DCS A-10C Tutorials - From 0 to HERO Ep1 - Start-up Procedure

hello my name is ralphie dude and this will be a series of tutorials for the 18c module in order to get you ready to fly her from zero to hero now these will not be your typical 30 second videos of just showing you the sequence of buttons on how to fire a weapon and move on instead these tutorials will be more in depth in order to give you a pretty darn good idea of why you're doing the things you're doing in today's lesson we'll be doing the startup procedure [Music] there is the cheating way of starting the aircraft if you'd like for the time being and that's if you press left windows plus home and this will auto start the aircraft for you but it will take a good six to eight minutes should you wish to start it yourself you can limit this down to just under four minutes first we're just going to go over all of the steps in depth and then we're going to go over the normal startup procedure and lastly i'm going to show you the fast ins procedure which will considerably lower the time the ins needs to spool up first things first controls everybody's going to have a different hotes system now depending on what you have you have a limited amount of buttons at your disposal the one thing that you need to know is that i'm using a thrustmaster warthog hotas and i'm also using a track ar5 so i don't need to waste any buttons on my hotes in order to look around and i have everything i need mapped out on my joystick now if i go to the control section of the a10c reel and i go down to the hotas section everything that i need is mapped out over here if you have any questions about anything i will say in the future you're going to need to reference this list and check what the keyboard shortcuts are if you are not able to map most of these functions and as you can see from this picture every single button that i have here is mapped and all of these buttons are what i use on a daily basis when i fly the a10 now as i said before because of the different amounts of hotel systems out there whatever you don't have mapped just make sure that you have this list up here and you have the keyboard shortcuts somewhere there is going to be a lot of hotes controls as we get going but for the time being we're not going to worry about that until later stages of the lessons if you wish to follow along you can always go to the instant action go to the a10c section and do the cold and dark start okie dokie so now that we're sitting in an aircraft we do have some weapons on board which is nice and we have fuel now this is very important and the reason is that since we're going to be using the apu start which is the auxiliary power unit we actually need fuel you see you have these two engines in the back of your aircraft and this is the powerhouse of the a-10 however you actually have a third mini-jet engine which is the apu which is located roughly around back here and because it is a jet engine it does require fuel so in the unlikely event that you get into a multiplayer server or maybe a campaign mission that starts you off with no fuel you will actually need to refuel your aircraft first before you're able to start the aircraft because the apu will need that fuel to start but since we have fuel over here where okie dokie to get going so the first thing we're going to do is hit our battery and our inverter switch as you can hear some systems have come to life however the battery is not enough to start the engines of this aircraft that's where the apu comes in so let's go ahead and kickstart the apu that's located behind this cover switch so i'm going to go ahead and enable our arming for the ejection switch you technically don't want to do this on the ground but it's dcs who cares and there we go we've started up the apu and now we're going to monitor the apu and wait until it reaches 100 [Music] perfect now that the apu has reached 100 we can go ahead and enable our apu generator switch now we're supplying power from the apu to the aircraft and at this point we have enough juice to start the rest of the systems in the aircraft before we turn on the engines of the aircraft we want to make sure that we start aligning the aircraft the ins alignment is extremely important for the a-10c without an ins alignment the a-10 doesn't know where it is in 3d space and if it doesn't know that it cannot do anything such as autopilot or weapons your navigation so what we want to do is start the ins alignment and the way we do that is by the cdu keyboard down here we have two switches the cdu and the egi and that's it the alignment process will start on its own as soon as the cdu does its own little bit test you have no further input in order to start the ins alignment so we're going to let that do its thing and we're going to go ahead and start our engines in order to do so we're gonna need to turn on the boost pumps for our wings and our main tanks and with that done we can kickstart the left engine to start the left engine we need to hit right alt and home and to kickstart the right engine we need to hit right control in home there you go we've now gone from off to idle now we can monitor the rpm gauges over here the critical rpm that you need to look out for is 30 to 35 rpm if you have an engine failure and i will show you an engine failure start it will typically sit at the 30 to 35 rpm and will not go any further at that stage you know that you have failed to start great our left engine has started and there are no problems let's go ahead and kick start our right engine we're doing the same thing we're just going to monitor the 30 rpm and