Flying the ATR 42-600 from Luton to Jersey in Microsoft Flight Simulator

hello so it's been a while since I last flew the ATR in Microsoft flight simulator and I know lots of people have said they've had issues with it so I thought we'd give it a go and see what problems we Face along the way so we are at Luton Airport in on North side of London and we're going to fly down to Jersey so if we're going to have a quick look at the the map sketched out here so we're up at this corner it's a bit jumbled at the moment it's going to turn the um user points off uh where do we do that here no user points there we go oh it's a little bit tidier so we're going to fly a standard instrument departure Route Around London and then across the English Channel and then into Jersey so it's a fairly straightforward route so we'll get all this programmed into the airplane so let's go and jump in the airplane out of the wind it's quite a windy afternoon in Luton okay so I'm going to be following a printed checklist that I've written up previously and we'll see how we get on with it so first thing it says is make sure all the switches and levers are in their correct starting positions they believe they are so I have set the aircraft up as best I can uh let me go to control three go to the tablet and we are going to connect the ground power so I can't remember from this if you actually get a unit outside the aircraft or not I guess this is it isn't it do we get a cable across the floor maybe not anyway so then we go to control six overhead and we're going to turn the batteries to on so we can just flick the switch here to the on position we wait for two and four of the screens to come alive in the cockpit so we'll hear some Mario Style scenes as we wait for that so just before we're waiting for that it's not going to see that light looks like you had like a Double Image in there but okay so we're waiting for these to come alive and after we've done that we can go and turn the external power on overhead so we're just waiting waiting waiting for things to boot up again this is kind of closely following the real world procedure at this point waiting for this takes about 20 to 30 seconds usually there we go so you can see the aircrafts come to life and it's complaining about all sorts of things so we go back overhead and we can click the external power button there and a lot of the systems come online all of a sudden so on the external light section second column at the bottom we're going to go and turn the beacon light to off make sure it's off and it is at the moment and we turn the nav light to on hydraulic power section third column at the top that's up here I'm going to turn the blue pumped on the auxiliary pumped on and the green pump to on so blue auxiliary and green prop break second column in the middle we are going to uncage switch on and re-cage the prop break so this will allow hotel mode to happen the main electric power section the second column in the middle DC gen one and two to on they will show fault that's absolutely fine science section third column at the bottom seat belts to on or up so that's there and emergency exit light to Armed that's not that windshield heating third column at the bottom L and R to on so windshield Heating so here's the anti-icing I'm having to find my way around this again having not used it for a while uh L and R here we go so AC weld electric power section third column in the middle ACW gen one to on ACW Gen 2 Tone so there's gen 1 and there's gen 2. don't worry that they're showing faults it's absolutely normal so the enunciation light section fourth column at the bottom turn it to Bright so that's down here oxygen section fourth column in the middle turn the main Supply to on which we have done so cockpit we're going to configure the flight guidance control panel or fgcp so if we press f we can look across at this set the heading of course to the runway Direction so you can see down here there's the heading as the heading knob so we're just going to move this marker to 70 degrees set the course as well to the runway Direction although we're in GPS mode so of course isn't going to make much difference and we're not going to come out of GPS mode to be honest so that's fine set the nav source and we have already got this the nav Source set to FMS so we don't need to worry pre-select the altitude Target so we go to the altitude select knob and we can go and if CSS 1500 at the moment so we can go and turn that up we can all shift on to go faster so we're going to fly to 25 000 feet today so we're going to go straight for 25 000. we get 25 000 is showing set the comma and nav radios appropriately so we don't need to worry about that really because we're not talking to ATC and we're not using nav guidance until we get into ILS at the end uh on the pedestal click brg one and brg 2 to display data so down here there's these two buttons when you turn these on if you are using nav radios which we may along the way they show these two sections down here okay multi-function control display unit or mcdu press control and four to look at the mcdu so we're going to go in and program the flight so FMS in it pause in it copy a GPS position into the init pause and it does it there and then we can come back and then we can go to the weight section and we can long Click on each empty field and it will fill it in for us so we don't have to use the tablet it's done and then