How to use a Flight Director - MSFS. (Alpha Hotel Flight Simulator Training - Quick Looks #3)

hello flight summers and welcome back to alpha hotel flight simulator training in this quick look video we'll take a look at how to use a flight director so what is a flight director a flight director is a flight instrument that is overlaid on the attitude indicator and gives the pilot visual roll and pitch cues to fly the desired flight path flight directors were developed in the late 1950s to give pilots direct roll and pitch cues while flying an instrument landing system approach or ils this resulted in pilots being able to fly more precise approaches than was possible using raw course data and enabled lower approach minimums they became commonplace equipment on turbine aircraft by the 1960s and became available in piston engine ga aircraft by the 1980s like horizontal situation indicators they can be either mechanical or electronic and their standard feature on most efis equipped aircraft which has allowed them to become widespread in the modern general aviation fleet even though they were developed for flying approaches flight directors can be used to give roll and pitch cues in most phases of flight inputs for setting the flight path the flight director will display are usually entered through the same system that's used to control the autopilot and in most systems the flight director is actually the system that sends commands to the autopilot in fact on many autopilot systems equipped with a flight director the flight director must be on to use the autopilot though not all autopilot systems are equipped with a flight director the flight director system on most aircraft equipped with one can be used independently of the autopilot in other words you can turn on the flight director enter the desired flight path and then hand fly that path by following the flight director though this can be a bit cumbersome in flight simulator depending on the aircraft you're flying in two crew aircraft such as airliners in the real world the pilot not flying typically makes the entries to control the flight director if the autopilot is not engaged so the pilot flying can focus on flying the aircraft and in most of the jet aircraft and flight simulator the flight director can be set up so you can make minimal manual entries and just focus on flying the jet in single pilot aircraft however using the flight director without the autopilot can be quite workload intensive as you have to make the manual entries into the automatic flight system while hand flying the aircraft so most pilots tend not to do this the exception to this is when flying an ils approach as long as you have the system set up to track the ils prior to initiating the approach and turning off the autopilot it's pretty easy to hand fly the ils using the flight director and it's actually good practice if you're new to flying an ils to get used to the small corrections you need to make to precisely fly the localizer and glide slope as they become more sensitive closer to the runway there are two types of flight directors split queue and single queue split queue systems were the first type to come into use they're sometimes referred to as cross bars or cross hairs and are more common in the airliners in microsoft flight simulator this system consists of two command bars the vertical bar moves left and right to indicate how the pilot should bank the airplane to follow the desired flight path and the horizontal bar moves up and down to show how the pilot should pitch the aircraft to follow the desired flight path the proper way to fly this type of flight director is to roll and pitch to keep the little square on the attitude indicator that represents the aircraft nose wherever the crossbars meet the single cue flight directors also sometimes referred to as v bars or bat wings consist of two upside down v-shaped command bars that can move up and down for pitch and roll left and right for banks simultaneously all you have to do to fly this type of system is bank and pitch to lock the triangle shaped aircraft symbol under and into the command bars like a puzzle piece it's very intuitive and easy to use and is the system that's preferred by most pilots some efi systems particularly those in third party aircraft can be configured to display either a split cue or single queue flight director depending on pilot preference so let's take a look at a quick demonstration on how to use a flight director system so first we'll take a look at the single queue model i'm currently in the uh cessna 172 with the g1000 this is actually the nxi mod that's up here right now although uh the both flight directors do work the same between the stock model and the nxi model right now i'm level at five thousand five hundred feet uh cruised out here and heading southbound and i do have the autopilot on so you can see the flight director is uh up here and uh giving guidance to the autopilot right now but i can also turn the autopilot off you see the autopilot disengages but the flight director stays up there and it's going to give me uh pitch and roll cues to right now just maintain a heading of one eight zero and a level altitude of 5500 feet uh if i want to do like a turn i can just turn the heading indicator or the heading bug here on the autopilot and you can see as i do that it indicates that i need to turn to the left here it's banking to the left and see what i mean about this being cumbersome i have to do this on the autopilot control panel and then i actually have to hand fly the airplane as well if i want to just use the flight director not the autopilot so it gives me a roll cue to the left here and i follow that cue and then when we get over there to the heading it'll give me a cue to roll back out and there it's giving me the roll back out cue and i just follow that i just locked the yellow bars right underneath and right into those magenta command bars and the aircraft should stay on the flight path that i've put into the automatic flight control system and this uh lateral mode this roll mode will work for heading and it will also work for any navigation mode that you want to put it in so if you want to put it into track a gps course or a vor course or a localizer front course or back course it will give cues for all of those things and i can also use this to engage a vertical mode just like i can with the autopilot so i will roll my altitude down to 3500 and i will go ahead and put into flight