it looks like we've gone past it so it looks like we're gonna have a successful start great both our engines are now started and we're good to start the rest of the aircraft now with the engines on what we don't need is the apu anymore sierra engines also act as generators and they can supply power to the aircraft should you lose one engine the other engine will actually be enough to supply power to the aircraft but right now we need to go ahead and hit the ac generators in order for that to work for the left and the right system the master caution warning is normal don't worry about that clear the mass precaution now we no longer need the apu running so i'm gonna go ahead and switch the apu off and hit the ap generator off good we're supplying our own power driven by the engines excellent now in order to start the rest of the aircraft it is easier to do a flow where you go from left to right later on as you get more proficient with starting the aircraft you're going to develop your own flow but for the time being it's nice idea to get a nice flow that way you don't miss any of the switches starting in the back we want to do is turn on our three radios our vhf am our uhf and our vhf fm this minimum radio will actually no longer be available once the new a10c update is there it is going to be replaced by a new radio system and we'll go over that in a future lesson and with that all three radios are now on next we have our pitch and yaw sas systems we're going to flip these on now these will only turn on after you have supplied engine power and you have hydraulics going the pitch and yaw sas systems you can think of it like a fly-by-wire system except it's not it essentially keeps your aircraft coordinated so that you don't need to use rudder pedals for instance in a turn so the pitch and yaw systems will actually help smooth out all of your actions in the a-10 next up we're going to go up to the panel up here and flip our cicu our jtrs and our iffcc switch in the actual in-game tutorials they want you to go into the test section and start a bit test up here however there are no bit test failures in the a10c in dcs so we can skip this it's not necessary unless you really want to we're going to flip it into the op position the cacu switch applies power to the central interface control unit which in turn provides data input to the mfcds and associated subsystems the jtrs is the joint tactical radio system which enables power to the data link system and the iffcc is your integrated flight and fire control computer which applies power to the iffcc and heads-up display next let's get our standby attitude indicator uncaged and we're gonna scroll mouse wheel over it and get it as level as possible then we're gonna put our anti-skid switch on which does exactly the same thing as the anti-skid on your vehicle and put our landing lights in the taxi mode let's also not forget to put our flaps in the down position and we have the flaps over here let's turn on our mfds we have the night and day for both the left and the right and now we're greeted by the dts upload page a couple of things to note about the dts upload page if you are going to start in the multiplayer server and you're probably not going to have weapons on board of your aircraft you're going to spawn in naked if you were to load dts upload right now by hitting load all you would load all of the information the a10 has but you would have nothing for the weapons and let's say you finish your startup procedure and then you start loading up your weapons you would have a small problem where in your dismiss your data storage management system will actually show your weapons as all red currently it will look something like this it recognizes there's something underneath the pylons but it doesn't know what it is and you would need to reload the dismiss big pain in the butt you don't want to do that so you would have to rearm and refuel before you press a dts upload since we already have our weapons on board and we're good to go i'm okay with pressing the load all you can do it on either the left or the right mfd it doesn't matter and notice that the little dots or asterisks will disappear as you do so while this happens in your loading you will not be able to press the nose wheel steering button to engage nose wheel steering i'm not quite sure why this happens but you're going to need to wait until the loading has stopped it will be indicated by the dots reappearing there you go everything is loaded and as you can see our dismiss page now shows all of the weapons on board and we're good to go now the reason why we do the dts upload is when the pilot comes into the a10 he has something like an ssd disk that he pops in and it contains all of the information and data that the a10 needs and you need to upload it into the a10 we're going to go over the functions of the mfds at a later stage next let's flow over to the right now i don't want to keep leaning over to the right side and to take a look at the cdu so what i'm going to do is i'm going to repeat the cpu on my right mfd it's a little easier to see and you have a cdu option in the right mfd now everything that's here is copied over here so here's the thing about the ins we are now ins nav ready the self alignment has completed and you know this because it's flashing with the ins nav ready and our time has now shown 4.0 0.8 it is only at this stage after it has completed this ins alignment where we can now hit the navigation menu and only then are we able to go hoya and enable our egi by default it will be in horrors which is a legacy system that the a10 no longer really