MSFS: Autopilot basics in the Cessna 172 (G1000) - Microsoft Flight Simulator

hey this is kip and i'm going to give you the basics of using the autopilot in the cessna 172 skyhawk g1000 model in microsoft flight simulator 2020. and i'm running at flight sim version 1930 this is right after the japan update so you know if you're watching this in the future then things might have changed or been improved but this is how it works today so first thing you should remember is the keyboard shortcut control 1. that will zoom into the primary flight display or pfd which is the left screen here in front of the pilot and this particular installation of the g1000 has an integrated autopilot system and that is controlled by this section of buttons and dials on the left side of the panel so we have a heading uh dial that chooses a target heading to turn to we have a set of buttons to engage the autopilot and choose its various um modes including the lateral and the vertical modes and then we have an altitude selection or target altitude dial as well so what i'm going to do first is simply hit the ap button here to enable the autopilot and what that does is turn this status here ap to green this whole section here from the roll ap and pitch these three areas here are the autopilot statuses the left status is your horizontal or lateral mode the center is the autopilot status whether it's engaged or not it'll be blank if it's not or green if it's turned on and say ap and then on the right is the vertical mode so when you first engage the autopilot the modes that it's in is the roll holds mode and the pitch hold mode and what that means is that the wings will be level that's what roll holds mode does in microsoft lights in 1930 that i'm running right now today roll mode only levels your wings out realistically it should actually hold a roll so if you're banking between six and 22 degrees to the left or right it should actually maintain that bank according to the g1000 manual but in microsoft flight sim 2020 at this moment it doesn't do that it just holds the wings level so if you hit autopilot engage it'll level the aircraft out and then pitch mode it'll maintain whatever pitch the nose is at and maintain that so i was pitched up just slightly up from the horizon at like one or two degrees so it's holding that one or two degrees pitch up now if you've never used the g1000 before the basics of this display is that in the top left you have your navigation radios for using vors in the top right you have your communication radios for dialing into tower control ground etc at the left side of the display you have your airspeed information in the center you have your attitude indicator that shows if you're pitched up or banked left or right pitch down on the right side you have your altitude information and your barometric pressure you can change the barometric pressure by using this knob here to the right underneath the word arrow so you can go ahead and change to the correct altimeter setting and then parts of this attitude this vertical display here the altitude information that you'll need to know are the selected altitude display which is the top part right here on top of the altitude and then there's also this little section here above the vertical speed indicator that shows your target vertical speed when you set that later and i'll show you those in a few minutes but first let's go over the lateral modes the simplest one that's on by default is roll that levels it out if you have any other mode on and turn it off and there there are no lateral modes enabled autopilot will use the roll mode the heading mode will point us at a specific heading so right now we're heading 339 if we want to turn to heading say 270 which is directly west we can go ahead and use this heading dial here on the left so when you interact with these dials you can either mouse over the left or the right side to get the left curved arrow or the right curved arrow when you do that and click it'll change the heading by one degree and you can see that changing right here and the corresponding heading bug on the compass and teal will also move so i can turn that to be one at a time and another way to use this is using your mouse wheel when you point to either the left or the right side you can use your mouse wheel up or down to change 10 degrees positive or negative so i'm going to go ahead and mouse down until i get to a heading selection of 270 and you'll notice that it's not turning our aircraft to the 270 heading yet and that's because we're in roll mode which means just keep the wings level so we just need to turn on a heading mode and we do that just by clicking the heading button over here now we'll start turning us to the left you can see that it's now in a heading mode for our lateral mode and it'll turn over to heading west at about a 25 or 24 degree it looks like it's between 20 and 30 degrees so um like a standard rate turn and then it'll level out at 270 and maintain that heading so this is really nice if there's wind or anything it'll just constantly be adjusting our heading and making sure we're at the heading of two seven zero the next lateral mode that you'll probably use pretty often is the navigation mode now i don't have a flight plan loaded in here so i'm going to go ahead and click on the nearest button down here i'm going to scroll this fms wheel the outer ring of this wheel to just pick an