Flying from Dortmund to Frankfurt in the FlyByWire Airbus A320 Neo in Microsoft Flight Simulator

hello so today we are going to take a look at doing a complete flight in the flyby wire A320 in Microsoft flight simulator this is something several people have asked me to do typically in the past I've just bookended kind of the recordings just doing a cold and dark startup or maybe an ILS demonstration and I very rarely have done a full flight but of course unbeknown to um anybody watching the channel I regularly take part in group flights where we operate the aircraft from end to end so I thought it might be worth just doing a an example flight with the flyby wire A320 it's worth pointing out actually I don't tend to fly it very often so I've chosen it today purely because I know lots of people use it normally I'd be flying either the Boeing or the Phoenix or something like that so I'm going to be using my own checklist from the past to help me along the way mistakes will be made but hopefully you'll see if I do make any mistakes the instructive thing will be kind of getting back out of them because that's half of it I know a lot of people learn things by wrote and don't really learn how things work so then diagnosing problems becomes a nightmare if you don't kind of figure out why you're doing things so I'll be explaining along the way and we'll see how we get on so we are today going to let me just switch this off we're going to fly from Dortmund in Germany over to Frankfurt it's quite a short flight so it was intentionally chosen so it will keep us busy all or most of the way of course this is an Airbus so most of the work will be done on the ground before we take off um it's worth pointing out actually in the real world if you go and look at some videos of real Flight Deck footage on YouTube you will find the pilots actually manually flying the aircraft a lot more than the simulation Community tend to see but the thing is there are two of them on the flight deck so where the co-pilot might actually manually fly the aircraft for large sections of the departure or the approach in the simulator you tend to find people getting the autopilot to do that for them while they are doing other things and that's I think that's typically just a workload issue but it's an easy trap to fall into to think in the real world that the autopilot is used more than it actually is so you know there's various jokes that the pilots will say that you know commercial air traffic Pilots themselves will say they are by Nature lazy and they'll use the systems to their benefit but also they have to practice their skills because they know as well that the least you know the less they practice the more Rusty they will get with actual stick Rudder skills so um it's just to keep that in mind there's only one of me in the cockpit I'm going to be talking like I said I'll probably make some mistakes along the way so bear with me you'll also notice I'm using the checklist this is going to be very very functional in terms of the things I do in the cockpit so in the real aircraft there's a host of checks and balances you do to make sure systems are operating correctly I am going to presume everything is going to work I'm not going to do all the fire checks or the system checks I'm just going to go with it and see how we get on okay so first things first we go overhead in the Airbus and we turn on the batteries so we press both battery buttons and the systems come online if we have external power available we can use it so external power comes up then we immediately go to the external light section at the bottom left and we turn the strobes to Auto and the nav logos to number two there isn't an option for number one on the flyby wire Airbus so don't worry about that then on the Apu section we immediately go and turn the master switch for the Apu the auxiliary power unit to on and then start it so that's the small jet engine in the tail that provides electrical power and compressed air to been up the engines if we go and spin around the view to look at the tail you can see the heat is pouring out already as the Apu comes up within the cockpit as soon as we switched on the Apu the lower engineering screen would have come up and you can see the um the speed of the jet engine coming up of the the APU you can see the exhaust gas temperature and you'll see when it starts generating electric as well so if you are not looking at that screen you can change to this is called the ecam display you can change the display that is shown by using these buttons down here so there's two places you can get to the Apu to see its status you can either go to the electric page and it appears there in the little box so it's just it's just started look so zero percent on the power generation so far or on the actual Apu page where it gives you more details and there you go it's doing it okay and flap open Okay so the Apu is up and running anyway so back overhead we need to go and turn on the crew oxygen supply then we turn the emergency exit light to Armed which is here and we set no smoking to auto then right up at the top we go and switch on the inertial guidance system so there are some realism options for this in the tablet at the side of the aircraft with how fast this happens I think I've set it to instant whereas in the real world it can be seven or eight minutes so the inertial guidance system uses Gyros so this is how the aircraft knows which way up it is and which you know if it's accelerating in a given Direction uses Gyros to do that and they take a few minutes to calibrate and stabilize okay so if we go to the cockpit view we're gonna go and brighten up the various screens or any aircraft so for these two screens it's the two knobs here so the big knob does the the left one and the little knob in the in the middle of the right hand one is the um navigation display and it's the opposite on the co-pilot's side so we can turn the the inner one and the actor one that brightens those screens up for