uses should you lose your alignment the eggie goes offline this will disappear and it will revert back to the horrors but we don't use haar's we're not interested what we really want is the egi that's the new and updated fun section of navigating and it's only then that you will be able to enable these two switches your eac and your radar altimeter let's go over that one more time you will not be able to press nav until after the ins is ready and aligned and after it's aligned you press nav only then will you be able to select egi and only after you've selected egi will you be able to hit the eac switch and radar altimeter switch that is the flow here and that is the main section where most people get this wrong for some reason so pay attention next let's keep flowing to the right we have our ew panel which corresponds to our radio warning receiver we want to set this to at least the semi mode and we want to flip the switches up to armit the mws system for the missile warning system your jammer your radar warning receiver and your display and you can see that the rwr is now functioning and the panel is up and working moving on to the right what we want to do is also get our oxygen on you will not run out of oxygen however should you deprive yourself of any oxygen this will have an effect for you in flight this will occur at 12 500 feet or higher at prolonged periods of high altitude flying what you will notice is that you're actually going to start suffering from hypoxia this will lead to you having a grainy blurry image starting to settle in until you start to black out if this ever happens to you in high altitudes you know you have forgotten to set the oxygen what you immediately need to do in that situation is look to the right go to your oxygen and turn this green switch into the on position and you can also switch from normal oxygen to 100 oxygen which will almost immediately get rid of hypoxia for you once your vision has returned you can go back to normal oxygen and you're good to go but you'll never be in that situation because you'll never forget to turn this on right right so right now i'm experiencing hypoxia everything else still seems to be okay but if i keep progressing like this without turning my oxygen on i'm going to start losing consciousness and i should start seeing the effects the edge of my screen the edge of the screen is now getting blurry at this stage the heads-up display has become completely unreadable and the edges of the screen have gotten much worse as you can see the longer you prolong this the worse it's going to get obviously you wouldn't wait this long to do something about this hypoxia situation so let's go ahead and fix it i'm going to enable oxygen first i'm going to put 100 oxygen next and just like that everything's back to normal then let's go over to the pito heat pitot heat should be on always don't worry about it even if you're in the sahara desert and it's 152 degrees turn the pedo heat on you will not overheat it in dcs real life operations may differ but this has a huge effect on what will happen to you should your pitot tube freeze and your pitot tube is located on the right side of your wing and it is this shank device looking thing and it is responsible for giving you speed indications but should it freeze over the remedy is simply to turn the pedo heat on next let's move our steer point switch from mission to flight plan the reason why we do this is if we head on over to the tad which is our tactical aided display basically our map as you can see there are some waypoints or steer points in the inside here it's kind of clogged up and difficult to see but i currently don't really have any steer points there's no flight plan and that's because we have mission selected so if i wanted to see the lines going from steer point to steer point to steer point i need to switch this to flight plan and now you will see that my steer points are now active additionally if you take off and you come back down and you land what you'll see is that the 810 goes through as little self-alignment process the master warning will go off for a second and your tad will go back to having no lines for your steer points in order to fix that all you have to do is rock the steer point switch back and forth into flight plan and your steer points will reappear with the lines through it and that is pretty much about it you have your exterior light settings here and your interior lights so you can set them as desired let's go ahead and close our canopy [Music] and make sure that it is closed and the light turns off here and lastly let's just turn on our nose wheel steering great now that nose wheel steering is on we can simply throttle up and taxi and we can confirm that we have done everything because there are no more lights lighting up in the warning section if there is something lighting up you've forgotten something okie dokie let's look at an example of something that happens once in a blue moon and that is an engine start failure there are many reasons why this may happen the number one reason is a bug the number two reason is the boost and main fuel tank pumps should you forget to turn these on you're going to be in a little bit of trouble and the third reason would be if there are high winds and your aircraft is not facing directly into the wind there are known issues where the aircraft will not be able to start up its engine if let's say winds are coming from behind this way this i think is pretty much a non-issue these days but once in a blue moon it does crop up if you do everything i've taught you here and your engine still doesn't restart