airport in the um that's just pretty far away let's go ahead and pick this 4-0 ks whatever airport this is it's 36 miles away has only a thousand foot runway but anyway i'll go ahead and hit direct and then hit enter for activate and you can see that's updated with this magenta line and i have a flight path entered now so i can actually see that flight path here on the map which is just to a single waypoint but if you've configured a flight path in the map screen the world map before you load in then you'll have several waypoints in a row and whenever you enable nav mode by clicking nav mode on it will fly that course for you from waypoint to waypoint to waypoint and you can see up here at the top it says gps now it doesn't say nav because the navigation mode actually has several different modes the most common you'll probably use is gps but there's also a mode that will follow vor towers if you happen to turn it to gps mode and it doesn't seem to and it doesn't do anything it could be because the navigation like sub mode is not set to look at the gps route but instead to is looking at your navigation radios so your vor radio towers if that's the case go ahead and click this button under the cdi label here and that will change you from vor1 or vor2 to the gps mode i'm going to go ahead and turn heading mode back on just to bring us back over to the 270 heading and now let's look at the altitude modes so our vertical modes there are several of these as well the simplest to understand is the altitude hold mode so i'm going to go ahead and click alt here that enables altitude hold and a couple things just changed first it says alt here so we know which mode we're in and then it says 3 700 feet so it's holding our altitude at 3 700 feet also notice the selected altitude which matches this right here is set to 3700 so this is our selected or target altitude when you turn on altitude hold mode it will automatically set it at the nearest 100 foot altitude so it snapped us to 3700 feet now what if i want to change and climb to 4000 feet what i can do is use the altitude selection dial on the bottom left now there's two parts to this dial the inner part the smaller part will turn us in increments of 100 feet and the outer dial if you can find it uh will actually turn us in 1 000 foot increments so you can again use your either clicking with your mouse wheel or sorry clicking with your mouse or turning the mouse wheel i'll hover it over this to change your altitude so i'm gonna go ahead and set this selected altitude which is up here to 4000 so just like with the heading mode even though we've set our target altitude we have to tell it how to get to that altitude now so the first mode we'll look at is vs or vertical speed mode so i'm going to go ahead and click vs to turn it on and again you'll see the status here for our vertical mode change to vertical speed mode 0 feet per minute and then it says alts or alts which means selected altitude so zero feet per minute means that right now it is doing a vertical speed change or a vertical speed mode for us at zero feet per minute which just means it's just going to hold us at our current altitude so to change that we use these two buttons down here nose up and nose down in vs mode when you click these buttons it'll increment feet per minute by 100 feet up or down so if we want to climb we hit nose up we're going to hit it as many times as we want to reach our desired rate of climb so we're going to do 500 feet per minute you can see here that we're climbing it's pitching the nose up this is our vertical speed so it's bouncing around a little bit but it's basically trying to average 500 feet per minute and then you see our altitude coming up you can see now this is flashing because it's getting close to 4000 and it just automatically changed to altitude hold at 4000 feet so when you use a mode like vertical speed mode to reach a certain altitude that you set when it gets to that altitude within 50 feet i believe it will capture that and switch to altitude hold mode to keep you there so that's how you can just say all right you know go to ten 000 feet and just you know get there and you don't have to worry about it it'll get there and it'll level off for you and then it'll hold that altitude and something to mention is that the vertical speed mode does not manage your throttle your engine power at all so if you choose to climb you may need to increase your throttle to make sure you don't stall if you choose to descend you may need to reduce your throttle to make sure that you don't get below your minimum speed or sorry that you don't get into an overspeed situation when you're descending too fast so let's go ahead and do another just do a descent now instead of a climb we'll do it the same way use the altitude selection dial choose 3000 i hit vertical speed mode to turn it on it's on but it's at zero feet per minute so i hit nose down and i'm going to do a steeper climb here we're going to go 1000 feet per minute negative 1000 feet per minute in a descent and you see my speed going up so i want to keep it in the green so i'm going to pull back on my throttle manually to make sure that we don't stress the aircraft by diving too fast and so this will go down until we get to 3000 feet and the alts just means that it's going to wait until it gets within that 50 feet or so of that altitude and then it's gonna go to altitude hold mode the