Flight Simulator Lesson 1: Flight Instruments (NEWLY REDONE!)

hi this is Matt with flight trajectory comm in this lesson I'm going to walk you through the six basic flight instruments and how those work and how we use them to fly the aircraft so just above the yoke are the six primary flight instruments the first one that we're going to talk about is the airspeed indicator the airspeed indicator is pretty straight forward but the biggest thing that you need to understand is that it reads our air speed in knots well what is a naught a naught is simply one nautical mile per hour whereas your normal car speedometer just shows you statute miles per hour so the difference between a normal mile or statute mile versus a nautical mile is that a nautical mile is six thousand and seventy six feet long instead of the standard 5,280 feet so one knot is approximately 15% faster than one mile per hour now again as the name implies airspeed is simply our speed through the air so for fighting a headwind I could have an airspeed of a hundred knots but I could only be moving across the ground it's a 50 or 60 knots just because of fighting a headwind or a tailwind if it's a tailwind I could be doing 100 knots and have a ground speed of 120 140 just depending on what the actual wind speed is but in either case whatever reads out on the airspeed indicator is my actual speed through the air mass that I'm flying through at that given moment moving on to the attitude indicator this is arguably one of the most important instruments that we have in the airplane especially once we get into instrument flying which is flying in the clouds but even for VFR flying this is a very important instrument so the attitude indicator gives us a direct indication of our pitch in our bank so looking at the middle of the instrument you see the miniature airplane here sitting in the center so I have two little orange wings and a little dot in the center basically telling me where the nose of the airplane is now as I start pitching up I have graded lines I have a 10 degree line a 20 degree line and then little white ticks in the middle so it'd be 5 degrees 10 degrees 15 20 25 that's my degrees of pitch up and then conversely my degrees have pitched down here shown below it in the brown blue is the sky brown as the dirt try and keep the sky above the dirt okay on the top of the attitude indicator I have my bank markings each tick is 10 degrees up until this bigger tick which is a 30 degree mark and then we skip all the way to the next big tick which is 60 degrees of bank typically the most that we're ever gonna want to bank during normal flying is about 30 degrees don't you don't need anything more than 30 the only time you'll use more than 30 s when you're practicing certain maneuvers like steep turns where you'll go to a 45 or 50 degree Bank if you see yourself banked over here at sixty degrees you need to level the wings and get back to straight and level flight because you're probably doing something wrong now below the attitude indicator there is this little knob you can make fine-tune adjustments basically when you're sitting on the ground you want to adjust the miniature airplane so that it's sitting with the nose right on this little white horizon line but you can trim that up and fly it if it seems like it's a little off we would more or less want to trim it so that when I'm when I have my aircraft on the horizon that I'm not climbing or descending okay moving on now to the altimeter which is also a very crucial instrument because we need to know how high roof line there's three hands on this one of them is this triangle here with the little line that's my 10,000 foot pointer the hand here the fatter hand is the thousand foot pointer and the skinny needle is going to be my hundred foot pointer so this just reads just like a clock so my 10,000 foot pointer is just above zero but below one so I know I'm not above 10,000 feet next my thousand pointer shows me between zero and one and my hundred foot pointer shows me at 650 feet so each tick is going to be 20 feet on the hundred foot pointer so as I said we're at six hundred and fifty feet right now now that is height above sea level so we always want to have our altimeter reading height above sea level because the height above the ground is going to vary and what I mean by that is that ground level actually varies the the elevation in Chicago is not the same as the elevation in Denver so we always have our altimeter calibrated to tell us height above sea level now this little knob here at the bottom that's how we actually adjust the altimeter for more information on this watch lesson seven on how to correctly set your altimeter in the bottom left we have the turn coordinator now there's actually two parts to the turn coordinator there's the miniature airplane here in the center and then just below that there's this ball so how this works is the turn coordinator tells us our rate of turn okay so the difference between the turn coordinator and the attitude indicator is that the attitude indicator tells us our degrees of bank but it doesn't necessarily tell us how quickly returning so the turn coordinator here as you start to roll into a bank this miniature airplane and the turn