the only other thing you should do is pick another slot for your a10 if you're on a multiplayer server where it has a different position for the aircraft where it spawns and you should be able to start your aircraft just fine so what would happen if during the startup procedure you got to the point where you're ready to start your engines but you have failed to turn on your boost pumps well the thing is going to happen is that you're actually going to be able to kick start one engine now we're going to monitor the rpms and it's gone over the 35 mark so it looks like we have a nice good start so as you're doing this everything will seem like it's normal great and now you're gonna go to kickstart the second engine and uh-oh we have a problem you see the rpm is now hanging around the 30 mark and it is not going forward and the reason why is because well you've forgotten to turn the boost fuel pumps so you go all right let's just turn the engine off in order to turn the engines off for the left engine it would be right alt plus end and for the right engine would be right control plus end so let's shut this off let's kickstarter boost bumps but you might not be able to re-light the engine should you move it from the off to idle position and the reason is that you have just flooded the chamber and the engine with fuel so what you need to do now is purge the engine of that fuel using the motor so if i lean over to the left here and move the right engine from normal to motor it will move the motor roughly to the 30 rpm gauge and now you need to monitor this for 30 seconds [Music] okay that should be good enough let's kick start the engine now and it already looks like we've gone past a 30 rpm and it looks like we're gonna have a nice and successful lighting of the engine perfect both our engines are started and you can now continue with your startup procedure one other thing to note in order to restart the engines in flight you will need to use a different process and should you take battle damage where you take fire and it takes out one of your engines you cannot restart the engine it may run at a reduced rpm it may go all the way down to idle or it may just turn off or it may be on fire if it takes any battle damage there is literally nothing you can do to get that engine back running you will need to land and repair the only times that you can really do an in-flight emergency restart of the engines is if they for some reason flamed out and the only way i know that that happens is if you starve the engines of fuel what you have to understand is that the engines are gravity fuel fed so as long as you have at least one g going through the aircraft you are supplying the engines with fuel however should you go into a zero g attitude you will only have 10 seconds of fuel remaining before the engine shuts down and if you go negative you'll probably have even less this doesn't really happen frequently and i don't think you'll ever run into it but it's something to note do not have excessive zero or negative gs in the aircraft or you will starve the engines of fuel and you will have to do an in-air restart okey-dokey so up to this point we have learned how to start the aircraft using the ins procedure where itself aligns but it takes roughly four minutes and after this you're gonna see my flow of how i start the aircraft and i can get everything going in pretty much two minutes or less thankfully there is a fast alignment option available to us it's not a full alignment but it's a full enough alignment if that makes any sense we do not experience any ins drift in the a10c there are some other modules that do experience ins drift but we don't and because of that we can go ahead and use this fast alignment in order to reduce our time and have a partial alignment that does not affect our navigation or weapons at all but it allows us to get going much quicker and this is how we're going to do so i've started up my battery inverter and my apus apu generator is on and now i'm going to go ahead and turn on my cdu and egi now we're gonna need to wait until the cdu does its whole bit test thing and during this whole time you can obviously go around and turn some other systems on while this thing does its thing but you're gonna need to pay attention because if you're not fast enough to do this it will just enable its normal alignment system and then you're not gonna have the option to do a fast alignment all right we're gonna go to the ins we're gonna go to the alternate alignment and we're going to use the fast alignment and now it is going to spend only about 1.7 minutes in order to do the alignment okie dokie and that's it we're done now we can hit nav and we'll be able to hit egi and get going with the eac and you'll be good to go okie dokie so now it's time to show you how i start the aircraft from start to finish with the fast alignment process you'll see that it takes me roughly around 2 minutes and we're still gonna have to wait for the ins alignment but it's better than waiting for the entire four minutes let's get started so [Music] okay should be right around there that's it we're ready to taxi i'll see you guys in the next lesson what we're gonna cover taxing taking off and landing in the a-10 see you next time [Music] you

Channel: ralfidude

Views: 43,894

Rating: 4.9765706 out of 5

Keywords: ralfidude, ralfi's, alley, dcs, fc3, digital, combat, simulation, flaming, cliffs, battlefield, bf, flight, sim, f-15c, eagle, f-16, viper, a-10C, a10c, a10, a-10, tutorial, training

Id: a2mtbTYjClA

Length: 27min 41sec (1661 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020