Beginners guide to starting the PMDG 737-700 from cold and dark in Microsoft Flight Simulator

hello today we're going to take a look at the pmdg 737 700 in microsoft flight simulator it's finally been released so it was released last night so there's still a few bugs in it but it's good enough to show you how it works and kind of how to find your way around the cockpit to get things running so i'm going to jump inside the cockpit we are cold and dark we're on the ground at stansted airport in london it's a horrible day but it doesn't really matter we're in here in the dry and let's go and figure out how to get this aircraft up and running so the first thing we need to do in a 737 is turn the batteries on so in the overhead panel it's right in the middle here we can turn batteries on and we can close the guard on that and then again if we were in the dark we might want to turn the dome light on that's up above us here more importantly you might want to go straight to ground power at this point so to do that in this version of the 737 you have to go down to the fmc or flight management computer press the menu button just to get to the main menu go to the fs actions option then go to ground services and then you can request ground power to be connected to the airplane and that changes to connecting if we have a look outside and zoom out now you can see the cart has appeared and it's connected via cable to the aircraft the connecting will change to say connected in a moment and there it goes so then overhead if we press control six on our keyboard to look at the overhead panel we can switch the ground power to on and it automatically cross feeds power over to the ground power if we hadn't done that in a timely manner we would have started to hear a warning because the whole time the aircraft sat on batteries it's chewing up the battery you know it's discharging the batteries so you start to hear a warning until you give it some other power source which we have just done another way of doing it if you don't have ground power available to you wherever you are on an airfield you can use the apu so we'll do that just as an academic exercise here we'll fire up the apu and cross feed over to it so crossfeed is the major difference between the boeing aircraft and the airbus for example or certainly the 737s of this generation so crossfeed means we are controlling the routing of the power to the aircraft the aircraft doesn't switch over automatically on its own okay so we turn on the aft number one fuel pump and then we go and hit start on the apu so apu is down here or on the kind of eyebrow panel if we look from where the pilot would normally be sitting apu's up here so oh while we're waiting just before we turn the ap1 let's go up above we're going to go and turn on the inertial navigation system because it takes a while to warm up and line up so we turn both of these to nav and they'll go at it on dc and then settle to a line which is perfect and then we can change the display up here if we roll it around to hdg sts it will show us how many minutes are left until the alignment it takes that a few moments before that appears so while we're doing that we can come down here so that's why we don't see a map is because the inertial navigation system hasn't aligned yet um okay we were talking about power weren't we so we're going to get the apu up and running so if we go and look here here's the apu switch and here's the exhaust gas temperature for the apu so we've turned the fuel pump number one on which is the lowest point basically in the tanks and then we click to start it returns back to the middle and that needle moved ever so gently then we should get a a low oil pressure light there it goes and then the needle will move around to about seven and then fall back to four so the the auxiliary power unit is a small jet engine in the tail of the airplane and it provides electrical power and it provides compressed air and the compressed air is used both for the the cabin systems so if we were following a full workup we would use the apu to warm the cabin up and you know to recycle the air before we get the passengers on or while the passengers are boarding even before we switch over to using the the gas turbine engines you know the jet engines to do that job but we're not going to do that we're just going to go straight into getting the airplane ready firing the engines up so there we go so we've got apu gen off buses lit up on bus transfer meaning we can now switch over to use the apu as our source of power so we flick both of these switches so we're now using the auxiliary power unit not the external power so at this point you'll notice if i switch the off on the ground power it doesn't do anything so by the same token we can come back down to the flight management computer or fmc and we can release the ground power now because we're not using it okay so a lot of this is just functional bits and pieces around the aircraft the actual the exact order and the checks and balances done varies tremendously from operator to operator so i'm just showing you you know the functional how it really works okay so the next thing we do we've got power to the aircraft so you'll notice in the cold and dark setting of this pmg g plane the position light was already set to steady so what that really means is as soon as we provide power to the aircraft the lights are going to come on so that's just telling people in the vicinity you know that there are people in the aircraft we are bringing it up to speed it has power therefore the lights are on if that wasn't in the off position we would put it to steady at this point okay so back overhead we are going to go and turn on the window heats which we are doing now and then the pro heats next on our list we are going to go and set up a basic flight plan so we'll go back to the menu page and we go to fmc and the first thing we need to do is initialize the aircraft's position in the world it says here and the this is the message line enter irs position so we go to position init and it's asking on a mandatory field here with the square boxes for set irs position so what you do is you go to the next page and you get both of the gps systems on the aircraft are listed here with their positions you can borrow one so if we click on that it puts that into the scratch pad for us then we can go previous page back to where we were and we can drop what's in the scratch pad into the irs position and that just initializes it you can also go and set a reference airport of where we are so egss is stansted we see ico icao code for stansted where we are and we select reference airport we can then go to route and this is where this differs a little bit and i'm not sure how accurate this is or if it's a minor version difference in this model of boeing 737 i expected the reference airport to be pre-filled into the origin and it's not so we're gonna have to re-key that let's pretend today we're going up to edinburgh we're not actually gonna fly we're just gonna get the aircraft ready to fly so we're gonna go from stansted to edinburgh okay so then we could then jump over oh before we do that let's go back into that root page i didn't put a runway in so let's put in runway 22 at stansted and we can put a flight number in as well we can make one up makes no difference to us really okay we can then go into the departure arrival page and we can say egss or stansted we are going to depart now runway 22 is already selected because we keyed it in previously and we'll say we're leaving on the bky 2s departure or standard instrument departure and then we come back to root then we could say on the arrival page we want to go into runway 6 and the agp e1e standard approach route into edinburgh and we'll use a