us in terms of the engineering displays the two knobs for those down here the ecam screens so we just turn them around to halfway to brighten them up a little bit and for the mcdus the the flight management computers we can use the The Rocker knob or rocker switch at the side to brighten them up okay so that's that done so we're going to go and program the flight computer so we're going to go to the fmgc and there's a message at the bottom the bottom line is used both as What's called the scratch pad for keying things in and as a message display so it says we're using the the primary GPS system so let's clear that message and the first thing we're going to do is go to the init page which is where we set up where we're going from and two basically so we're going from edlw which is Dortmund to eddf which is Frankfurt so edlw to eddf so e d l W you can see down here slash e d d f so the important thing here is we are copying the format of the field that we want to fill in then we click the soft key next to it to transfer what we've keyed into the scratch pad into the field it comes up with this confirmation page and we just come back so it's done we can set a cost index the cost index relates to a formula that governs how aggressively the aircraft can climb or accelerate it can be several hundred normally it's on your operational flight plan so if you've used Sim brief and you've got your operational flight plan for the aircraft type it's probably got a cost index on it so you should be able to find that and then key it in we're just going to put 100 in Cruise flight level we're going to go to 25 000 feet so flight levels are altitude in feet divided by 100 so 250 is 25 000 feet you can type in 25 000 and put it in there and it will understand that okay there is another page to the init if you go left or right it will get to it so we can set our zero fuel weight of the airframe if you just click on it it will already know it and then you can drop it in and the block fuel so how much fuel have we got right now so we've got enough in the in the aircraft to not have to worry about this so by default the flight simulator starts up I think with the aircraft 50 full so we're going to put in the amount in tons so 3.8 tons so 3.8 goes into the block fuel Okay so we've done that bit after we have completed that we can go to the flight plan page to program the flight itself so clicked on flight plan and all it's got at the moment is where we're going from and two which is what we put into the initialization page if we click on the airport that we're leaving from it gives us the option to set the departure which we will do we are going to be let's go and have a look at the charts we're going to be taking off runway zero six and using the BAM s2q departure and the bamsu transition so there's Runway zero six we're now looking for the Sid or standard instrument departure there's bam s2q and I don't think this has the transitions by the look of it so we'll just insert that okay so it's put the various waypoints along the standard instrument departure into and it's ended at bamsu there was obviously what only one option so um it's put those in and then it's got a discontinuity and then it's got the destination so in other words it's not going to try and figure out how we get from the end of the standard instrument departure all the way to the destination so in other words it's got us to there it's not going to figure the rest down so we're going to tell it about the destination so we're going to run my seven right using the eunoc 3H arrival okay so if we go and click on eddf which always appears at the bottom of the flight plan page the destination will always appear bottom left so go to the arrival information seven left we want and we want the ILS so seven left ILS Zulu will be fine was it seven left or seven right no it was seven right so we can erase what we've just done let's do that again eddf arrival we want seven rights so it's not on here so we push up ILS seven right there it is and we wanted the you knock 3H so we push through the Stars by scrolling the screen eunuch 3H there it is now do we have a specific transition it's just a it says the Unico transition so do we have a Unicode transition on here no we don't so we're not going to worry about that I think it's going to say rid to be honest that's where that ends here so yes we say rid and insert that so then if we go and scroll through just to see there's the end of the standard instrument departure there's the beginning of the standard approach route so that it hasn't got a discontinuity there which is interesting if we carry on down it's gone all the way to the approach so it seems to be quite happy with doing the entire route all on its own which is good I was expecting a discontinuity but we haven't got one okay so now we've done that we need to go to the performance page and in order to get the V speeds calculated the rotate speeds of the aircraft on the runway we need to tell it what flap setting we're going to be using we're going to use flap setting one so I'll just put one in and key it into the flaps and then when I key on these I will get the system will automatically calculate the rotate speeds okay we're not going to worry about Flex temperatures or anything like that so we can look at the next phase next phase next phase so this is The Descent rate and then we got the approach into the destination so if we wanted to we could go and get the qnh so let's just do that for a bit of fun to see how you might get some weather data so in the um mcdu if you go to the mcdu menu go to atsu and AOC and then do a weather request a WX request and it's notice it already has the destination and departure airfields programmed in because they're in the flight plan so we can send that weather request and it will go and get the data for the weather for those airports for us so then if we come back a page we can look in received messages now I'm not sure this always works but it should come up saying