we return again then we go to the performance initialization or perf in it and in here we are going to program the cruise altitude it should match what we've already programmed and it has and we just come back out of there again so we're really just confirming that that's there let me go into route so we're going to press the flight plan initialization and get a route and now we're going to put in our from and two so we're going from eggw and we're going to egjj so Echo golf golf whiskey slash Echo golf Juliet Juliet so it's from Luton to Jersey okay and we can execute that and that programs the basic route so now now obviously we can go back over that and put this hidden the star in as required so the standard instrument departure we're using is debt 7c so if we select the airport we can go Runway zero seven and a debt seven seat and execute that then if we scroll down using the careers next to do this here we can there's egjj so then we'll go and choose the big n 1K into ILS for zero eight so ils-08 and then Big N 1K and execute then we'll also go and look and we want to put the sfd or seafood VOR in the route so we're going to find out where that discontinuity is in the middle of our route there it is just before big name so we want to put in Sierra foxtrot Delta and click on flight plan discontinuity and it will insert it we want the one here in England not the one in Sweden and then we go next and we clear out this discontinuity so we hit the clear button and get rid of the discontinuity and execute our change and we have a flight plan programmed in okay so we could do a gross check of the display here by using the um the Northup orientation in here on the efis display but we're not going to bother with that I'm fairly confident that what we've done is going to work so but if you were you know if it was a route you've never done you can go into the uh ifs display so just to show you how you would do that if you go down here and turn the knob you can change the display here so you get North up yeah and then once you've got North up you can use the next and previous button to flick through the route so it's called just a gross check of the route yeah so you can see it's kind of making sense they're Seafood and then we come down to the beginning and there's the ILS into the destination so if you want to flick that back to you can have Rose mode or it's quite useful sometimes to see behind you as well I'm going to put this onto the Arc mode Okay so if you press F to go to the normal copy view which we're already in we pre-select lnav and V nav if we want to so let's go and do that so if we keep an eye on these displays when I do it I'm going to go and select a nav so that selected lnav and then I'm going to select V nav as well and you can see V nav indicated AirSpeed motors come up so you can see there's indicated AirSpeed here so we should be able to yeah you can either you can cycle through the various modes so if you say v-nav it will go V nav Ias okay speed is controlled over here you've got speed Target you can see that here so we could say 140 for example but for takeoff you probably only want 120 130 so we'll take that then 230. okay to be honest I am going to go 140 just to be certain um let me go down to calibrate the ultimators so we can just press B to shortcut that the other way you could do that obviously is go and look up the atis information another way to do it if you don't know the frequency is to find out the elevation of the airport you're at and tune it until the altitude reads the same as the elevation you know you're at ah control six goes overhead engine pump one and two to on so the pumps are over here these are boost pumps okay so they are both on so engine start so control six we were overhead already engine start section second column bottom ignition and knob to start a so here's ignition knob now it'd be interesting to watch the way these switches behave as we do this so start two is going to go to on and we're going to monitor in the cockpit the NH level on the engine so you can see it's coming up when it goes past 10 we can move the throttle lever for engine number two to feather so then overhead once this is stabilized so it has stabilized so we can go to control six we can turn the ignition knob back to off and start abort so yeah that's all fan starter board okay so then then on the main electrical power section second column in the middle we can turn the external power to off at this point because the engine is generating power so that can come off then back on the tablet we can go and remove the external power so turn that off we can also close the doors remove the tail prop Etc if we've got them I'm going to leave the trucks in place for the moment so then back in the cockpit we switch e-fist to show the performance data the MDF perf page so we come down here and I have to remember where this is now the perf button will show the performance data we can confirm the takeoff data yeah and the indicator for that means the numbers go Blue V1 is blue on the screen um you can set the trim to match the ewd screen so if we look over here it's already lined up the same so if it wasn't we could pre-arrange trim to be balanced just by I'll do it anyway just to show you the needle move can you see over there the little triangle so I'm using the elevator trim to cause that to move okay so then overhead control six turn the beacon to on or the up position