Beginners Guide to Starting the PMDG Boeing 737-700 from Cold and Dark (Revised and Updated)

hello today we're going to have a look at the pmdg boeing 737-700 in microsoft flight simulator and we're going to follow a functional start procedure to get the aircraft from cold and dark into an operational state this is not going to follow the real world procedures that a pilot might follow it's going to miss out a lot of the checks and balances that happen to do with safety so we are purely going to look at the functions required to get the aircraft ready based on all of the switch positions that are in the aircraft from a cold and dark state from the default cold and dark state that pmdg have given us i'll show you where you can select that before we get started so the first thing we're going to need to do is make sure that our controllers are going to work correctly in the simulator so we press the escape key on the keyboard and we go into control options and we make sure if we've got multiple profiles configured that we've got the appropriate profile configured for our controller okay otherwise you may have different mappings for levers or switches or axes so we're going back into the aircraft once we've confirmed that the first thing we're going to do with the 737 is provide power to the aircraft so we go control 6 takes us to the overhead panel and the battery switch is in the middle and we turn the battery on okay the next thing we're gonna going to go and do is go straight down to the fmc so we press control and three which takes us to the fmc we are going to connect ground power immediately but before we do that we're going to have a quick look in the pmdg setup page so this gives you the option to load a panel state so if the aircraft's already running but you want it to become cold and dark while you are sitting in it go to panel state load and then you can see cold and dark is at the bottom of the first page there are three pages of these options and next page and previous page will step through them so if i select cold and dark i will get the cold and dark state and this will go out again and i'll have to go back to the batteries to make the aircraft start in cold and dark there's a startup state option and you can select the one you want again and then the next time you load the aircraft it will be in that state so i've selected cold and dark so this procedure relates to the out of the box cold and dark state okay so we're back at the main menu of the fmc signal so we are going to go and connect the ground power to the aircraft so we need to go to fs actions then ground services and ground power and we have to request it and it will say connecting and when it has connected it will say release in other words you know to to disconnect it so if we look outside we've now got the ground power cart is connected to the aircraft if we go back inside we can see it's just saying connected and it's switched to release so it's now connected okay so back overhead control and six to get to the overhead panel and we can turn the ground power to on so the switch for ground power is right in the middle here you switch it to on and the aircraft switches over to using the ground power if we are operating in the dark we can now turn on if we press control and seven to go further overhead we could turn on the dome light at this point because we have power to the aircraft the main worry if you're just running on battery is that you are discharging the battery the whole time so the more things you switch on the more you're going to discharge the batteries so you know you go for the minimal amount of things okay the next thing we're going to do while we're further overhead here is turn on the inertial navigation system so these two knobs here are the initial navigation system we turn them both to nav and we wait for the lights to go to a line and they both have and now we can move the status knob here over hdg sds it will read zero in a few moments it will read the number of minutes until the irs or inertial navigation system has aligned so we'll leave that doing what it's doing we can go back down to the lower part of the overhead panel which is control and six again we can turn the emergency lights to armed so right in the center here is a flick switch so this is arming the emergency lights and we can close the shield on that we can also close the shield on the battery switch over there we can turn the window heats to on now and we can turn the probe easter on i am working through a printed checklist that i prepared that i will make available to download in the notes of the video so look out for in the notes so the next thing we do is go down to the fmc we're going to prepare a flight plan so to do that we go to the menu page to get started and then we go to fmc or flight management computer you can see it's asking us to enter an irs position so we can clear out that message and we can go into pos init and this is where it's asking for the irs position so this is the a reference position to start the inertial navigation system so we can go to next page and you'll see the gps coordinates from the gps systems on the aircraft for left and right we can pick one of those if we just click on the soft key next to it it transfers the value into the scratch pad we can type into the scratch pad so you can see as i press buttons the letters appear we can also remove the letters we have typed with the clear button so we clicked on a value it put it in the scratch pad we can then go to the previous page and we just select the soft key next to the field we want to fill in with whatever is in the scratch pad see and that makes that go away we now need to fill reference airport we don't actually need to but it will