there's a company message on the the display here but it doesn't always work I don't think so if we go and have a look in received messages yeah we can see we've got the meta information is it saying it there no it isn't so there's the weather information so you can see at Frankfurt we've got a q h of 1028 so to make this easier to reference we can print it and there's a little thermal printer in the corner of the center pedestal and that will print out those weather readings for us so when it's finished printing we can just click on the printout and the simulator will very nicely go and put that print out on The Middle section so that 1028 if we remember we go and look at performance again and go to let's just Center this up next phase next phase next phase next phase so we're looking at the approach data so we can put in one zero two eight obviously we're doing this ahead of time in the real world this would be done while you're on route and the temperature at the destination that's not actually appearing on here so no need to worry about that um do we get the temperature here let's just put in yeah zero is cold um I think that's good to go so then we go next phase and obviously we're not going to bother with go around because we're going to land first time first time every time as Batman would say um and you can see we've got the the root has appeared solid in the efis display so if you do want to check your route all you have to do is go to the flight plan page and then check change the mode on here to plan mode and as you scroll up and down through the legs it will move you around the route to see where you're going yeah each one you will notice the second line down is the one that is centered on the display so as you move your way through the route you can see the legs of the flight plan and obviously you can zoom in and out as well to get a wider view of what you're doing yeah so we've got this nice view of Us coming in and doubling back on ourselves and going in for approach okay so we'll go back to Arc mode on The View so it gives us the aircraft relative View and we'll pull the zoom back to 10 miles so where are we on our printed checklist I will try to remember to put a link to the printed checklist I'm using in the notes of the video we've done the programming of flight so we have set the flaps we've set the rotate speeds so now we go and press Ctrl 2. um notice you've got the barometric pressure reading it will be wrong at the moment we're going to press B which will calibrate it so you can see the altitude change to give us the accurate altitude above sea level of our current situation um we can also go and pre-configure some of the the data around the cockpit so we are going to climb out to 5000 feet the reason for that is on the approach chart oh sorry this the standard instrument departure chart so this is the chart we're using we're taking off and we're going to follow this route to actually see that to make some sense if I overlay it onto the flight plan you can see the route drawn in now notice there are no blue restrictions on this chart on this side of it there's one on the other side but there's none on this side but there is an initial climb clearance of 5000 feet and the reason for that is that is the transition altitude so when we get to 5000 feet we switch the barometric pressure to normal or standard Surrey okay so we don't need to worry about too much in the Airbus we've got a fully programmed flight plan so we can use manage speed mode managed uh heading mode managed altitude to get to that altitude um we may use vertical speed on The Descent just to give ourselves something to do okay so where are we so we need to go back overhead now go and turn the seat belt sign to on turning external power to off because the Apu is now up and running and we perform pushback so that's quite interesting in the Airbus that you can perform pushback actually before we do that just before we do that I'm going to do this a little bit out of step with the checklist I've got we're going to go and switch on the fuel pumps yeah and then we can perform pushback we're just doing that to save ourselves from having an extra thing to do in a moment so on the third item down on the the tablet there's a pushback section if we enable the pushback system and confirm it we can call the tug so you can see that the tug is maneuvering around the front of the aircraft will come off the parking brake so you can see the parking brake is now off it says tug is attached so we can start pushing the aircraft backwards and we can manipulate how fast it moves and we can change the tug Direction so we can actually make the pushback happen to to roughly where we want it to be the interesting thing in the real world is usually during pushback the crew would be starting the engines as CR as pushback happens with only one of me to talk and show you this and start the engines that's going to be actually quite difficult to do everything all at once so I'm just going to wait for pushback and then we will tell push back to stop and then I'll start the engines but obviously that's in the real world you've got two people up here doing this so we can stop the the push back turn the system off confirm it put the parking brake back on for the moment and we wait for him to get out of the way now while pushback was happening in the real world what would what we would have really done is put the Beacon Light On oh I'm just checking the list to make sure I'm not not missed anything enormous so fuel pumps were already on we go and turn the Apu bleed on at last so that provides the compressed air from the auxiliary power unit to the engines and we can start the engines so we turn the ignition to the start setting we flick the starter for engine number two and you will see the the gas turbine for engine number two is coming up okay so it should climb straight through 20 because we have the fuel pumps on so exhaust gas temperature is Raising and then thrust is coming out the back