Cirrus Perspective - Flight Director vs. Autopilot

hey everybody this is a tutorial on how to use the flight director the basic modes a lot of people think that the autopilot is deals with a lot of these different issues and all that but one of the things I think that's important understanding the autopilot and the flight director system is by looking at a couple different things one when we actually make an input on the autopilot guidance panel the center Council we return the autopilot on go into heading mode nav mode something like that we would we really want to start to think about that we're actually controlling the flight director and the autopilot is following the flight director so that's one big key difference is that the flight directors are pink Chevron's here and the autopilot will follow wherever the pink Chevron's go so the best way to do this then under make some understanding is by actually doing some hand flying and turning the flight director off actually seeing what's going on so I'm going to go ahead and turn the autopilot off and I'm going to reference this area up here is the scoreboard it's really important to understand what your scoreboard reads right now it says GPS ap alt 6500 B path this is a lot of great stuff but we can understand exactly where the airplane is going where the flight director is taking the autopilot or trying to take us when we're hand flying so understanding this is going to be incredibly important the best part about this is that it's also a universal Universal nomenclature so if you were to go into a 747 and go up front and to get accurate cockpit crossing Atlantic you'd be able to go look in the same spot on the PFD and see GPS ap alt 6500 probably give you 36,000 feet something like that so the sooner you understand this you'll be able to understand every our board every every you know now I know how to operate a lot of different auto pilots so it's this is not just Garmin or Cirrus Pacific this is standard across all a lot of different avionics paths so I'm gonna go ahead and turn off the autopilot there we go now I'm hand flying the airplane cool this is great I'm going to reference this guy over here is the bullseye this is basically a flight path angle you'll be able to see that we have a tailwind or excuse me a headwind and a crosswind that's pushing us this way so the tip of the yellow Chevron represents our nose of the aircraft but the wind is pushing us and we're actually kind of crabbing or flying it at an angle across the ground that's what our bull's eye is so I'm going to go ahead we're here at 6,500 feet I'm going to go ahead and turn on a couple different things to switch fuel tanks fuel pumps on that's good fuel pumps off great all right cool so my autopilot or flight guidance panel on the center console I'm going to hit the FD button look what happens we're in role in pit mode with alt s whenever we turn on the F hit the flight director button on the guidance panel the center console the flight director the pink Chevron's pop up and it just takes a picture of whatever pitch attitude we're at and it's going to try to hold that so right now we're in roll mode and pitch mode and it's going to try what here in white means altitude select so as soon as we get down to 1700 feet the flight director is going to try to hold us at 1700 feet but we're going to ignore that for the time being so if I were in a pickup climb like this and I were to hit flight director the FD button look at that my carts are pulling up so wherever I hit the button it tries to take a picture of where we're at and it's going to try to hold us on that until we tell to do something different so that's pretty cool I'm going to go ahead and hit the FD button with an autopilot disconnect button to cancel out the flight director again all right so I'm going to bring us back on course a little bit and we're going to try what I call some of the basic modes so we're going to be in heading mode so the first thing I'm going to do is pick up my heading bug by pushing with the heading knob in our guidance panel in surinam so we're at zero two zero zero two three heading if I hit heading on our flight director or our guidance panel now look at our scoreboard it's telling us to maintain our desired selected heading which was zero to three it's going to take whatever picture we haven't given a pitch input either climb or descend at a vertical speed or anything like that and it's going to try to hold us another zero two three so if I start turning to the left the flight director is going to start commanding me to turn to the right and we're in heading mode so if I go wings level here you can see the flight director is trying to turn command me to a right-hand turn back to our selected heading of zero two three so I'll come back here I'm going to try to follow the flight director and it's starting to level me out and it's going to try to hold me on a heading of zero to three so that's kind of nice so let's say air traffic control said turn left two heading three three zero I'm going to select the knob first wait for the command of the flight director to turn us and then I'm going to follow it to the left now in this left-hand turn I'm going to I'm controlling the yellow which is basically me hand flying and I'm just trying to tuck the yellow Chevron's in right underneath the flight director there goes getting close to my heading the flight director is commanding a roll out which is great and it's going to try to hold me on heading three three zero I overshot a little bit so it's going to turn me back to the right now if air traffic control tells me to turn to heading three six zero well we'll go ahead and twist it's a360 watch the flight director command a heading to the rights we're heading mode and it's going to roll me off on heading three six zero great now here's another thing let's say air-traffic control says now this fly heading three six zero descend and maintain 6,000 feet so what I'm going to do here is select 6,000 feet in our altitude select and now on my guidance panel I like to descend in vertical speed mode so right now I'm going to hit vertical speed now our scoreboard reads vertical speed zero feet per minute it's the blue target right here on the vertical speed indicator the flight director is going to try to hold me in a vertical speed mode of zero so it's basically level flight so I want to actually descend so I'm going to take the wheel on the guidance panel and I get a pitch down to 500 feet per minute you can see that the flight director is trying to have me pitch forward to command at descent so I'm going to take a little power out it's for 500 off leave in six before and tuck the flight director check the yellow Chevron's and hand flying right underneath the paint Chevron's this is going to be in vertical speed five hundred feet per minute until we get to 6,000 feet which is alt s altitude selected which is six thousand feet take a little bit more power out here now if air traffic control said turn right heading 0 9 0 I can turn right to zero nine zero here flight director's commanding a descending turn to the right and now we're tucked right underneath we're looking really good this is Rolle need a heading zero nine zero try to keep me on heading zero nine zero and once I get close to 6,000 feet 205 we're going to hear a little chime and the next thing I'm going to be looking for is alts to kick out vertical speed go green overshot it just a little bit [Music] there's the chime I'm 200 feet our selected altitude is