes just realized my throttles weren't in the correct place okay that's interesting why am i getting such a high amount of thrust remember i said there was an amount of positive thrust i'm just gonna try something to make sure my throttles are configured correctly and again this is first go with this aircraft so i'm just looking at the throttle throws okay so i i've got the um the airbus quadrant i've got several videos about configuring this and i'm just going to put the parking brake back on so i can get to the levers for it so i'm just gonna yeah i'm just making sure that the throttles are working correctly throws okay that i have a whole video about configuring this because i've got the airbus throttle quadrant and obviously it is not a boeing quadrant it doesn't have the same throws doesn't have the same axes so if we're just texting it to the airfield to take off on the way we can go and turn some lights on so let's go and press ctrl six just briefly we want to turn the strobes to flashing name against the room eventually so where are we on the airfield let's have a quick look okay so we will go right and then left a lot of people tend to like taxiing incredibly fast but you're not supposed to you won't see a a real airliner going more than a few knots it's worth saying i've got the simple traffic plug-in which has given me really nice deliveries on the other aircraft it's available from aerosoft it's really cheap and it just makes the simulator look a lot better so you can see down here the flight plan is arranged we've got it in the the this is called efis display we've got it in um map mode at the moment you can change the range you can also actually we haven't configured a few things let's go and have a quick look we'll put we'll stop before we come out into the wrong way i didn't turn on tcas today which we would typically do during taxi or takeoff anyway so tcas is where is it on this one have they moved it oh is this a slight difference between between the aircraft i think it might be interesting i guess this is a newer version of the aircraft so we're not going to worry too much so it's got this different panel here so we've got tara so it's already on by the look of it okay we're not going to worry too much about that today it's just a that's the first difference i've seen with the load out of the cockpit between the 700 and 600 so we're going to go and pre-configure the indicated airspeed for the auto throttle to 220 knots so once we take off you will see me do several things in a row quite quickly obviously we're not using air traffic control today so we might get a phantom ai airplane that fly straight through us quick look in the sky can't see anything like that it's a funny little looking little boeing isn't it so again i've not flown this before this is my first go in it so we're going to find out what we find out basically as soon as we start accelerating let's reduce the range on this map so we can actually see what's going on okay full throttle now this is the reason i didn't go for the toga mode or anything like that on the throttles i've pushed them all the way forward look you can go beyond a hundred percent i'm doing on purpose to be honest is trimming slightly there we go autopilot is on autopilot is uh sorry um auto throttle is armed and speed mode is engaged so the airplane is now essentially flying itself so we can we'll leave it at 220 knots just to make this corner so it doesn't get too fast and we'll raise the flaps because you can see there's a marker we're just about to pass on the indicated air speed saying at what point you raise the flaps that's done and we're basically done in terms of departing so we accelerated down the wrong way we pulled up after a couple of thousand feet you're allowed to engage the autopilot which we did remember we pre-configured lnf mode we switched on the auto throttle speed mode came on automatically and the plane is now flying itself basically and it's climbing out at two and a half thousand feet ah so that didn't unless i just looked into climbing in at two and a half by the time i engaged it i was anticipating that vertical speed though would reset to whatever i was doing as i left the runway so that's an interesting one what's something to look into so we have got a restriction coming up of above 3000 feet obviously we're at 5000 already because this thing is a rocket ship you can see there's a nice view across the it's a lovely day in the uk this is live weather by the way so there's stansted and here's our 737 600. it's very nicely modeled okay so now we've got away from the the first turn we're going to increase speed to 250 knots we can then look on our flight plan here and we could go to the progress screen and that gives us some nice calculated times along the route almost up to ten thousand feet already which is quite amusing really and again for anybody that wants to jump on me and say oh you didn't do this you didn't do that all i'm doing is functional use of the aircraft and having a quick look around it okay so you can click on this panel on the yoke which moves out of the way so you can get to switches in the cockpit it's worth pointing out i've got the airbus yoke i have switched off the axis for the um landing gear notice i've also gone and switched it off on take off we switch this to up to pull the undercarriage up we subsequently move it to the off position otherwise it's pressurizing the undercarriage cylinders the whole time which is ridiculous and obviously would cause wear and tear on the real thing so the collection we heard there is we got within a few hundred feet of our target altitude so you can see we're in that last hundred feet now before we get to a 10 000. and the plane is happy cruising along so if we go and look at the map it's going to miss the turn or we've probably