of the engine which is therefore going to spin up the turbo fan so the percentage of turbofan speed is increasing now as well cross feed to provide power from the engines rather than the Apu happens fully automatically in the Airbus so we'll wait for the engine to stabilize I believe actually we can start both engines at the same time yeah we can imagine okay so as soon as both engines are ignited and started we could turn the ignition back to Norm if there's a change of cabinet pressure for oxygen as well drops above the head the link will advance towards you decide okay exhaust gas temperature is coming up on engine and number one the left engine you can see that happening outside so engine number two is spinning already engine number one is coming up to speed so just waiting for that to complete there we go so you've heard a clunk there that would have been the cross feed so we can go and turn off the ignition system turn it back to Norm okay okay so ignition to Norm Apu bleed can now be switched off the compressed air and the electricity generation from the Apu are no longer needed so Apu comes off Apu comes off and the aircraft is pretty much ready to go so during the taxi I've noticed there's something missing on the checklist actually there's a tiny little switch down here which is the core predictive wind shear which is the um for the aircraft to predict windshield strangely enough you also get notices here that are your final check of things to do so it's telling us that tcas is still on standby so we'll go and enable tcast before we get to the runway normally you'd do this on the runway but we're going to set it to TA not t a r a um it's still saying Apu is available which is quite interesting anyway uh parking brake is on seat belts are on no smoking sign is on we are pretty much ready to go ladies and gentlemen so we're going to taxi over to the runway you can see if we zoom in and keep zooming in down here if we switch this in another graph to the VFR chart we should see an airport diagram I think or not it's not going to do it for us is it today that's interesting anyway we can see this in little nav map this is why we have redundancy of systems um zoom in so we're going to tax you down to the end turn on to Runway six right uh Runway six and then we'll get ready just take off so flaps need to go to take off position which I've just done on my controller which is the same as moving this flap lever here we need to arm the speed brakes and then come off the parking brake and we can begin taxiing so we're going to use the Rudders or the tiller I should say I've not got a tiller configured independently of the Rudders so you're going to see both move at the same time so I can't think we'll need all of the runway so we're going to go doing what's called an intersection takeoff and go on the shortened version of the runway in the Airbus you get a small amount of positive thrust from the engines at idle so once the aircraft's actually rolling with the engines at idle it will continue rolling so you almost have to feather the brakes to slow yourself down from time to time just something to be aware of so go and line up obviously if we had ATC we would have to be stopping at the holding point for the wrong way requesting mission to enter the wrong way and all the rest of it or they would guide us on not actually request permission okay final checks we've done the ground spoilers we've done the nose wheel steering it's a good point actually I think the nose wheel steering is automatically armed in this thing it's a really good question so release the parking brake which is released and we can go for it so throttles all the way forwards which is toga take off go around [Music] [Music] we're waiting for the rotate speed Gear Up it's back to the tent autopilot on and we're done let's brighten this up a bit on the display I forgot to brighten that one up earlier so when I said throttles to the CL detent what I meant was I have moved both throttles to this marker because I've got the thrustmaster quadrant it makes it very easy for me to do that I can feel it when they were pushed all the way forwards it was at toga which should take off go around now in the real world when you've got two pilots and they're not talking about an audience to this about this and one can be doing one thing and one another they would flow this by hand typically and only once they're kind of stable and have dealt with everything would they even dream of um switching on the autopilot whereas we did it at the earliest possible convenience now look notice it sometimes gets things wrong it's recalculating as it goes so we're coming up to the 5000 feet which is our initial clearance and we are going to go and pull this knob to go to standard barometric pressure now and we're going to climb now to 10 000 feet so I'm going to push the knob in for 10 000 feet which means you do it the way you think to the airplane yeah so the airplane is now doing it it's climbing you'll notice it's just over speeding that's because I still got the flaps down so that's like I said I was going to make mistakes so I've removed the flaps and now we're above 5000 feet it's going for 250 knots should slow down again is going to convert speed into climb rate but it's doing it really badly 10 knots faster than it should have that's interesting so this is almost certainly a failing of the flyby wire aircraft because we broke just broken Aviation law with it on automatic so it's coming up for 10 000 feet the reason we're staying at 250 knots is the the law says you can't exceed 250 knots below 10 000 feet in a commercial aircraft the other thing we haven't done actually typical commercial aircraft operations you would have the landing lights on below 10 000 feet so these can be switched back off so just coming up to 10 000 feet so we would switch these off and then we would climb to our climb altitude obviously there would be communication with air traffic control about doing this and we would increase