starting to flash I should start to see when I get within 50 feet or so depending on my descent rate alts kick out vertical speed this will go green and then you'll start to see alt 600 or 6000 excuse me all right any second now alt now is highlighted meaning it's an altitude hold mode of 6,000 feet the flight director is going to command a level off in order to try to maintain 6,000 feet in heading zero nine zero now let's say air traffic control said climb maintain 6500 I can go ahead now and select 6500 in my altitude window by choosing the altitude select knob and I want to climb at 120 knots so I'm going to go into an indicated airspeed climb I always climb an indicated airspeed and descend in vertical speed so I'm going to go ahead hit IAS or an indicated airspeed mode and it's going to try to climb us at 146 knots so that's what when we press the button we were at 146 knots but I want to actually slow down pitch for 120 knots and you'll start to see the flight directors trying to addition have me initiate a client so I slowed down to 120 knots I just keep following the flight director see how it's trying to slow me down to 120 knots right now but it's also causing me to climb I like to climb in an IAS because it prevents me from stalling if the autopilot on which is really great so I'm going to come up here honest 200 to go you'll hear a chime when this reads 60 300 200 feet from our selected altitude alts altitude select is in white meaning that's a standby that's the armed mode and then should go that's the thing it's way to do you do next so when we get too close to 6500 feet altitude select and hold it's 6500 feet is going to come on flight directors pitching me down commanding it to to lower the nose to keep the bull's eye right the wings of the bullseye going right through this white line let's just the horizon basically keeps us nice cool what I want to try to do is actually trim this hand fly and I can trim so that the the yellow Chevron's with very little effort hand flying actually they are in here so let's say our chaff control one more time set fly heading 1 8 0 2-centimeter n-- 2 right 2 1 8 0 and then 6 set 6000 first I'm going to go into heading mode which we're already in and vertical speed down 500 feet now I'm going to set make sure the flight director set heading vertical speed down 600 feet per minute altitude select is standing by I'm making my turn down this is really great start bringing this down a little bit power powers coming back down flight directors commanding a rollout and we're 200 feet within our select altitude 6,000 feet so we should be able to capture this here just just a second now I'm hand flying all this and I'm commanding using the button ology on the guidance panel reading my scoreboard and I can basically tell you exactly what the airplane are the flight directors trying so understanding and reading this up here is really really important for really getting good understanding where the autopilots taking you or what your autopilot or flight director is going to command you to do next so flying an approach or whatnot is really important cool so let's say here I'm going to fly heading two seven zero at the moment we're going to turn heading two seven zero follow this and now I'm going to go direct to the Kankakee vor so I'm going to hop go over to my flight plan go direct to Kankakee air traffic control let's say sighs proceed direct to Kankakee vor I can go ahead go direct to enter enter our needle starts to turn and I've been heading mode so this is going to roll me over in heading mode but it's not going to follow our GPS course right here so what I have to do is go on the guidance panel hit nav and that's going to go into selected GPS mode and now you can see the flight director is going to try to line me up and keep this pink Center needle completely squared up and it's going to put the green bull's eye through the center of these boxes to keep us on course they'll automatically sequence us to our next position as we go our next fix in our play plan which is pretty cool right so let's say I get pulled off my course and air-traffic-control says for traffic fly heading two seven zero so I'm going to go onto heading two seven zero start following that and I'm going to come out here for a little bit now what another cool feature is that we can do like if air traffic control ever says fly heading two seven zero and intercept the final approach course or fly heading two seven zero and intercept victor victor airway or something like that we can set up our flight director to to follow those those cues rather than us just kind of flying and then going hitting direct to or something like that so let's say air traffic control says fly heading zero nine zero we're going to intercept our previously selected course so I'm going to turn to zero nine zero intercept so I'm going to go ahead and hit nav so heading it's going to auto paw are the flight directors going to turn me to heading zero nine zero and then we're going to have when I get to my course our needle here GPS is going to kick out go active and then the flight director is going to follow our course from here on out so we'll see that here in just a second now I've been hand flying this entire time controlling the flight director and getting it to do what I want the cool thing is all I have to do let me turn to zero three zero and get a better intercept angle here as I get closer to our course our needles coming here I should see GPS kick out or kick heading out and it'll start to follow us there a little bit better job of holding my altitude there we go good now we're just standing by there's GPS kicked on flight directors commanding a turn to the left now it's intercepting and it's it's goal is now to put this green bullseye right through the center of the boxes follow the flight director just a turn there we go that looks great cool now the cool thing is I've been hand flying this entire time if I want to actually make progress give myself and a break I can hit a pee on the auto pot or the guidance panel the center council and now ap comes on and the auto pilots following exactly what's a program in the flight director vertical track cool thing is previously for another video we'll set up our we set up our vertical nab some pretty cool so I just armed vertical path on on our guidance panel see vertical path is set up and when this little glide slope carrot comes down and hits in centers a vertical path will actually initiate a descent for us and start bringing us the autopilot will bring us down we have different altitudes and a couple different fixes along a route that we're trying to hit and bring us down to traffic pattern altitude so the cool thing is I could turn the autopilot off by hitting the ap button leave someone leaves them mmm leaves the flight director up and all I now I'm just hand flying following the flight director just cool there goes a vertical path I could take a little power out now to start my descent and to hit the different fixes that we have programmed in at our different altitudes and they're so right now that's enough for for the moment but you turn the autopilot back off and sign off this is al from simple flight see you later

Channel: Al Waterloo

Views: 14,125

Rating: 4.9854546 out of 5

Keywords: Cirrus Aircraft, Garmin, G1000, Cirrus Perspective, Avionics, cirrus vision jet, cessna, flight training, piper, learning to fly, flight, sr20, sr22, sr22T

Id: TaT-39kGfik

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 07 2020