help out the flight management computer if you see a field with hyphens it's an optional value if you see a field with boxes as we saw with the pos in it then it's a mandatory field so reference airport we are at stansted the icao code for stansted is e g s s echo golf sierra sierra so we're going to fill that in and from the system it knows where that airfield is okay then we can we want to fill in a root so this is where we are flying from and to so origin is stansted e g s s and you click on origin and it fills it in say we are going to fly to edinburgh today we'll put in the icao code for edinburgh airport which would be e g p h let me fill that into the destination we can put the runway we are leaving stansted on this will help the fmc or flight management computer with some calculations later so we'll say runway 22 we are going to leave stansted on in the real world you'll be looking at your flight plan or you'll be referring to your operational flight plan and you you know that would have all the details on it you would be looking at the winds and you would say or you would take instruction from atc so runway 22 now we're going to set up our departure and arrival from stansted and into edinburgh so we click on the dep r button and that lists the airfields with dep and r next to each of them so for stansted egss we're going to click on the dep option and this shows you our departure options so we've got runways on the right and standard instrument departures on the left so we can see 22 is already selected because we've already keyed it in but we need to choose a or we don't have to choose a standard instrument departure we can choose a departure so you look at your flight plan and if it names a specific departure it's worth saying departures are just sequences of waypoints predetermined sequences of waypoints so we're going to choose one here the bky2s departure and we'll go back to root and then we'll go and put the arrival in at edinburgh so we'll go in runway number six and the agp e1e standard approach route so again standard approach routes are predetermined sequences of waypoints you've got some transitions here so quite often a star or a sid will have variations so they're called transitions which link them up to airways so we're going to choose one of those just to show you what happens and then we go to root activate and then execute and that has essentially created our root okay the next thing we do is go to performance initialization and we can get to that also if we happen to look at something else to get back to performance initialization you can click on the init ref button and it will take you straight here so the first thing you want to do is fill in the zero fuel weight this i'm predicating all of this actually by us having filled the fuel in already if you want to go and fill the fuel in you go back to the menu button go to the fs actions and there's fuel and payload so you may want to put a number of passengers on an amount of fuel in so if i go to fuel for example i can fill the plane completely up or i can set a specific level in pounds or percent so if i set full we've got 100 and 46 000 pounds of fuel okay so then we come back to init ref remember we could jump straight back that way and we can put in our zero fuel weight so that's the weight of the airframe so if we click on it it will work it out for us 118. then if we want to fill in our reserves notice it's calculated therefore the gross weight because it knows how much fuel we've got on board so reserves is how much we want to have left over when we land as a you know just a reserve in case we have to um go into a hold or whatever else so we'll put in two so two thousand pounds we want to keep back cost index this relates to a formula that's used for economy and it really regulates how aggressively the aircraft can accelerate and climb so a normal number you might see is about 20 it can go as high as 50 on normal flights the number you can enter can go as high as several hundred but 20 is a normal number you might typically see we have to fill in a flight level so this is the altitude we are going to fly at on our route so traveling from stansted to edinburgh edinburgh is slightly to the west of stansted so generally the flight level you might fly out would be an even number if you're traveling west and a flight level is an altitude in feet times a hundred so if i wanted to fly at thirty two thousand feet it would be flight level three two zero you can key in either the feet or the flight level and it will understand i'll illustrate that here so if i put in three two zero zero zero it will automatically convert it to flight level three two zero just divided by a hundred basically okay next thing we can do is go to we can execute those changes we've done so far you can execute at any point everything you do is not confirmed until you click execute and then it becomes the active uh plan so we can go to the n1 limit page we'll leave this alone this details how you want the aircraft to climb basically then we can go to the takeoff page and we can put in our takeoff flaps so we'll go for five degrees of flaps for takeoff and you can see here it's calculated some numbers for the v speeds and the rotate speed so based on the runway length and the configuration and weight of the aircraft it knows now how fast we need to be at the point we rotate on the runway so to transfer those across to the ones that will be called out during the takeoff run we just click the buttons next to them and it copies them across the other thing it can calculate for us is the center of gravity of the aircraft so if we click on this button you can see it's put 20.2 in and that's given us a trim number so what that relates to is the elevator