speed so you'll see the speed marker climb look it suddenly jumped as soon as we go above 10 000 feet the target AirSpeed jumped from 250 knots to 290 knots but it's also trying to climb at the same time usually the aircraft will favor reaching the target AirSpeed before it gets to the before it worries about climbing it's interesting look we because we did such a fast acceleration through those first those First turns we've actually gone wide of the flight path which is why you see the crews flying the plan by hand if it's a very squarely standard instrument departure a human can do it far more or can react far more quickly than an autopilot can you may intentionally looking at the plan keep your speed down we've just gone you know like a dragster off down our flight plan and if you remember we set a um a cost index so that's going to be factoring that in on the speeds it's going to try and go if we go and pull this knob speed instead of pushing it we can make the decision we can say let's go 320 knots let's go light this guy up basically so we told the aircraft we want to do 320 not uh not 280 so yeah we're forcing the aircraft to do what we want rather than it wants we'll stay a healthy distance away from the airframe limit though which is the red striped bar on the ribbon okay so now we're climbed out basically we can go and turn the seat belt sign off be nice to have some lights wouldn't it I think sometimes the simulator when it's really bright outside makes it look very dark if you haven't got the control panels in the center it's a shame really so if we go and have a quick look at that uh control8 give us this I'm just having a quick look to see I can't remember where the the light switches are here we go dome lights so if we just turn the dome lighting off just makes it a little bit brighter to look at okay we haven't actually looked outside have we since we took off there's a 320 on route following its Flight Plan so we're just coming up to bamsu if you have a look on the little nav map we can see how that is representing it so coming up to 20 000 feet we are well ahead notice I said we came out off the ground like a dragster and we're well ahead of the climb profile or the one that we little Outback would have been wrong to be honest it's people kind of tend to try and stick to it and it's usually wrong so we're coming up to bamsu turn that back off now and we'll start worrying about the scent see if we did a really gradual descent you're not going to worry about it until you get to past unoku so coming up to 25 000 feet gently you can see it's starting to wind off the climb Ray or it will do very soon going into some Mist I need to be aware of icing let's see if we get any warnings about that minus 17 outside signs of ice showing up no you can be too cold for ice and it depends on the um the amount of moisture in the air you get icing happen so we're at 25 000 feet there we go look the vertical speed is winding off the aircraft is leveling it and it's working good Okay so we've got a couple of minutes let's go and extend the range on the there's the unoku Waypoint so shortly after that we'll begin descending back then again so we'll first of all come down to um it's through it okay have they still got the interior of the cabin modeled yeah I thought they still had this model but maybe not we can easily find out but if we press the insert key to go through the drone camera and go and put the drone camera inside the body no it's not modeled just waving it and go through the door oh there's another aircraft look so in about 25 miles time we will pass unoq and then we'll start thinking about our descent so if we increase the range again we get to see it can't make the turns at the speed we're doing so this is all based on the speed we're doing right now but we are going to be slowing right down before we get there so I wouldn't worry too much so typically mid-flight you'll just be checking in and out with sector controllers as you pass through the various sectors along your flight plan obviously on a very short one like this you may not even leave the sector um depends what your ATC sector coverage looks like I'm just gonna have a quick look around it on tcast Tara flaps two up did I switch to t-cast to Tara I'm sure I did we didn't set no I didn't so difference between ta and Tara in ta mode t-cast tcash is the traffic collision avoidance system in ta mode you will be informed about other aircraft and you're telling other aircraft Where You Are in Tara mode the autopilot will respond to other aircraft yeah so it may weld us descend or climb to avoid other aircraft I'm not going to get into the rules of how it does that today gets complicated but typically if you're in depart early stages of departure or in later stages of approach you switch to ta mode instead of Tara so you are transmitting where you are to other people and taking no notice of where they are otherwise you might get an unto an unwanted intervention because obviously the pilots or the crew will be looking out the windows looking for other aircraft ATC will be looking for other aircraft okay so we're looking pretty good so far just to give us something to do along the way let's go and descend down to 18 000 feet so if you're using managed mode to descend I'm going to use both modes during our flight plan if you use manage mode you can just set your target altitude and then push the knob in the dot will appear when the aircraft will get to 18 000 feet as it sees fit so you can see the N1 percentage is dropping on the engines so it's reducing thrust to allow it to descend without the airspeed increasing ladies and gentlemen as you may have noticed we have begun our initial descent down to our destination now would be a good time to wrap up any business you need to take care of as we prepare for our first up once you return to your seat we ask them to remain seem to tell the aircraft that I've saved navigation speaker Capital right as soon as we get to 18 000 feet we'll