level change and reduce the power to descend i'll put about 1900 rpms in there and you can see the command bars uh pitch down to indicate that if i want to maintain that 103 knots i have in there that i need to pitch the nose down and again we just lock it right in underneath the command bars there and it will perform as long as we lock it in there it will follow the desired flight path and to show you how it does with roll and pitch q simultaneously i'll put a little turn in here back to the south and again if as long as i follow those uh flight q or those flight command bars then it will do exactly what i enter into the control system and you can see as it comes up on the heading it goes ahead and rolls back out and then as we continue the descent it will give me a command to pitch up when it captures the altitude and you can see from the uh autopilot status box up there that it has gone into the altitude capture mode you can see it is now cueing me to pitch up just a little bit so i will add some power and follow those command bars and that will command me to level off at 3 500 feet so here's a demonstration of the last thing that you can do with the flight director which is to shoot an approach hand flying approach with it use it to assist you as you're flying the approach currently i am inbound on the localizer for the ils runway 36 at stuttgart municipal airport in stuttgart arkansas and uh i have it set up to have the autopilot on right now i've got it set up to track the localizer and i have the approach mode arm so the glide slope is armed so at this point i can take off the autopilot and it will be nice and stable the glide slope as you can see is coming down so all i have to do is uh slow down the aircraft so i'll begin to slow the aircraft and configure for the approach and then once it uh intercepts the glide slope all i have to do is follow those flight director cues and it will help me to fly a nice ils and you can see the glide slope mode is activating there and you can see that the aircraft pitches down and now it will give me both roll and pitch cues to fly the ils so it's pretty easy to do this there's not a lot of messing around you have to do with the automatic flight control system panel all you do is arm the approach when the autopilot's on and then again you just lock in the flight director and fly it down and it should help you to fly a nice smooth ilist this is really good practice if you're trying to learn how to fly an ils to kind of get practice on what kind of corrections you need to make typically it does it pretty smoothly all you have to do is kind of follow the flight director and you'll get a sense of what you need to do to the kind of corrections you need to make to fly the ils you can see even as it gets really sensitive close to the runway as long as i follow those flight director command bars it's going to keep me pretty well centered up on the needles and help me to fly a nice smooth approach i'm getting close to my decision height coming in with about 20 feet so i'll go ahead and take a look outside and there's the runway so it's helped me to fly a nice smooth approach i hand flew the approach and use the flight director for guidance all right so let's take a look at how the split cue flight director system works as i said earlier most of these are going to be in the airliners in the game they're on the airbus 320 and then if you happen to have the uh 787 in the premium deluxe edition it's also on that so to fly that type of system you have to pull up one of those aircraft uh we're level at one five thousand currently uh just to the north of north of memphis tennessee i'm doing uh 250 knots and i have it in a heading uh hold mode uh at 180 degrees so a southbound heading and right now the autopilot is on so let's take a look at how this system works i'll go ahead and turn the autopilot on of course the autopilot has this nice and trimmed up and it will continue to fly pretty well in manual fight if i don't touch much of anything right now i'm gonna go ahead and enter a turn to zero nine zero in the automatic flight control system here and you can see when i do that the roll bar which is the vertical bar moves over to the left to tell me that i need to bank to the left to make that turn so i'll go ahead and enter a turn again i keep it on the pitch bar to do the appropriate pitch to keep it on level flight and see when it's happy with my angle of bank the bar actually moves to me and then i just want to keep that little square box centered up right on the crosshairs there and that will keep me level and in the turn and then it will start to move back the other direction once it's time to roll out and you can see as i approach my heading it tells me that i need to go the other direction it moves to the right i move to the right and then when it centers up then i'm following the guidance and it will do what i have programmed into the system so that's how the roll mode works on a split cue system so now let's look at take a look at what a vertical change looks like so i will go ahead and roll myself down to 11 000 feet and i will put it in an open descent mode and you can see the flight director commands uh a pitch down to do the open descent of course we have auto throttle in the uh 320 so that's going to take care of the throttle portion of it for us and then we just follow that uh pitch cue uh and it will give us a level off cue once it gets down there so the pitch bar just moves up and down just like the uh pitch cue does on the uh single queue flight director we can also combine the two modes and we can do say a turn back to the right to uh 180 again and again if you're in a real airliner when you're flying manually like this the other pilot is going to be the one that's going to be entering this into the uh autopilot control system while you're flying and all you have to do is follow the flight director so i'll pitch down to get the uh pitch bar in the center there and then i will bank until the roll bar is in the center there and then just keep that square right in the middle and uh that will have me follow the desired flight path uh to the heading and the altitude that i want to be at and so i approach my heading first so i'll go ahead and follow the roll bar and that'll roll me back out on that 180 heading and you can see it's gone back into the altitude capture mode and the pitch bar starts to come up so again i just keep those crosshairs right in the middle all the throttles