trim so the elevator trimwear wheel is here and if we look it was 6.71 so we need to rotate elevator trim until this small needle gets to 6.71 so we'll let this spin and the reason for doing this is so when you accelerate along the runway when you're getting to kind of rotate speeds so the aircraft will be in equilibrium based on its weight and where the payload is so you know the nose won't suddenly lift in an unexpected manner okay so there's our 6.7 ish it's not an exact science so don't worry too much about obsessing over it okay so that's basically done the last thing we need to look at in the flight plan apart from i'm not covering filling in the winds or anything like that today that would be on a much longer workup of a flight plan what we are going to do though is go and look at the legs and you can see we've got some discontinuities have appeared okay so we've got our departure did we actually choose a departure let's go and choose that again yes we didn't choose a departure so bky2s and we had runway 22 already didn't we root have we got a bug in the system runway 22 bky 2s it doesn't like it does it departure let's go for 5r there we go that works and execute so then if we go and look in the legs page this makes a lot more sense here we hadn't programmed the correct sid earlier so this is what happens when you program things at random okay so we've got the standard instrument departure waypoints here and you can see there are five pages of legs now just to cover our departure and approach so if we say next page you can see there's a discontinuity has appeared in the middle of the flight plan so that basically means at the end of the standard instrument departure and before the beginning of the approach shoot into edinburgh there's a gap in the flight plan and the fmc or flight management computer is not going to work it out for us okay so we can actually disregard that it's not going to work it out and say okay we just want to close the gap so what we could do is say select this waypoint and pull the flight plan up over the gap yeah which does that and you can execute that you can see there's another one here if we go next page so there's the end of the flight plan but there's another discontinuity so there's a gap so what we can do is select that one and pull it up over the discontinuity and execute it and it's done okay so that's the flight plan i have got another video going through the the flight management computer in a lot more detail but that's the basics of getting our flight plan into the flight management computer okay so now we go to the master control panel so this is the master control panel for the autopilot of the aircraft and we turn the flight director switches on so an autopilot basically has two systems there's the flight director which is the computer that figures out what the aircraft needs to do to follow the flight plan and then there's the autopilot that blindly follows what the flight director tells it to do okay so the flight director does the clever bit the autopilot just blindly follows its instructions okay so mike what might we want to set here we will set an indicated airspeed that we want to climb out at so we'll say 200 knots just for this example we're not going to do anything else with that yet we're also going to set the altitude we're expecting to climb out to today on our initial climb off the runway so that might be you would look at your standard instrument departure and find out what the first altitude is that you're climbing to we might also say well actually we're going to we're taking off runway 22 which is 222 degrees funnily enough and we might say we'll use heading select for initially you know when we initially turn on the autopilot we'll just get it to fly that heading we might also say because we have a flight plan here go straight to el nav mode yeah so that's lateral navigation that means the aircraft is going to steer along the flight plan we have programmed in it's going to steer for us if you notice when we were filling the flight plan in on the right hand side of those legs there are speeds and altitudes if you switch on vnav mode then the indicated airspeed won't be used on the auto throttle settings so when we arm the auto throttle vnav will take over controlling the throttle according to the speeds and the altitudes here so the aircraft will disregard our altitude target and use the flight plan for the target altitudes if we disregard vnav then it will use our target altitude it's worth pointing out if you are using vnav and you're flying to the altitudes that are programmed in but you get an instruction to change your altitude that's what these two buttons are for so you've got a speed intervention and an out of altitude intervention so so if you're on vnav for example and you suddenly need to speed up because you've been given instructions for sequencing or something by atc you can just press speed intervention and regardless of the v nav following this this will all zero out and you can then use the speed you need to okay so that's all we need to play with here for the moment we're just making you aware of what's on this master control panel you've got approach mode you've got voi lock mode we're not going to get into those today got vertical speed mode so you could pre-program that and say actually when we leave the wrong way we would like to climb out at two and a half thousand feet a minute that'll be at sort of a normal steady climb rate so we'd use l nav with vertical speed normally another way to do it is level change that means the aircraft will use the n1 speed limit to get to the target altitude so it's going to climb at the highest rate it can on the maximum n1 which is the percentage of um gas turbo sorry