got a yeah we've got a discontinuity here between what the aircraft thinks and what little nav map thinks the route is yeah so it's going to kind of be in the ballpark but don't don't worry too much about what little map map thinks it's not as clever as the 737 if that makes sense so you can see this is absolutely nailing the predicted flight path okay so this flight isn't going to take very long at all again we look we should have been at 4 000 feet we've again these i'm not following procedures this standard approach we should have been at four thousand feet from the boat but we're not we're at ten thousand already but it's quite nice for sightseeing purposes so the plane's flying itself remember earlier i mentioned about the flight directors that's the crosshairs that you can see that superimposed so the flight director is is figuring out it wants the aircraft to be going in the direction of that crosshair in order to follow the flight plan the autopilot is chasing that crosshair with the attitude of the aircraft so we are at 10 000 feet so we could accelerate and so we will so let's go for 320 knots let's see how fast this thing accelerates then this little 737 600 crikey look at it go i mean okay it's smaller and lighter i didn't anticipate it being that much smaller and lighter and faster whoa the green line you can see here is the anticipation of when it will reach the target's altitude you'll it'll make more sense when we're descending something we can go and have a look at because we are going to fly into birmingham on the ils is make sure we've got the ils programmed 110.10326 degrees so what we can do is go down and look in the fmc and look at the actually no i'm getting confused between different airplanes there we need to look down here here's the nav use so we want one one zero one zero so one one zero one zero we'll transfer that to be active and the same over here one one zero one zero transfer it's active so we got both of the nav radios agreeing with each other and we want to set the course to the runway direction on both sides so the direction of the runway was uh three two six of the the ils sorry was three to six degrees so it goes course on this side so we'll make the we're just getting things ready in advance really so everything makes sense in the cockpit okay so if we increase the range here we can see what's coming so top of descent is coming in about 15 miles if we follow the flight plan to the letter but we can just play with the descent modes on the way just to show you how they work you can see as you fly along the flight plan it highlights the current route or the current part of the route interestingly you can go to plan mode on here and when you go to plan mode it zooms in on a particular step and if you go to the legs page it shows you the one that is centered is daventry if we say step we can go and step along the route and then obviously you can use zoom as well interesting we can press tfc as well i'm not sure if it will work on that mode actually yeah tfc look puts range rings on if you switch tfc on that will show other aircraft so it's using the tcas system to show other aircraft nearby obviously there aren't any at the moment okay so let's start sending just to show you how this works so say we came wanted to come down to 5000 feet first of all we're going to need to just slow down to 250 knots notice it hasn't started descending yet we're still at ten thousand feet even though i've said five thousand that's because we're on altitude hold boat and we haven't told it how to get to five thousand so this is very much a target altitude yeah and you can see it reflected here so this is the altitude we're at this is the target altitude so we're just waiting for the speed to come off if we wanted to to airspeed faster we can just use the speed brakes so if you haven't seen what the speed brakes are there those flaps are now sticking out the top of the wings and you can see a green line here on the indicated air speed that's the speed we will be doing i think it's in six seconds time so remove the speed brakes and obviously the plane will come down a more gentle rain to 250. so we need to get down to 5000 feet so we tell it to do it at a given vertical speed so we roll this round say come down at 2000 feet a minute please and you can see the vertical speed is changing and you've got the target there marked now we need to keep an eye on this indicated airspeed look it's actually increasing this is the danger of using vertical speed mode versus level change if we just do level change instead the plane will get down at the best rate it can so we could go for speed brakes now and the plane will go more steeply to hit 250 knots because it can it's doing a level change based on what we've configured elsewhere so if i go for full speed breaks so while that's going on there's something else i want to quickly show you i think see if i can find it uh menu i just need to get the door hang on a second okay that's throwing me um just let someone come to the door but so if you go to the pmdg setup you can go to aircraft and equipment and i just want to have a look there's 15 pages of this i think it's about what i'm looking for and i can't remember where it is and i don't want to spend too long looking for this is you can get the speed from the throttles displayed on the etop cs default battery yeah i'm not going to worry about it there is a setting where you can get your current throttle display to show up on the n1 which is really useful i'll come back to that okay so we're down to almost a 5000 feet we heard the clacks on there and it's lovely weather isn't it so this is going to be an instrument approach so we're going to take the speed off to 200 knots so we're not in a hurry so it wants us above 2000 feet at cf33 so we're going to drop down