so there it goes in the prop break we're going to uncage that propeller brake remove it and re-cage so what you will now see is that propeller coming up to speed so we wait for the NP to rise above just checking the instructions here so we haven't got our NPS over here yeah it's gone to 12. and condition two lever can then go to auto so this goes to Auto you can tell I haven't done this for a while currently I'm going so slowly everything just making sure I do everything correctly I've whized through this so many times in the past and got things wrong so then overhead control six we can turn the start system back to ignition a and we can start engine number one and we can come down and look down here you can see the screen has automatically switched back to show the engine so when it goes past 10 we can advance and wait for it to come up when the NP gets to 10 which was on the other side so it's going through six seven eight nine ten there it goes we can then advance that to Auto as well and then overhead we can go and turn off the ignition system again so then on the main electrical power section second column at the top over here we can unguard the true button which is here and click it and then regard it and the probe heating section third column in the middle capped on standby on the first officer to on so probe heating is here kept on standby arm first officer on [Music] in the cockpit we can go and set our flaps to 15 degrees so I'm just going to scoot across to see this happen so we move the flap lever and we have 15 degrees of flaps on the server page of efis we can trans we can configure the transponder code so if you can't see the serve page you'll see there's a serve button here so there's transpond that we can turn the transponder on obviously we can choose a code there as well notice we can configure t-cas in here as well it's on auto by default then in the tablet we can now remove the wheel chocks so we are relying at this point on the emergency brake and the parking also the emergency parking brake which is this lever and the gas lock so we're going to remove gas lock at this point the stone emergency brake let's just have a quick look outside make sure final check you've got ailerons we've got elevators we've got rubber so we are going to hold the tow breaks on remove both of these levers go hard left on the steering oh did I remove the chocks yet yeah I have it just hasn't come off the brakes okay what's going on I've had this before I think I've just solved it I had the brakes on foreign okay I need to solve this for a second I'm just going to pause the video okay it was my fault I was being ridiculous I hadn't actually disengaged the parking brake on my controller so this is a problem with the the Airbus quadrant using it with the ATR that the the parking brake is really controlling the tow brakes [Music] so you just need to be careful of that so we're just taxing out name so on the way out we can turn on the taxi lights so they're up here somewhere so we've got the taxi lights are there when we get closer to the runway we'll go and put the strobes on as well just have a little look at the runway layout so we're going to follow around to the right basically let's get in the center of the sexy way okay so we're going to go for the shortest route out because we don't need a very long runway in the ETR certainly not in the short body version oh look there's still a bug with the lights in this scenery hovering above the wrong way I haven't seen that for a while so let's pull down to the wrong way and straighten up okay strobe lights on Landing lights on and we're ready to go [Music] and we're off the Runway it's a bit of a crosswind just dealing with it it's Gear Up [Music] start trimming [Music] so we're just watching now our speed so we just we can raise the climb rate a little bit go if we want to you know we could go and engage the autopilot so let's go and try it see what happens so we've got V nav and they'll have got is mode so it should be targeting the indicated airspeed so it will adjust climb rate let's see what that but it will also if you have to be mindful that it's going to not just climb indeterminately for it so let's go and increase that Target now I've just raised the flaps so we'll take you there to 160 knots so it's dropping the nose to achieve 160 knots still climbing nicely aircraft should start a right turn very soon [Music] we don't actually need this on the display so if we go nav that will bring up the ILS radios if we come down here we can show the map which is quite cool or we can show there's all sorts of things you can show so navigation display we'll flick that over so you get an HSI here and nav over here which is quite cool so you should see the early flight director has started to kick in turn the airplane so we're going to turn the speed up a bit more Target AirSpeed up to 180 knots now and Vino's going for altitude there so it's gone out of ILS mode so the reason we're accelerating so heavily and leaving behind the target is because we're on an actual restriction if you look closely look for about four thousand then five thousand we're at five thousand so it can't quite many higher so we need to moderate the throttle to stop ourselves from over speeding so I'm just purling the throttle back gently so we're not in Notch mode anymore on the throttle if you're wondering what I'm on about with Notch mode you will notice on