coordinator will also start turning now once the wingtip reaches one of these ticks either a left turn or a right turn that's telling us it's a standard rate turn and see here this indication says two minutes that's how long it's going to take you to turn 360 degrees using a standard rate turn so that breaks down to three degrees per second is your standard rate turn so to turn a full 360 would take you two minutes to turn 180 degrees would take you one minute to turn 90 degrees would take you 30 seconds again this is not necessarily related to your bank because the rate of turn is affected by air speed as well for instance if I was flying around it's a 50 or 55 knots about a 10 degree Bank is all that I'm going to need to give me a standard rate turn where as if I'm doing my normal cruise speed of about a hundred and ten knots it's gonna take me closer to thirty degrees of Bank before I get my standard rate turn that I need the second part of the turn coordinator is this ball underneath of the miniature airplane now all it is is a little ball in a tube of fluid and what it does is sense centrifugal force now think about a car going around a corner as you go around the corner in a car you feel a force pulling you to the outside of the turn now this ball is gonna do the same thing if we felt a g-force pulling to the outside of the turn the ball is just gonna swing in the direction that force is being felt now because in airplane we actually Bank the plane while we're turning that ball should not swing out from Center meaning that when you're banking the airplane to turn to the right you feel extra weight in the seat of your pants as a g-force but you don't actually feel it pulling you to one side or to the other and that's how we know when the turn is actually coordinated so as you're flying along if you see the ball come on either side of the black line a little bit to the right or a little bit to the left what you're supposed to do is step on the ball so if you have rudder pedals you're gonna push the pedal of where the ball is so if the ball is hanging off to the left you're going to push the left rudder pedal if the ball is on the right you're gonna push the right rudder pedal now on your joystick if you're just using a joystick it'll be the twist grip of your joystick that will coordinate the turn okay moving on to the heading indicator here in the center my heading indicator just simply tells me what direction I'm flying now I have my cardinal headings which are north east south and west on some heading indicators like in the first video that I made showing you about the flight instruments this was just marked as zero nine one eight and two seven so the thing is with these heading indicators on the numbers you need to add a zero to the end of it so north is zero degrees or 360 when we come over here to the three add a zero to it so that's 30 degrees six is 60 East would be 90 degrees 120 hundred and fifty hundred eighty 210 degrees so on and so forth each little tick is five degrees each of the slightly larger ticks or ten degrees so if my heading indicator I'm just gonna adjust this real quick if it looks like this right now I'm flying on a heading of zero one five degrees or 15 degrees now thing with the heading indicator is that it doesn't actually know where North is which is why we still have a compass sitting up here now the compass right now is telling me that I'm on a heading of North so what you need to do is adjust you're heading indicator to match the compass and the reason we have to instead of just using the compass is that the compass is prone to a certain number of errors when you're flying around for instance if you're accelerating or decelerating the compass is a little bit inaccurate when you're turning the compass is a little inaccurate it really only works when you're in straight and level unaccelerated flight whereas the heading indicator gives you a much better and easier to use reading of what your heading is but like I said it's not slaved to magnetic north you have to manually set it to match your compass okay the next instrument is the vertical speed indicator vertical speed indicator tells me how fast I am climbing or descending in terms of feet per minute so the needle gives me hundreds of feet per minute right now I'm sitting right at 0 if the needle was here by the 5 that would mean on climbing at 500 feet in a minute if it was down here on the 10 that means I'm descending at a thousand feet per minute below the vertical speed indicator we have the tachometer the tachometer tells us how fast the engine is turning in revolutions per minute and that's again by hundreds of RPM so right now I'm idling it about 600 rpm the throttle lever here is essentially the same as the gas pedal in your car push it down to go faster in your car push the lever in in the airplane to go faster so the RPM gauge is how I know how much power I am using it is my indicator of my power setting so again idle power is about 600 right now that's 1500 rpm so on and so forth if I add full power that'll give me approximately 2,300 rpm once I actually take off though that's going to change and it'll actually increase a little bit but because I'm not moving on the ground in the park break is set