to percentage of turbo fan speed that you have set in the fmc remember in the in the initialization pages there was the n1 limit page which is where you set what percentages it can use okay so i think that covers the mcp but typically all you're really worrying about here is presetting things so when you enable the autopilot the aircraft isn't going to lurch in a different direction so you're going to get it ready so you have a smooth application of the autopilot okay so we've looked at the mcp name just checking my printed list the other thing we need to do is make sure that we have calibrated the altitude so there's the barometric pressure over here which is in either inches or hectopascals there's a shortcut in the flight simulator you can press b and you see the altitude moved slightly so what we've done is tuned in we've twisted that knob automatically by pressing b to the local barometric pressure okay so we're ready to carry on with the startup so control 6 takes us to the your dampers so we turn the your dampers on we set the cabin pressure to cruise altitude so this system here sets the bar the the barometric pressure essentially the air pressure in the cabin and the heating of the cabin so this whole system is for the cabin environment so we're going to go to did we say 32 000 feet we turn the aft fuel pump number one to on the reason for doing this is we need to provide fuel to the auxiliary power unit which we are about to start so the auxiliary paint is here the auxiliary power unit is a small jet engine in the rear of the aircraft so we move it to start and let go it's a small jet engine in the rear of the aircraft that generates electricity and compressed air and obviously heat as well in a full workup you would use it to warm the cabin up before you start the jet engines but we're doing kind of this short efficient way of doing it so you can see the exhaust gas temperature needle here of the apu is raising it will come up to about seven and then fall back to about four when it falls back this center light on the bus transfer will light up and this will allow us to transfer electricity generation the auxiliary power unit and at that point we can remove the ground power so the needle is falling and you'll see this light come on any moment meaning that it's available to be used so that the small jet engine is now generating electricity so we can cross feed over to it and at this point the ground power is actually disconnected so we can go back below and we can go back to the menu page back to fs actions back to ground services and we can release the ground power now because it's not being used okay that the switch up here for ground power doesn't actually do anything once you've transferred over it's it's effectively switched it off for us okay at this point we're getting ready to start the engines that's the reason we've switched the apu on so we need to go and turn the apu bleed on we need to go and turn the anti-collision lights on so we're warning people outside the apu bleed provides the compressed air from the apu to the jet engines to spin them up okay another thing we need to do at this point again the exact order you do thing these things in is debatable and different operators will have slightly different orders we're going to remove the wheel chocks but before we do so we need to look around in the cockpit and i can't from this viewpoint i'm going to go back to the pilot's view we're going to make sure the parking brake is on and we are going to remove the wheel chocks okay which is in that fs options page so back up overhead we have transferred power we have switched the apu bleed on we've turned the anti-collision lights on we've disconnected the ground power we've removed the chocks so at this point we switch all the fuel pumps on we're getting ready to start the engines so this is where you would perform your push back normally we're not going to bother today we're in a very fortuitous place we're parked where we can taxi straight out so fuel pumps are on apu bleed is on so we can start the engines so to start the engines we turn the right hand engine starter switch on the overhead panel here to grd and we switch on ignition to the right engine and if we look down you will see the speed of n2 is increasing n2 is the gas turbine on the right side of the airplane so if we look at the engines on the 737 there's actually two parts the central part is the gas turbine the jet engine and the outside part with the huge fan is the turbo fan okay and you can see it's spinning up and it's got to 29 all on its own that's just the the compressed air spinning it to make it go any faster we have to switch on the starter switch which introduces fuel to the engine yes you'll suddenly see the exhaust gas temperature has risen and it's carried on past the number it was at and it's now accelerating and the engine's up and running when the engine is up and running the switch for the starter will go back to off all on its own so if we wait for that to happen give it a few seconds there we go so now we can start on engine number one so we've done that to grd ignition to the left engine and you can see the numbers coming up so n2 is coming up you can flick the starter switch when it gets to about 20 22 21 22 and flick the starter switch and it will carry on straight past all on its own so you can see the exhaust gas temperature is rising as the fuel comes in the fuel flow is increasing and the n1 the turbofan speed is coming up as well now there's a gearbox basically between the gas turbine and the turbo fan so again the switch will flick to off all on its own so if we just wait for that to happen so it's just happened now now the engines are running we can actually switch over power