faster you're descending or climbing the faster it's kind of got the momentum of getting to that altitude um the sooner it'll switch to altitude hold mode and then slowly level you off to end up at the selected altitude another way to do a change in altitude is a mode called flight level change or flc and the difference between vertical speed mode and flight level change mode is that with vertical speed mode you're telling it what rate to climb or descend you're telling it in feet per minute i want to go 500 feet per minute up i want to go a thousand feet per minute down and it will just maintain that rate with flight level change mode you actually give it a speed and air speed in knots so the first thing i'm going to do is go look at our best climb speed that's our v y which is 74 knots so if i want to climb up as efficiently or quickly as possible using my best climb speed 74 knots i can use flight level change mode to do that so i'm going to go ahead and switch up to 5000 so i change my selected or target altitude to 5000 now i have to tell it how to get there instead of choosing vertical speed mode i'm going to choose flc or flight level change mode as soon as i click it again just like with vertical speed mode nothing happens and that's because just like the default is zero feet per minute with vertical speed mode the default for flight level change mode is to just hold your current or set it at your current speed until i change the throttle or i change my selected air speed nothing will happen it won't start the climb until one of those two things happen so if i want to climb at 74 knots the closest i can get because right now if you click this it just goes in increments of 10 is 76. so i'm just going to click nose down nose up and nose down when you're in flc mode actually change this target air speed which is right here above the air speed indicator so now what it's going to do is maintaining 76 knots it's going to try to climb but it's actually not climbing right now and the reason for that is it doesn't have enough engine power so i need to move my throttle up my throttle was still low from doing the descent earlier so i'm just going to bump my throttle up and now it has the engine power it needs to start the climb and so the rate of climb isn't what matters it's the speed that it's going to maintain so it's going to choose whatever rate of climb that it can in order to have a minimum or actual just like the straight up speed of around 76 knots so you can see it went from 500 to 700 and it's just going to keep doing that until we get up to our 5 000 mark i'm actually just going to pull it back to 4000. you can do that while it's in the middle of a climb it's totally fine it'll adapt to it so this will climb us up at 76 knots you can see up here again in the status it says flight level change mode target speed is 76 knots and you can go faster or slower it's up to you just remember you want to obviously climb at a rate that's efficient for the aircraft that you're flying and now it's going to level off at 4 000 then we'll be back at 4000 feet so i'm just gonna do a few quick um turns and altitude changes just to show you um that just with a little bit of practice this will be really easy to do so say you're flying a visual route you have a vfr plan and you have the atc telling you all the vectors for your flight so atc they'll just be flying along looking out the window maybe looking at the map looking up some information on where you're going the runways whatever you got autopilot flying you along and the atc comes on calls your tail number your call sign and says i want you to do to climb to 5000 feet and change to a heading of 330 so all i have to do is say okay 3000 feet or sorry 5000 feet 330. so here's altitude 5000 feet heading zero [Music] right here is three three zero i was already in heading mode if i wasn't i would have clicked heading mode to turn it on so that's doing the lateral change for us and then i'm gonna hit vertical speed and hit up 500 feet per minute and make sure that my throttle is high enough to do that climb and that's it i'm now following that instruction if they come on the radio again and they say descend to 2500 feet turning of zero three zero i'll once again go to the heading turn to zero three zero on the heading set my altitude to 2500 feet so i'm gonna roll my mouse wheel a few times but then i'm gonna have to use the inner wheel and roll my wheel or just click to make sure i get the smaller 100 foot increment to get to 2500 i'm already in vertical speed mode and now i'm just gonna change it instead of climbing to descend let's do a really fast descent i'm gonna go 1500 feet per minute and now i'm going to pull back on my throttle because i want to make sure we don't overspeed and stress the aircraft and now say for some reason i'm all of a sudden going to follow my gps route instead i already have that loaded in i click the fpl button i can see that that's loaded in my flight plan to this airport i picked earlier so all i have to do is instead of using heading mode just go ahead and click nav and that's set on the gps mode and that'll resume our route which is on the map over here that's it i hope that helps out i hope you have

Channel: Kip on the Ground

Views: 22,624

Keywords: msfs, autopilot, g1000, tutorial, fs, fs 2020, mfs 2020, msfs 2020, mfs

Id: tOAzASTbypk

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020