Ep. 57: Airplane Instruments | Gauges | Dials | All Explained

hey guys what's up John from fly Mike alpha comm and I'm here today to walk you through the instrument panel on our piper warrior here so every single button and switch what it does how it affects us when it's connected to we're going to go ahead and name every single thing here [Music] [Applause] [Music] so for sirs we've got our clock our clock runs off of 12 volt DC power so it's just running off the battery and it's not gonna run the battery down I mean no take you years and years 40 that's using very little electricity the battery will go battle and so on long before that happens so just directly connect the battery keeps running 24/7 even with the master switch off so it's not connected to one of the buses that's connected directly to the battery next is our airspeed indicator it of course indicates our airspeed it works off of the pitot tube and the static port so air pressure comes in through the lines through the pitot tube presses on a little wafer inside there and then it measures the differential pressure between that and the static port and indicates your airspeed so it's just purely off of air flow to the pitot tube not electric not powered by anything it will work with the master switch off it'll work just by blowing into the pitot tube not that you want to do that so prior to start the instrument but just with airflow or air pressure against the pitot tube that will start to indicate a airspeed next instrument is our attitude indicator is a gyro suite we've got a spinning gyro inside there in this vacuum power so if you lose vacuum then you're going to lose this instrument its vacuum powered off of an engine-driven vacuum pump therefore it's only going to have vacuum when the engines running not master switch it's an engine-driven vacuum pump on this airplane in many small airplanes next altimeter altimeter works just off the static port that's the only thing not electric or hydraulic or anything like that it's purely based off the static port so just the air pressure the ambient air pressure is going to come through the stack port through a static line to the altimeter and indicate and altitude to us next we've got to view ours here with the view ours have these OBS knobs and we won't go too much in depth into the vor s but they are electric they are connected to your nav radios and that is powered off your master and your avionics switches down here vertical speed so vertical speed is purely off of your static port and it's just basically a calibrated leak so as the ambient air pressure is changing a what rate of changes then indicates the vertical speed in how many feet per minute you are climbing or descending we've got our DG that is another gyro instrument and is powered off of the engine driven vacuum pump so it's getting the vacuum pressure to spin the gyro or vacuum suction rather from the engine driven vacuum pump it vacuum pump fails that's gonna just basically freeze in place and not turn at all next over here we have an engine analyzer pretty cool tells us our egt and CHT and we'll also show you how that works with all the wires but basically it's just telling you the four EG T's and the four CH T's on the engine it's powered electrically so it comes on with our master switch being turned on so we can see here under the engine cowling where we have these wires running through all these yellow wires that's our engine analyzer and they're coming down here and coming to these little probes that are actually inside of the exhaust pipes so they've actually screwed a hole through the exhaust sealed it off again and then with a hose clamp attached that little probe to each individual exhaust pipe so you're getting egt from each exhaust from each cylinder they also have probes for the ch T's and you can see they're a little further back there right in here without burning myself hopefully that is our CH T probe so it's directly into the cylinder head to get your cylinder head temperature for each cylinder on the engine we can see the other one back there behind the spark plug and behind the intake we've got our turn coordinator over here that is a gyro instrument but it is electric so it comes on with the master switch and that is a backup function basically it's not powered with vacuum suction because they want you to have some sort of arrangement still working to indicate whether your level or if you're in a turn if you're to lose your engine driven vacuum pump and lose your other two tie our instruments so if you lose your engineer Maggie pump these two fail but this one should still work as long as you have electrical power coming down here we have our LT control panel so we can either turn it on or reset it or if you want to turn it on but without using this then you just have to land really really hard also known as a crash that will also activate the ELT and you should see a little red light come on when that ELT gets activated provide that you don't actually sever the cable going from the LT in the tail up to this little red light in that thing that we call a crash little further down there we have an old egt that's just a single place egt and we'll talk about that when we look underneath the cowling but so having four wires going to four different exhaust pipes that was just a single wire going to one exhaust pipe just to give you a rough idea what the egt was on the engine really just in this one that we use for leaning down here we have a switch for electric pitch trim so we actually have trim that is on the control yoke and we can turn that on and off of that switch there we'd start to run away on us or something like that we could quick reach down there and turn it off just stop the electric trim from not trimming the airplane in a way we didn't want it to we have our bank switch down here off right left both and start we all know how that works and we'll look at the wires going to the mags when we look underneath the cowling there tachometer it works off a spinning cable that comes through from the actual engine all the way through the firewall to this instrument so as the engine turns it then turns the inside of this instrument with a little magnet inside and it indicates our engine rpm to us as well as keeping track of our total time airframe it's important to note that if you fly the airplane say at 2500 rpm for one hour this will then indicate that you flew for one hour but if you have the airplane run at say half that at 1,250 rpm for an hour it's gonna indicate half of an hour so it's actually indicating time as a percentage of rpm with the theory being that higher rpms mean more wear and tear in the engine so your maintenance is based off tack time so your 100 hour and things like that your total time on the engine we see 4000 hours on an engine well that's about 4000 hours and the clock that's probably 4,500 hours or 5000 hours on the clock because for some of that time it was running less than the designated crews setting coming up here we have fuel gauges while fuel gauges are electric we have little law float sensors in our tanks and so we have a left in a right fuel gauge we have oil pressure and we have fuel pressure these gauges here are actually powered off of lines that come from through the firewall from the engine so we actually have oil flowing to this gauge here we have fuel flowing to this gauge here if you were to disconnect those lines or break those lines underneath the cowling or underneath the instrument panel here you would have fuel or oil leaking on your feet over here we have our primer the primer just sucks in a little bit of