go into more of a manual descent mode and I'll explain some bits to you and the reason I'm doing that is I want to show you some of the symbology you get when you use vertical speed so you can see this is getting it wrong and the rendering at the moment if you've got the Phoenix Airbus it won't get it wrong not in the same way that this one does I'm using the stable version of the flyby wire A320 the um the development version tends to have better rendering quite shocked actually that that's got that so badly wrong but we'll see once I slow down traffic traffic there we go that's t-a-r-a the um traffic collision avoidance system you can see it there look I'm just looking to see if we can see it where was it I think it may have been something directly below us I'm gonna worry you can see the marker there look promise I guess they're there they haven't got their lights on normally you can see the lights okay so we are going to slow down to 250 knots and in anticipation of dropping down to 10 000 feet in a few minutes time we're also going to go for 10 000 feet and go for management let's do this on manage Descent of say 15 or 2000 feet a minute let's see if it'll do it so notice I've set 2000 feet a minute we can go by using a vertical speed we can go beyond what the aircraft can manage to do so it might start even start accelerating even though the auto throttle says a given speed so we might have to start using the air brakes so I'm going to throw the air brakes out so the aircraft will decelerate now see that happening on the indicated AirSpeed ribbon so if we go look outside you can see I've thrown out the air brakes so the flaps along the back of the Wings have lifted and the engines are idle when it if we go and switch this back to managed mode you can see now the speed has come down the radius of these turns has shortened enormously so we actually want to fly out to red that's what the flight plan said but the um the computer is going to round the corner off so it's going to come over here and then I'm almost immediately loop back in and come around now we know at the start of the ILS we need to be at a given height so let's have a quick look at the chart while all that's happening so we want to be at 4 000 feet at Red if we're coming in from that direction if we put this over the top of the chart we come down here and we want to be at 4 000 feet let's have another look at this one so it's interesting it hasn't got the restrictions written on it in blue normally they have restrictions written on them in blue so something will be worth looking at in little nav map is how high above the ground Frankfurt is so if we show information for Frankfurt we've got elevation 364 feet so once it's above 4000 feet at robsa so we're coming down we're at 11 000 foot the moment let's go and reduce the range on this so we get a better drawing of it so we are going to be reducing speed as we go anyway so we're also going to tell everybody to go and sit down so seat belt signs go back on we're going to be below 10 000 feet soon yes just coming up so we are going to go and turn on the Landing lights so we're at 10 000 feet now so we could easily drop another 220 go coming out to T20 Maybe just thinking about making those turns a lot easier for ourselves or sharper turns it's making the turn we're going to come down for 4 000 feet now go for it remember at six thousand feet let's just check that on the charts for problem with finding this is they print the transition altitude in a different place every child so we probably want five thousand feet for the it's probably still five thousand isn't it for the transition altitude I'm just looking to see where they've written it always in a different place it's really frustrating transition level by ATC transition altitude 5000 feet so if you saw my video about what transition level and altitude mean transition level is the first flight level available above the transition altitude so that's where you go so 5 000 feet is where we switch back to qnh of the destination so we can find that out if we go and look in here and go right click on Frankfurt actually we already had it didn't we in the cockpit qnh is one zero two eight at Frankfurt so we are just coming down so when we get to 5000 feet I'm going to do this a little bit ahead of time just so you get to see it so we push this to go back to normal and this is this has got the alternate system for the Q a this has got inches rather than easily change it in the Airbus yes there's a knob here look there we go we want one zero two eight so we've changed this to Hector pascals which are used in Europe inches tend to be used in the US okay so we'll come off the air brakes now so you can see now we have slowed down we can make these turns a lot more easily so we're going to slow down again and Coast back to 180 knots and we'll start to feed the flaps in so we'll go flaps one obviously they provide drag in and of themselves which will help us is quite interesting obviously because we're getting this foggy mist so there's the Frankfurt itself we're going to pass by the airfield on our right I think the river is completely Frozen up according to this we're not going to get to see much are we that actually plays into our hands to do like an instrument Landing I guess so let's go and double check we're coming in on seven right so 11095 would be the ILS frequency so we're going to double check that in the um to you so in the radio navigation button 11095 is pre-programmed in because it was part of our flight plan it also knows the course of the runway is 66 degrees so it's already all done for us so all that means is when we get um when we make our final turn towards the airport we will turn one of The Ether screens to LS or Landing system mode and then the symbology will change to show us the ILS so without 180 knots we can go for two which will just change the altitude of the aircraft slightly then the nose will come down what's the outside air temperature looking like minus