transition as well and come back to root and now we have the option to activate that route and we've done that and we can then execute that next thing to do and the boeing flight management computer tends to sometimes show you the next thing to do at the bottom right it doesn't always but you can get to all the pages through the rest of it anyway so performance initialization this is quite clever and this is a little bit easier than it was in x-plane we can get the aircraft to tell us various things so if we just click next to the zero fuel weight for example it figures it out and puts it into the scratch pad for us and then we can just click on it again and it inserts it and because it knows obviously the empty weight of the aircraft and it also knows how much fuel it's got it now knows the gross weight so then we can go and put in how much reserve fuel we want left at the end and it's in thousands so we'll put 1 000 and cost index so the cost index relates to how aggressively you want to let the aircraft either accelerate or climb and it's to do with fuel um fuel saving basically economy so cruise altitude say we were going to fly at 25 000 feet you divide that by 100 that gives you 250 which is the flight level you can key 25 000 and it will take it or you can key a flight level and it will take that as well okay it's just warning us here we've cruise altitude has changed so that's fine we'll clear that message away next thing we can do is go to n1 limit we're not going to change that then we're going to go to take off so we need to say how many degrees of flaps we're going to use for takeoff we're going to use 5 degrees and you'll notice those numbers popped up these are the v speeds and the rotate speeds so it's pre-calculated then based on the runway we're taking off from and our weights and our um the cost index so now we can go and click in each of those and it gives us our numbers so when we're rolling down the runway it will tell us that 134 knots to rotate for example it's got a center of gravity here again it will precalculate it so we click on it it gives us a number 22.3 percent and that gives us a trim of 5.99 so if we go back to the pilot's view and look down that refers to this gauge here so what you can do is go and roll the elevator trim to get it to 5.99 which i'm now doing and what this essentially does is pre-configure the aeroplane so it's not going to bloom around as we accelerate down the runway so it'll be pre-configured to take off smoothly so there's our 5.99 and then we come back so we've pretty much done the route uh there are various things we haven't input like the wind and things like that i'm just showing you the very basics to get it done really okay so next thing we're going to do would be push back in the real world or in our case we're going to make this truck go away and close the door so we go and look at the fmc we go to menu go to the fs actions as in ground services i can never quite remember this uh wheel chocks we're gonna remove them we make sure our parking brake is on by the way before we do that it's a lever here so parking brake so we would pull that yeah i'm just trying that on my controller and for some reason my throttle controller is playing up i'm not sure why but we'll leave that for the moment so wheel chocks are removed as soon as we remove the chocks that is a trigger to close the door and pull away the truck which is driven away with the stairs okay so let's go back overhead so we are preparing for flight basically so your dampers to on fuel pumps to on so all of the fuel pumps come on at this point cabin pressure we go and preset it to our cruise altitude which in our case is 25 000 feet we set the anti-collision lights to on so this is basically telling people in the vicinity we're about to get ready to push back and start the engines really apu bleed ghoster on so that's allowing the compressed air from the auxiliary power unit to spin up the engines uh where are we so yeah we are at the point where we can start the engines now so starting the engines on the boeing we turn the engine start switch to engine number two to grd we switch the ignition select to right and when we look down we should see that the numbers for n2 which is the gas turbine on the right side are climbing when they get to about 22 percent of nominal which is now we can move the start switch for engine number two and that will continue accelerating you know you can hear in the background fuel has been introduced the gas temperature is rising for engine number two and the n1 or the turbofan speed is climbing okay so we let that stable out or stabilize give it a few moments you'll heard a click there the click then was the grd switch flicking back to off all on its own so then we can switch engine number one to grd and switch the ignition selector to the left engine and you will see now the n2 number the gas turbine is increasing so that's the compressed air spinning up the gas turbine engine once it gets to 22 percent which about is you can see it slows down markedly when it gets to 22 we switch on the starter switch for engine number two and it continues on past and you can hear in the background the fuel's been introduced the exhaust gas temperature is going up the fuel flow isn't increasing or dropping down again now actually but and then the turbofan increases in speed and you can see the oil pressure is coming up so it's all looking good okay so if we go and look overhead now you will see now we have the engines running we can transfer power over to the engines away from the apu so we'll do that so this one and this one so then the apu is now off bus we have basically switched over to using the engines the the jet engines for electrical power generation instead of the apu which means we can now turn off the apu okay so we can go off here so hydraulic pumps go to on at this point okay so if we go and look over here that's interesting they were already on apu bleed to off we've just done that now ap to off we've already done that packs to auto so this is the the two switches here next to the duct pressure so this is the um air conditioning or sorry um what's the word i can't think of the word i'm not air conditioning the the temperature air temperature within the cockpit so the packs provide the control of the air temperature taxi lights to on just down here and then at this point you start to look at the master control plan you can get rid of the warning that was from earlier we start to look at the master control panel about configuring it ready for flight so you'd be looking at your initial speed for the auto throttle and so on and so forth again a lot of this won't come alive until we're rolling down the runway but we can at least get you know altitudes ready for the first part of the standard instrument departure for example so there we go that is the 737 700 prepared for flight i'm not going to actually fly it today i can see you i could show you for example if we now release the parking brake and ease the engines forwards just moving i seem to have an issue with the throttle throws are they reversed or something anyway i'm not gonna look into that today yeah it's gone into reverse throttle i'm gonna kill the engines for the moment that's interesting i'll have to have a look at that okay there you go that was the startup sequence as i said for the 737 700 in flight simulator from pmdg there are a few little bugs here and there in it but nothing serious and it's great fun so i'll be flying it over the next few days and i'll record lots more videos so i'll see you soon take care and bye

Channel: Jonathan Beckett

Views: 49,743

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Id: wAurWSp3ttE

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2022