fuel and squirts it directly into the intake to help the engine start now if we take a look at the other side of the engine here we'll see where our fuel line runs from the carburetor so we have the carburetor down there at the bottom of the engine and we have this orange fuel line here coming off and teed off of this fuel line we have this copper pipe and that pipe runs through will follow it with my finger here right along here along the firewall back behind the brake reservoir and eventually through the firewall to our fuel pressure gauge so we actually have AB gas in the cockpit with us this skinny little line here coming off of the fuel system is actually going to your primer so that goes into the cockpit so then you can pump fuel from inside the cockpit with the primer it comes back out and goes directly into the intake side so we can see where our skinny little copper water pipe comes back up here where we shoot fuel directly into the intake side sar intake pipe there for that particular cylinder so we're putting fuel directly to the cylinders to help us start easier so we have a primer on that cylinder and also I've won over on that cylinder it looks like they're on all four cylinders in this engine some engines only have the primer on one or two cylinders that's why it's harder to get a start or easier to float them where you have some cylinders with vom and others without fuel initially we have our throttle we have our mixture control and we have carburetor heat over here on the side this lever here adjusts the friction in our throttle here we can turn on our nav lights or dim them we can control the brightness of our panel lights we have pitot heat which is electronic it electrically heats the pitot tube we have our anti-collision light Electric we have our landing light also electric of course in our fuel pump that is electric so we have an engine Durham fuel pump plus we have this electric fuel pump we run four critical phases of flight like takeoff and landing as a redundant backup then of course our master switch split between alternator and battery so we turn on the left half we get our battery we turn on it energizes the alternator but we obviously aren't running the engine right now so I can get any power off that up here we have a few lights these are warning lights they're powered electronically and we can test them if they weren't on we could press to test them with that little press test switch just to make sure that they're in fact not burnt out and they're simply just sensing low vacuum pressure low voltage alternator or low oil pressure here we have our comm panel so you could select a transmit/receive com1 or com2 or external as we turn that switch we could select where we want to hear com1 on the speaker or we could hear it through our headset com2 so we could flip this down to phone there we could monitor com2 oh we're still transmitting and receiving on com1 we have nav 1 & 2 we could listen to those to positively identify things like the vor stations and hear that through our headset or we could flip them up and we'd hear through the speaker and so on with your ATF DME and markers we have our radios and those are of course powered electronically and we have our transponder down here which there's a little bit more than meets the eye to the transponder we have course you can type in our code and then there's also it's tied into our static system so it knows our ambient pressure so I can report mode see our altitude our pressure altitude - air traffic control and there's also an altitude encoder that actually runs to the static system and it's a separate little box behind the panel we can't see it from here so there's another part to this transponder that can go bad and that could be malfunctioning so may not be this box specifically that's malfunctioning if it's giving a bad altitude ATC it's maybe that little out student coder box and of course we have the ident button there we could have an off standby mode to keep to start warming it up on just to show ATC the code or alt to show you see the code plus the altitude we're at over here we have our intercom so we can change the squelch so when it'll start picking apart voices and volume and then our on/off switch we have a very old-school GPS our nav unit here followed by another very old-school GPS where I can talk too much about those just that they're electronic because they vary so much between different airplanes of course we have our dreaded Hobbs meter that's controlled when we turn on our master switch it provides power and then we have an oil pressure switch that closes the circuit and then supplies electricity to start running that clock and that clock is a normal clock so one hour of time with the engine on at any rpm reads one hour on here compared to the tach where it runs as a percentage we have our suction instrument that's just a direct line a vacuum line going right to the vacuum lines t din with your vacuum instruments like your attitude indicator and your DG down there to indicate how much suction that I came home putting out and to make sure that it's adequate to actually spend those Darrow's fast enough we have a 12 volt cigarette lighter and we have cabin heat and defrost so we could start to heat the cabin with airflow at our feet or we could turn on the defrost to blow some moisture or fog off the windshield down here we have all of our circuit breakers so we've got a switch for our strobe lights we've got all the circuit breakers that of course they were to blow they would pop out and then we could reset it they typically say to blows in flight to reset once and then to leave alone after that you don't want to continuously be resetting them because you'll probably end up causing electrical fire it's probably tripping constantly because there's some sort of short you need to let it blow or pop out to cut off electricity to the faulty component and lastly over here we have our ant meter so the ant meters are syndicating if we're charging or not once we start the engine and we have both parts the master switch on then we should go ahead and see a charge here when the engine is running if we don't see a positive indication here and that's indicative of the alternator not working along with probably getting that alt light to warn us of low voltage and thanks so much for watching guys if you have any questions on this at all leave them in the comments box below we'd be more than happy to answer them for you make sure you check out our patreon page we greatly appreciate all the support you guys give us like and subscribe to our YouTube channel so give us a thumbs up here subscribe to our channel keep a lot our latest episodes as I come out each week if you have more questions about Private Pilot things check out our free online ground school at flight Mike alpha comm lots of other online courses there are two besides just the private pyle one all sorts of courses for all sorts of pilots as always guys if you cannot fly Rene then fly a Mike alpha comm we'll see y'all next time [Music]

Channel: FLY8MA.com Flight Training

Views: 91,367

Keywords: Flight, Training, fly8ma.com, fly8ma, online, ground, school, private, pilot, license, ground school, fly 8ma, aircraft, aviation, piper, landing, cessna, airport, how to, flight, vlog, airplane, flying, plane, checkride, ifr, vfr, fly, ATC, Audio, m0a, mzeroa, mraviation101, steveo1kinevo, chops, friendly skies film, friendlyskiesfilm, und, aerospace, erau, instruments, instrument, panel, gauges, dial, gauge, explained, all, 57, airforceproud95

Id: fmTsLe8J8QQ

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2017