on the airbus are going to take care of the throttle for me and i level off at 11 000 feet so a little bit different of the look with the split q flight director most folks do prefer the single queue flight director but you know once you learn the ins and outs of flying a split queue it's not that difficult and finally we'll take a look at what shooting an ils looks like with a split q flight director again we're in the uh airbus a320 and we are inbound on the localizer for the ils to runway one eight right in memphis at memphis international airport currently just a little bit uh to the north of mcvay intersection which is where i will intercept the glide slope and so i will turn off the autopilot here shortly and then i will just follow the cues to follow the approach down all i have to worry about is setting up the speed uh basically transferring it over to the automatic speed and letting the auto throttle handle that and then configuring the aircraft for the approach and landing once i get down to about two thousand feet above the field all right so i'm about three miles from mcvay the glide slope's starting to come down i'll go ahead and turn the autopilot off and now all i have to do for now is just follow the flight director cues to fly the localizer and glide slope down and then again when i get to about 2000 feet i will go ahead and configure the aircraft for landing and then all i have to worry about after that is uh following the flight director cues all the way until i get a visual and we can see the vertical modes gone into glib slope capture and it does give me a pitch down all i have to do is follow that q and it will take me right down the glide slope there's 2000 feet so i'll go ahead and start configuring and slowing down so i'm just a little bit below a thousand feet now and all i have to do i'm configured i'm coming up on my speed all i have to do now is just fly those flight director cues and the auto throttle will take care of the speed and just fly it right down to minimums and then hopefully look outside and get a visual and land 500 again i'm just concentrating on keeping that box right in the center of those crosshairs and that should put me right where i need to be when i break out 300. and there's the approach lights coming into sight and i can stay on the flight director actually all the way down to 100 feet on a jet especially if it's equipped for a cat to aisle or yeah cut to ils 50 40 30. so that's how to fly an ils using a split q flight director again just a little bit different of a look than you would have with a single queue flight director but not that difficult once you get some practice none of the general aviation aircraft that are equipped with the g1000 in microsoft flight simulator are equipped with a toga mode which is a takeoff and go around mode and this concludes both the stock g1000 and the working title g1000 at least as far as i know if you know a way to get the uh toga mode to work let us know in the comments that doesn't mean you can't use the flight director for guidance on takeoff though what you want to do is set your altitude pre-select field to the announce the initial altitude you'll be climbing to after you take off so i've got 5000 set in there assuming that's going to be my clearance limit altitude for the time being and then you want to turn the flight director on it will initially go into the roll hold and pitch hold mode and that's the modes that typically we're going to want for takeoff for the pitch hold mode you want to use your nose up and nose down buttons to adjust the pitch so that it is at the pitch that your aircraft rotates to uh on rotation during the takeoff roll so on the cessna 172 i'm going to adjust that pitch mode so it's about at 10 degrees so there's about 10 degrees of pitch just a little bit under but that should be good enough to give us a little guidance on uh take off there and then in most cases you're going to want the roll hold mode on it's going to hold wings level since we turned it on the ground and our wings were level although if you do have a complicated departure that's loaded in the gps make sure that your cdi is tuned to the gps make sure that the flight plan and map look accurate as to what you want to do on the departure and if that all that is true then you can engage the nav mode instead of the roll hole mode and then that will give you good guidance for takeoff that's once you get airborne you can switch it over into flight level change for the pitch mode and whatever you want to do on the roll mode once you're at a safe altitude that you can start messing around with buttons and thinking about turning the autopilot on flight directors in most jets have a toga mode or take off and go around mode you typically activate this mode during your preflight and this mode will enable the flight director to give you accurate guidance as soon as you lift off on approach you can typically use a flight director in a ga airplane down to the minimums published on the approach on jet aircraft you can usually follow the flight director down to 100 feet above the runway if the system is certified for a cat 2 ils approaches if the aircraft is certified for cap 3 approaches the flight director will actually give a pitch cue for the flare though to legally hand fly cat 3 approach rather than using auto land in the real world you need a heads-up display or guidance system and i don't think any of the aircraft and flight simulator equipped with this system are currently capable of giving cat 3 landing guidance most jet aircraft flight directors will be capable of giving guidance during a go-around again by activating the toga mode but again most general aviation aircraft and flight sim don't have a toga mode so your best bet if you need to fly a missed approach will be to turn off the flight director and fly on raw data until you're at a safe altitude for programming the system again that concludes this video hopefully this gives you a good idea of what a flight director is how they work and how to use them as always if you've enjoyed the content please don't forget to like subscribe and ring the notification bell thanks for watching and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Alpha Hotel Flight Simulator Training

Views: 8,202

Keywords: MSFS, Flight Simulator 2020, Flight Simulator Training, MSFS Training, MSFS Tutorial

Id: fVo7OnKxDJo

Length: 22min 41sec (1361 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 17 2022