to two and a half thousand let's just check the height of birmingham above ground level 315 feet so we want about 2800 so again we can do a level change to do this we don't have to use vertical speed we go for 180 knots let's move the range so if we go another look on the map to see where we are we've got a little way to go yeah we're about 20 miles out so in order to get rid of that altitude quickly we're just going to go for flaps now it's a bit slow enough yeah we've gone past the up marker we can go first flaps two which i've already done so you can see the flaps are traveling over here we can remove the speed brake's name it's a lovely day isn't it you can actually see we've picked up the uh the signal from the ils already we've got the glide slip we haven't got a localizer yet but when we get a bit closer we'll pick that up so we're doing 180 knots let's have a look outside oh lovely day absolutely hammering it down oh i kind of feel sorry my other half is in this part of the world this morning and it doesn't look great does it she's watching the commonwealth games it's taking the kids up to go and watch the rugby i'm hoping they have got better weather than this they are in thick rain here so the weather's obviously swirling around out there because the aeroplane is reacting to it so let's switch this over to approach mode notice we can have both the screen showing something different so we've got approach mode on this side and on the co-pilot side we've still got the map view so we get a nice view of what's going on so when we make the turn we're down to 2800 feet when we make the turn we will lower the gear so we're five miles from the turn now she starts slowing down over 160 knots go for 10 degree flat get the gear down i guess landing lights on this is going to be a cool landing isn't it so this is using a coarse deviation indicator for the um the approach mode display on the efis and obviously over here we've got this in plan mode which gives us the the flight plan on the way in and we can reduce the range on that so you'll see the airport appearing on the far end of that line anytime soon and here comes the approach so should we fly this by hand just for a bit of fun for something to do so here comes the turn so notice the line has come in it's slightly overshooting 2500 so at this point i'm going to turn off that's just a warning i'll turn the autopilot off don't worry about that so just getting my bearings on where the airplane is so we're high so let's get the nose down it's a while since i've flown the 737 okay let's get this back under control shall we 2500 so we're off to the right so we'll just correct that we're coming back down to the great slope need some more speed off let's put the air brakes out to accelerate that let's press f and see what happens with the views it's quite cool so again fulfill flaps name feeding in throttle a bit low again this is just rustiness with me waving around a little bit there we go we're back pretty much on track now so what we're looking to do is balance the indicated airspeed and the glide slope and the localizer so gears down flaps are on full so it's just stick and rudder at this point yeah so this is actually dropping quite quickly isn't it we'll put the view higher up so you get a nice view of the wrong way on the way in traffic traffic yeah i forgot to turn the um tcas to ta instead of t-a-r-a so it's trying to react to traffic nearby i'm just watching the indicated airspeed here we can go very slow in this little 737 600 it's quite amazing actually adjusting 110 knots which is not advisable i'm going to speed up a little bit but look at the others look at the stall speed it's 80 knots i mean okay we've not got any passengers i don't think but they're still nuts i'm just wondering how true that is one hundred okay so we just fish for that fifty 30 20 10. obviously we can use reverses as well okay flaps up breaks off so on the roll back to the [Music] airfield you would typically turn the apu back on at this point just so when you get to the stand you don't have to worry so you can you know go through your powering down procedures the stunning thing to me with that obviously this is the first time i've flown this was how slow we could go that stall speed was like 80 knots obviously that was the absolute limit but that's quite stunning to me that you can fly this so slowly okay so you obviously don't want to sit and watch me taxi all the way back and go through the reverse of the startup list so i'm going to um leave you while we're taxiing back but yeah this was the pmd 600. uh we need to go and turn off the parking lights by the way um and yeah i'm massively impressed with it it's it is very very very similar to the 700 so the internal systems are identical so you know if you're if you've already got the 700 it's debatable whether you really need the 600 as well but it is quite cheap i was actually quite surprised i think pmdg have learnt the lesson now that they can actually sell twice as many at half the price or more um i'm not quite sure what they'll do about the pirates that are obviously going to go and just copy the airplane around but then i'd rather you know support the developers so i've paid the money um yeah so here we are the pmdg 737 600 in microsoft flight simulator i think it's actually rather nice so i'm going to pull us to a stop here on the uh taxiway birmingham and i'm going to leave you here very very nice isn't it okay i'm gonna leave you there i i will see you again soon and we'll do some flights over the next few weeks flying some continental routes i guess with the 737-600 see you soon

Channel: Jonathan Beckett

Views: 34,458

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Id: oljX0VzfMVw

Length: 69min 25sec (4165 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2022