generation to the engines so back on this crossfeed panel we can flick both switches down to the on position and you'll notice the apu is now lit up meaning it's basically off bus in other words it's there it's available but we're not using it anymore so for that very reason we can switch off the apu bleed now and we can actually switch off the auxiliary power unit so you'll see the the exhaust gas temperature of the apu will slowly drop then okay so the engines are running the apu is off hydraulic pumps to on so over here hydraulic pumps make sure they are all on so the hydraulic pumps provide the hydraulics for the control surfaces packs to auto so that's the cabin pressurization and heating system so this is going to provide warm air to the cabin because remember at altitude the temperature is going to be minus a significant number so it's freezing at high altitude so you want heat from the engines to be ducted into the passenger cabin you also want air pressure in the the passenger cabin because at high altitude the air is much thinner and everybody would not have enough oxygen to breathe so the engines are also used via the packs to compress air into the cabin taxi lights to on we're getting there so back in our normal position here we move the flaps to our takeoff position so we said five degree on the fmc didn't we for our takeoff which is a normal number for the 737 and you can see on the little dial here that reflects the yeah flaps are in transit so it means they're moving it takes them a while to get there if you've ever watched the wing of a big jet out of the window it takes a while for them to rearrange themselves so there we go flaps are now at five degrees next thing we do and again this is this usually happens during taxi remember we didn't bother with a pushback so what we can do we'll start taxiing towards the runway so we remove the parking brake and we will ease the throttle forwards and we should start rolling and we can see the ground is rolling so we're going to turn right immediately run over the guy with the trolley so now we're going out towards the runway we could go and turn the strobe lights on so if you remember looking overhead there's this strobe light we had it on steady earlier on we now put it onto strobing so it's flashing you don't do this when you're too near the terminals normally you would do it only when you get to the runway so we're doing it a little bit early because it could blind people it's a very very bright light okay so we're going to taxi out to the runway at this point you would review the master control panel again to confirm how you're going to to leave the airfield so for our purposes today we will go for vertical speed mode and we'll reprogram it to go to climb out at say two and a half thousand feet a minute we're going to use l nav just keep an eye on where we're going we're going to switch on the auto throttle as well but we'll do that as we come off the ground there are many many ways to fly a boeing 737 there are many ways to use these various controls there is no one correct way and different situations would demand different ways of using it so there is a toga option on throttle as a small button which goes straight for takeoff go around power setting we are not going to use it today we're just going to use the throttle because i want to illustrate something to you as we roll down the runway so you can see on the efist display here we've got a view in map view that reflects our flight plan and that can be controlled up here again another video for another day to go into detail about that okay so we're on the runway so we get straightened up let me go increase power and this is the reason i didn't want to show you toga straight away i'm going to push the throttles all the way to their stops look at the percentages if you hold the throttles on against their stops and leave them there you will destroy the engines you can run them above 100 so i'm pulling them back gently and we're waiting for the v speeds go so we rotate to a 15 degree climate typically okay so gear up we wait for three greens and then we can move the gear back to the center position on the way we can now go for autopilot and auto throttle and we can go for speed mode on the throttle so that's the this is the very manual way of doing things okay so now we have got the the lights have gone out on the undercarriage we can move that back to off otherwise the up position is basically charging the hydraulics the entire time and that's it we're on our way the auto throttle is taking care of air speed we are climbing towards our target altitude at a vertical speed we have set so from this point on we are managing climb out and cruise so that is our flight done also not our flight down but the beginning of the flight okay so i did some things differently than you normally would on purpose to show you facets of the aircraft but that's the basics that gets you into the air and we described quite a lot along the way quite quickly and we missed a lot out about safety checks so as i said at the start this is an entirely functional startup sequence yeah to get you through starting the plane up and to explain what does what and what relies on what okay so a few things to point out if you have discontinuities in your flight plan you won't be able to select illness so you have to complete your flight plan before lnav can be used otherwise there's not really much more to say today we've really covered everything i wanted to okay i'm gonna leave it there and we'll see you again very soon you

Channel: Jonathan Beckett

Views: 25,722

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Id: hwj9m9mdPzM

Length: 34min 24sec (2064 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022