the throttle throws there is a white marker if the throttle is on the white marker it's said to be in notcher done a very good job of lining a throttle slip away [Music] so we're just maintaining a speed below 250 knots until we get past the restriction on altitude so that continues on a way out to a d09g by the look of it we can have a look on the the charts actually so if we go and look up this departure we are doing this one so you can see this is us coming along here so five thousand feet five thousand feet five thousand feet at that length and then we're on our way so it doesn't mention a limit for the deathling Waypoint now does it so we're just making that turn should we have a look from outside so we're just keeping an eye on the speed seeing what the engine's doing see the one thing I haven't done during this flight is use the checklist functionality so I'm not bothering with it I might have I might do a video on it at some point about how you can use the checklists it's quite nice if you did want to disregard the V nav instructions say if if you were being controlled and there was traffic below you that they wanted you to avoid and they were saying like you've cleared to climb climb to your cruise altitude for example there are many ways you can do that so we could just go IIs mode and then obviously I'm not going Full Throttle so if I were to increase my throttle name see the nose come up to stop me accelerating so then the aircraft starts climbing okay obviously if we lower the target speed then it will climb more strongly because it can convert that AirSpeed into climb rate if we push the throttles forwards to ramp or even to Max you can see here the target also the indicated climb rate has increased significantly so it's nearly two thousand feet a minute there for a few moments 1700 feet a minute 1800 feet doing remarkably well but you can't do that forever because the engines just blow themselves to Pieces so we are going to pull the engines back to notch so I need to check the um the transition altitude on the way out of here can never find it on these it's either five or six thousand feet there it is six thousand feet so we've just gone through six thousand feet a few moments ago so we need to change the barometric pressure which in this aircraft is here it is barometric pressure set so we need to set it to 2992. there we go just set it down here so I presume it's going to be the same on both sides of the cockpit let's just go and check yeah it's always almost the same so it may be that this is independent so it's not responding so this it's interesting how they were different than each other anyway we've done our part of the bargain as the pilot hey we can increase the range on this there's a couple of buttons down here we press plus a couple of times you'll see this change so we're flying out towards the death ring obviously we're supposed to be at 5 000 feet and I've just assimilate what you know how it might happen in the real world We Are Climbing a quite happily having been given pretend clearance up to cruise altitude obviously if we left it in veenav it would be obeying the altitude restrictions so I haven't seen anything untoward so far the airplanes behaved itself absolutely impeccably so we have three ten thousand feet yet no we're not so we still need Landing lights on but we can turn the taxi lights off should have done that earlier really so taxi intake office there so below 10 000 feet in commercial aircraft we tend to keep the landing lights on then actually passed through ten thousand feet turn them off so I'm going to push this out to ramp to get to accelerate a bit get some climb rate going the danger with doing that as you can see is the stress on the propellers so I'm gonna Purl it back to notch which will drop the stress below 100 drops it quite significantly doesn't it there's a whole subject area about managing the engines on these aircraft and I'm not going to get involved in it because you're here 10 different things from different 10 different people and the pilots are the real thing you're quite commonly see them quote as saying you know we fly around in Notch all the time and then you get the armchair experts who will argue with them [Music] Okay so we've got a little bit of a journey ahead of us so I am going to pause the video so we're not here forever and I'll catch you on approach into Jersey okay we're back in business so we're just approaching the big no Waypoint so if we have a look on the charts we are on the or just approaching the standard approach routes so we have the best part of about 50 miles to descend from 25 000 feet down to about two and a half thousand to join the ALS o let's go and manage that descent so you can see the airplane is making the turn banked over here comes the the routine so we're going to start to manage speed you can see I've already come off the Speed slightly so let's do this at a given speed shall we so if we increase the speed we want to change the target altitude now to 2500 feet which we can see we've done see the airplane actually overshot the turn and it's just reacquiring the route it's doing quite a nice job of it what is it going to do a nice job of it it's overshot it again hasn't it so we've set two and a half thousand feet and we've set um indicated AirSpeed mode and we've set 190 knots so we'll increase that up to 200. so you'll see the immediately the plane will dive because it