three I'm not very happy about the um any ice forming so I'm going to go and turn the various protections on to protect the aircraft if we look left we should see Frankfurt Airport so we will be looping around to the right in a moment and coming back in on that Runway and there's Frankfurt City can we zoom in far enough it probably won't render it very well from here there's the river running through the city quite dramatic weather in the real world you'd be communicating with air traffic control talking to approach on the way in and they might be regulating your speed to avoid other traffic you know to improve sequencing they may even give you vectors away from your flight plan yeah me so if we go back and look at the flight plan page we can see if there are any restrictions along our way it's all looking good so once we do the double back that rid I will drop the undercarriage actually we could do that after the final turn towards approach it's just a waiting game now really as I said in the real aircraft this may well be all be flown manually but then they've got two pilots they're not talking they're not doing all this stuff once I get through this final turn I'm able to do it manually myself I could I'll show you how you can use the ILS but then I will revert to manual control for the actual descent and Landing I'll turn the auto throttle and the autopilot off and do a manual Landing these plane should start turning very soon so let's zoom level down one more step have a look at his turn from outside as it makes it happen and there we go okay so knowing we have the display on the other side of the cockpit we'll replicate the range this is at and let's have a quick look at that see what this Landing display looks like so you can see the Glide slope is coming actually but we are going to fly back away from the Airfield and then turn back in so this is the direction of the runway we're going opposite you know the opposite the Romney Direction at the moment but then we're going to backtrack across so if we look at this on a map to show you where we are and what's going on we're going towards robsa now and then we'll turn in for the Final Approach it'd be interesting I suspect we may be above the Glide slope at the time we come away from robsa but we'll find out excuse my coughing not doing very well at all for the last week so you can see if you think about where the tangent is to the airfield on the diagram over here and where this vertical speed is sorry the uh where the localizer not listen to me the Glide slope um it should start climbing again so I think we should be fine because all this is really relating is how far away we are on the Three Degree Glide slope towards the runway so it should start climbing again as we get further away from the Airfield now so let's see if that is proven true see if this gently starts to move back up to the gauge there are lots of other aircraft around so we need to remember to switch the t-cast to TA mode otherwise we will be reacting to them and we don't really care about them for this demonstration flight still at four thousand feet yeah this is gently raising look so we're getting further away so the glow slope is climbing that's good because we need to be below the Glide slope at the point we go for approach mode if we're going to do it approach mode button is over here so we'll wait till we come around that final turn we're just approaching it now so you can see over on the secondary on the co-pilot screen we're about to make the turn so let's start scrubbing some more speed off on 60 knots with an extra level of flaps aircraft should start turning any moment now oh there was the nice real steering switch by the way it was on by default which is why I was a bit flummoxed as to why it was on the list because as I said earlier I haven't got anything in the checklist that isn't needed based on the default configuration of the simulator so we're just coming in towards approach so you can see that happening over on the second screen over there we go and look on the map on this one left map you can see that happening coming towards the approach so you will see we're coming into the runway Direction the course deviation indicator is sliding in so at this point we will go and drop the undercarriage we've already got the landing lights on which is good and we could go to approach mode name and we could also turn on both autopilots yeah and that will say cat 3 a jewel now yeah and autopilot's one and two are in operation we can now start playing with slowing down the 40 knots go to full flaps so with the approach mode on the aircraft will track the um the Glide slope and where you can see it's already leveling out to Center up the localizer our lateral position relative to the runways which are out in the mist ahead of us so you will see yeah it started descending look so it's tracking the Glide slope down towards the ground now completely automatically so so that's how we could do it and we could leave it like that I'm going to go and turn all of that off and fly in myself because what's the fun in that so autopilot off auto throttle off I'm just moving the throttles to find out where the the level is okay so now we're just going to watch these gauges to steer we've got full flaps there's the runway directly ahead of us so we just need to be mindful of speed and our vertical position in the sky and our lateral position relative to the runway ahead of us and we should be good when we touch down we will go for thrust reverses until we get to about 70 or 18 knots then we'll go for wheel brakes quite often you'll see the um the flight Crews go for spoilers as well so they'll basically throw everything out to use aerodynamic braking saves the the wheel brakes and sure obviously it shortens the The Landing roll so we're slightly off to the right you can see that reflected here so we're just rolling left a little bringing it back so you can see the reason for that is there is a slight crosswind this is quite a