I'm only gonna get about 2,300 rpm okay next to my throttle is my mixture control so the mixture control controls the ratio of air to fuel in the engine and why that's important is because in an airplane you can start off at sea level and you can climb to 12 13 14 thousand feet and assess and I believe the service Sealy ceiling is somewhere around fourteen thousand feet and the thing is that air density changes the higher we go the air gets less dense the higher we go so the higher we are the less fuel we need in the engine so the mixture control is going to control that and I'll show you in a future lesson about how to actually adjust the mixture properly but know that as I pull it out you can read just on the label it says mixture pole lean so as I pull it out that's a lean mixture meaning there's less fuel for the amount of air in the engine if I pull it all the way out the engines actually gonna completely stop and I'll show you that at the end of the lesson but for most scenarios when we're sitting below I'd say an elevation of a thousand feet we're just gonna leave it full rich for takeoff the other three instruments here on the right these are all navigation instruments which I've talked more about in the lesson on vor navigation and over here is my avionics tack so I have two gps's comm and nav radios are tied into that a transponder ADF navigation and autopilot which will all be part of future lessons real quickly just looking over here on the right side these are your engine indications so I have fuel quantity for my left tank in my right tank I'm about half tanks right now eg T's exhaust gas temperature it tells me how hot the engines running this is another tool that we're actually going to use to adjust the mixture properly fuel flow tells me how many gallons I'm burning per hour so right now I'm burning about five gallons an hour based on that needle and then over here we have my oil temperature on the Left oil pressure on the right and then finally a vacuum indicator which the vacuum indicator is responsible for running the gyroscopes in the attitude indicator and in the heading indicator so if that vacuum is below the green I may not be getting enough vacuum suction to run the gyros in the attitude in the heading which makes sense since I'm in idle power right now but as I start to increase power notice the vacuum gauge Rises and it's in the green basically from about 1500 rpm and upwards I will be getting sufficient vacuum to run the gyroscopes in my attitude in my heading indicator then finally I have an ant meter showing me what's happening with the battery it should be at a zero or slightly positive that okay finally as I was saying before if I take the mixture and I pull it all the way out to Pho lene that'll actually cut off the mixture and the plane will stop now I've talked a little bit more about this in my lesson on how to start up and stop a Cessna so just a quick recap the airspeed indicator gives me my speed through the air in terms of knots or nautical miles per hour the attitude indicator gives me a direct indication of my pitch in Bank now notice this is interesting here this little off leg came up that's because the engines not running and I have no vacuum pressure and so the gyroscope that's responsible for controlling that attitude indicator is starting to spin down and tumble and I'm not getting an accurate reading of what my attitude indicator is now okay altimeter tells me my height above sea level thousands of feet pointer is the fat small hand and the skinny long hand is my hundreds of feet turn coordinator tells me my rate of turn in terms of degrees per second remember that the standard rate turn is three degrees per second which would give me a 360 degree turn in two minutes heading indicator tells me which direction I'm going but I have to set it to the compass and usually about every 15 minutes while flying you have to recheck it against your compass to make sure it's still accurate vertical speed indicator tells me how fast I'm climbing or descending tachometer tells me what my power setting is for my throttle and finally have my throttle which is the equivalent of the gas pedal in your car and then the mixture control which controls the ratio of air to fuel rich mixture means more fuel lean mixture means less fuel all the way pulled out is idle cutoff well that's it for this lesson I hope you guys enjoyed the remake of lesson 1 I know the first one was absolutely terrible for the audio so hope you did enjoy this one better than the first one thank you to all my subscribers and if you haven't yet subscribed to my channel please do so at this time and you can also check me out on facebook comm slash flight trajectory as well as my website flight trajectory comm thanks and we'll see you next time

Channel: flighttrajectory

Views: 55,358

Rating: 4.9631467 out of 5

Keywords: flight instruments, flight simulator, x-plane, airspeed indicator, attitude indicator, altimeter, vertical speed indicator, turn coordinator, heading indicator, vacuum indicator, egt, exhaust gas temperature, throttle, mixture, learn to fly, flight simulator tutorial, flight sim lesson, cessna 172

Id: mlL5LFjl7HA

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 21 2018