can do so to accelerate and we'll come off the throttle slightly off the power I should say we can basically use the power to govern our descent rate so if we pull the throttles back a lot further on the power levers [Music] so we're maintaining about a thousand feet a minute it's not going to be enough so we're going to pull back further so about 1500 feet a minute at the moment so if we wanted to send any faster we can obviously employ ers they're just to show you how that happens look carefully at the wings does this have spoilers I'm just correcting myself here I don't think it does [Music] so we don't have that as an option okay that's fine [Music] but we are coming down quite smartly anyway so we're not going to worry obviously as you descend the air gets thicker as well which means you can increase your descent rate if you have a look on Roots there is a hold we can put in place at the Guernsey VOR so we could Circle wanted to use that to descend further so should we just try that just to see how it works this is where we managed to break the system isn't it so if we select the Guernsey VOR we put a holding in and just say execute and we should see it's going to do that now so this is just showing you some of the tools that are available to you to do a to lose height we'll probably only have to do one Loop and then we can come back around again so let's go and see right in front of us Jersey is over there and be able to see aldeny as well yeah there's older knee [Music] quite a clear day isn't it so we're coming in over that side of the island before we get there we're going to follow this holding at the Guernsey field [Music] yeah so we can just clear to exit the hold let's go straight down to shark and that will draw the line back in to go to shark [Music] stuff really and we'll see currency directly below us [Music] so we can look up a few other things while we're on our way in um [Music] obviously you'll see the holding that's on the diagram is not the same dimensions as the one I have just programmed in I just went with the default obviously if you're doing this properly with air traffic control you'd put in the dimensions of the holding as required um but the thing I'm more interested in to be honest is transition altitude it's by ATC so I think it's probably about five thousand feet usually this part of the world so we'll go with five thousand so you've got anything on the IMs diagram for a transition altitude no it's wow yeah there we go transition level is by ATC altitude is 5000. so when we cross through five thousand feet we need to go to local barometric pressure so you should see the airplane turn left very soon to maintain the holding we're down to 16 000 feet so this is probably going to work quite nicely actually [Music] okay there goes the left turn perfect [Music] so I'm going to increase speed a little bit so I don't want to descend too sharply so we're using power now to regulate descent rate it's quite a nice way to do it to maintain a given speed [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] happened from outside then to 14 000 feet [Music] let's explore this a bit more so I'm just pulling the throttles back again to let it descend a little bit more quickly [Music] so as soon as we turn back around I will clear the holding out of the interface yeah so we're keeping on this there's some quite a strong cross wind going on at the moment [Music] okay so we're just waiting for the airplane to turn around then it's 12 000 feet still descending [Music] okay so you can see shark is coming and that's where we will be going to so we'll go to clear clear the hold and clear to clear that and execute the change and there's our original route and we will Vector straight back onto it using lav automatically see so the airplane should come out of the turn now [Music] Famous Last Words there we go look flight directories commanding a roll right [Music] and we're just coming through ten thousand feet so we're going to go and turn the Landing lights oh I left them on earlier whoops so they should have been off while we were in cruise but we left them on no harm done [Music] there's no point putting the weather radar on you can see it's a nice day so we're still descending down down to 9000 feet we have to stay above 2000 at the turn so we're targeting uh two and a half thousand feet on the altimeter so let's go and double check the radios for approach into Jersey so we can see here 83 degrees 1.0.9 so let's just go and double check what's in here 1.0.9 we want so one one zero nine zero and can we get to the enter button please oh it's there isn't it [Music] and then our course will need to be 83 degrees when we come off of the um flight management system over to ILS but we won't do that until we make the turn at shark so let's go and zoom in on this display slightly so if you remember the zoom buttons were then here so we'll go over it okay so yeah when we make the turn at shark we will go and reprogram [Music] so we've got 10 miles to lose 5000 feet too much of a problem because as I remember as I said the lower you get the thicker the air gets so the more error breaking you get on the fuselage [Music] okay we're coming down one and a half thousand feet a minute look so they're looking good [Music] the city Island over there we'll just double check those frequencies on little nav map so 1.0.90 83 degrees Yeah it's all looking good [Music] so what we could