strong crosswind there's 27 knot wind at 36 degrees from 36 degrees so there's a very strong wind with a horizontal component in it pushing us to the right we're getting a bit slow keeping an eye on these various instruments so dropping the nose a little still being pushed to the right so we're gonna aim a little bit more to the left it's just a balancing game really I think the frame frame rate might be quite horrendous coming in from this direction in this weather but we're not going to worry too much about that traffic traffic and that was why we turned the t-cast to TA mode otherwise it may well have reacted to that so we're going to reduce this down to 10 miles an hour we can see the markers around us on the the chart there those are other aircraft traffic traffic so those will be multiplayer aircraft almost certainly they may be AI aircraft as well there's one directly below us or above us you'll probably see it in a moment 1000 traffic traffic traffic we could probably go and turn off the anti-icing name traffic traffic again this is where in the real world having two pairs of hands to do things is invaluable we're a bit High so we're just going to lower the nose traffic so by saying I'm a bit High I was just referring to this gauge here the um the Glide slope 500. the wind has tailed off a lot as we got lower so we're down to nine knots but it's also swung around to the north 300. so we were getting a bit slow then the stuttering is really bad 100 50. 40 30 20. 10. five and within the reverses The Rudder doesn't seem to be doing a lot but that's my configuration more than anything probably can go for wheel brakes check out the spoilers as well and look how quickly it stops so flaps are going up we get off the Runway and we can taxi back so terminals are over here we're going to completely disregard any Runway uh permissions and make our way directly back without passing go it's quite interesting looking at Frankfurt because I've been here so many times over the years with work it seems very familiar seeing the Lufthansa service buildings okay so now we are on the ground obviously we turn off the landing lights we also need to turn off the strobes but again this is the having two pairs of hands becomes really useful most of the time coming into Frankfurt you oops you won't go to a gate they tend to park out on the tarmac and they have lots and lots of buses but we'll go and have a look [Music] really nailing the frame rate isn't it with the weather conditions and the complexity of Frankfurt so on the way back typically you will also find that the um the crew will switch back on and start the Apu ready for when we get back to the gate or wherever we're parking so we can turn the engines off and not lose electrical power if we don't have external power available at the place we're going remember this like a star shape the the terminals here at Frankfurt I think this is the one the typical European um Hub I can't remember I can't remember the terminal numbers or letters it's been a while foreign can we actually find an empty gate somewhere just to go and put the aircraft in yeah we'll go over here not entirely sure which which one that is but we'll soon find it oh this will do directly in front of us so each of these hubs on the the um at Frankfurt tends to have a cafe in this circular kind of rotunda bit on the end of each arm and then the the gates come off of that Rotunda okay so let's go parking brakes on So that obviously you would then call for engines shut down the trick here being that we've also already got the Apu running so we've got electrical power so if we need to we can just shut the engines down and nothing bad is going to happen so we can go and turn that Beacon Light off now the lights off go and turn the seat belt sign off the passengers all go bananas behind us uh no smoking signs can go to back off now turn off the emergency exit lights I'm not doing this in the correct Ordinary by the way we can go and turn off those uh fuel pumps you can see look various warnings are coming up across the board if we press Ctrl 8 we can see that a lot better actually we can go and turn off the inertial navigation system and there's not really a lot to do with powering things down on an Airbus it's pretty much you know most of it you're really it's mostly around putting things back the way they wish to be found because it's a digital system a lot of the buttons don't have an in or are pushed or not pushed status either so um yeah it's it's interesting so go and turn off the tick ass obviously when you get closer to being shut down completely you would just go and turn off the Apu and then your final check is the battery itself and you go completely cold and dark and there you go so it's a bit more easy outside isn't it with all these Jets moving around there you go a nice flight in The lay-by Wire A320 obviously we haven't looked at things like calling for the jet way or anything like that we've just operating the airplane but hopefully that satisfies the people that we're asking can you do a complete flight plan to end in A Familiar airplane so I've done it now so that's that monkey off my back for you as I said I typically fly these kind of things with ATC control in the week if you're interested in doing that there's a group I play with regularly called my air if you search for them on the internet you'll find them um they're a very relaxed group of guys that a couple of them nominate themselves as atcs each week and provide a route and probably get eight or ten of us playing it and do the ATC communication between us it's a lot more informal and more relaxed than the likes of that Sim where it's a lot more you know by the book but it's a really nice stepping stone too bouncing anyway let's call it a day there and I'll see you again soon

Channel: Jonathan Beckett

Views: 12,653

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Id: VS0m4o5iZpI

Length: 75min 36sec (4536 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 21 2023