do just to make this a bit more fun and to use a few different modes there is going to turn the heading bug around to the direction we're actually going we're going to switch the heading mode so then we can safely go to nav mode so we're on heading select mode now on your autopilot so it's just flying the same heading and then we can go and change the source for the displays which means that we can change the course to 83 degrees there we go so the HSI is now representing the runway direction we're also showing the ILS has already been picked up look so we're not that far out but we're just descending down to below it which is good [Music] so the clocks on there as we were within um a thousand feet of our Target altitude just coming up to 3000 feet so we've judged this just about right it's done quite well [Music] so let's Zoom that in again the display so we can see it nice and easily as we approach [Music] now we're approaching two and a half thousand feet look but the airplane engines are still on idle so we're going to start increasing thrust now but not that much hey it's slightly ever done it [Music] there we go I just start to slow down but not too quickly okay we want to turn the heading around now [Music] we can have a play with approach mode go for a pressed approach so it's gone lock [Music] so we'll fly across the path [Music] and it's turning out automatically there we go so it's it's on GS and lock so it should intercept all on its own and start descending at the same point we come through the ILS beam and there it goes so at this point it's all about managing speed and um [Music] descent rate and just keeping an eye on the configuration of the airplanes so as we lose speed we will begin extending flaps so I'm going to start doing that [Music] [Music] so I'm not using power just to maintain airspeed as we Glide in or not Glide in as we descend so we're on approach mode so you can see the wrong way we've got a crosswind going on if we straighten our view up might be worth Just Landing this by hand I hate flagging them autopilot so autopilot off just to confirm that I'm flying now there we go so we're slightly off to the right so let's just correct that while we're here get onto that Center Line and see the marker down here we've gone slightly off to the left now [Music] got quite a strong wind there's 20 odd not wind but it may not be that strong out the wrong way [Music] okay so if we have a look outside just to check configuration we haven't put the nose wheel light on yet so we can go do that over here [Music] and we're just monitoring the localizer and glide slope basically keeping the airplane roughly on track [Music] [Music] [Music] so I've just gone High where I've just dumped the flaps to help slow us down a little bit more 500 looking good 100 there's a lot of turbulence here [Music] 30 20. 10. okay this can come up don't even have to use reverses okay so slowly anyway it seems we touch the wheel brakes we stop okay [Music] so we have a bit of a taxi to do Nate foreign not sure which is the correct way to go here should we have a quick look at the map so we need to do a right turn okay [Music] I think I need to look at the calibration of my controls the throttle at just around the leaving the um idle seems quite vicious it is softening out a little bit but that's easy enough to adjust okay we're just gonna go find somewhere nice to park go around the back I'm always a little bit nosy just to see what's been up it's our transfer or is it Hercules that's a Hercules [Music] nice to my head close we are to these airplanes yeah a bit too close to park in here okay so if you remember we have to deal with the emergency brake and then we can come off the tow breaks and we can roll the condition back to your feather obviously at this point we could if we wanted to go and get ground power connected and convert over to it so Ctrl 6 go to ground power and then we can start turning everything off that we turned on earlier obviously I'm not going to sit here going through doing all of that because it boys tears but yeah you get the idea but yeah I'm quite impressed um I know lots of other people have had loads of issues with it but I didn't seem to have any major issues there other than forgetting to release my parking brake on my controller when we were sat at the departure gate so I guess they were on external power we can just cut the engines and kill the airplane off so Turn The Landing lights off they should have come off on the taxi really can like come off takes like come off and have like come off strobes can come off that should have come off on the taxi as well again this is what happens when you're busy sightseeing and not following procedures uh seat belts thing can come off and let everybody go and Rampage through the cabin just out of interest do we get any nice things here about the no there's nothing to do with um hooking up let's have a look oh it does give you a nice set of stairs okay there you go the ATR not quite sure when I'll fly again it's it's very good it's interesting because it has so many different systems to play with but other than that yeah it does what it says on the tin it's a very nice short kind of commuter aircraft so anyway I'm gonna leave it there and I'll see you again soon

Channel: Jonathan Beckett

Views: 10,060

Keywords:

Id: lAD4OcDoyTI

Length: 63min 51sec (3831 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2023