Navigraph, LittleNavMap and Simbrief Integration in the FlyByWire A320 in Microsoft Flight Simulator

hello so today we are sitting on the ground at Stansted in the flyby wire A320 this is the free study level A320 that's available for Microsoft flight simulator and the reason we are here today is to have a look at the simbrief integration with flight simulator now and the primary reason we're looking at it at all is because there is a misconception a common misconception I want to address to do with what simbrief can do and what it can't do for you I think there's a huge number of people out there that are either it's too steep a hill for them to climb in terms of devoting the time to learn how some of these aircraft work or they just don't want to and they would rather just have an airplane where you press one big green button and it flies along and they get a slideshow to look out of the window of them happily going from the route along the Route but unfortunately it's not quite as simple as that so I thought that's what we'd have a look at today okay so what is simbrief let's go and have a look at the website you can see here's the simbrief website it's owned by navigraft so simbrief allows you to create operational flight plans if you've ever seen the crew getting onto an aircraft at the airport you'll have seen they have a raft of paperwork in their hand in a folder usually and that's the operational flight plan that's the full details about their route that they've just been given by the airline and it will have all of the notices to Airmen and you know all the details about the roots and winds and winds Aloft and any you know any dangerous areas they need to be aware of that are along their way so let's go and generate one to show you what we're talking about so if we go to the dispatch system in simbrief we can make a new flight and if we scroll down we can then fill in some of these details on this form to give it an idea where we're flying so we put the airline in so that's the icao code for the airline so baw would be British Airways for example we can put in a flight number we can just make it up we can see where we're going from so we'll use the code for stanstead and that's the icao code again and then where we're going to so we'll use Edinburgh just for this quick example you've seen me fly to Edinburgh in videos in the past perhaps so then we can choose the airframe and again there are many already listed so the the A320 Neo is there the a20n and it's already done it this is how quick it is so it's figured out the route and you can see it on a map already drawn you know exactly how it would get from Stansted to Edinburgh following corridors through the sky with a standard instrument departure involved and a standard approach route and lots of waypoints along the way that perhaps even follow corridors okay so if you wanted to turn this into an operational Flight Plan you'd click on generate flight and it's it warns you because you're only allowed to have one at a time so we'll say yes so it gets on and does it and it's busy compiling the operational flight plan for us and you can see now we have got the full operational Flight Plan just covering the route that was sketched out to us and we can pan around in the map it's very clever but here we go look this is the raft of paperwork that the crew look how much of it there is there's probably 20 30 pages of it and it's got all the details of everything about the route all of the notices to Airman all of the safety notices everything you could possibly need to navigate from A to B basically so how do we get this into the aircraft then so we've done our bit in simbri if you'll notice when you actually when you scroll down to the end of the operational flight plan you can actually download the flight plan there as a pln file for example for FS 2020 but that's not what we're going to do we're going to get the airplane to talk directly to simbrief and come and fetch this so we'll just leave that there so we come back over to the A320 and let's go and have a look at it so if we look overhead this is cold and dark at the moment we've not done anything with the airplane we're going to turn the batteries on overhead and we're going to turn on the external power and we'll go and switch on the ideas to to align itself that's the inertial navigation system okay so everything's coming up to speed around the cockpit so let's go and turn the brightness up on the screens we're not actually going to be using anything but we just at least make it look presentable around the cockpit I've got it set to realistic in the airplane so this is going to take seven or eight minutes for the um initial navigation system to align he says famously as it does it very very quickly oh my word anyway uh that's completely thrown me that that started so quickly we're going to take the yeah you can see the backup attitude indicator hasn't so it isn't actually working it's just the screens are booted okay uh let's go and brighten up the engineering screens as well so how do we get simbrief to work in the A320 there's a couple of things we need to do so in the fly tab I think some people call this or just the tablet click on the Cog at the bottom left and on the fourth section then you've got the atsu AOC page so AOC stands for an aeronautical operational control and that's the data communication between the aircraft and the ground atsu is the air traffic Services Unit and that's built by Honeywell on the Airbus and it's actually you can think of it as kind of an integration layer and it allows different aircraft to talk to the same ground system you know to give them a Common Language between each other so when we click on that we get some details we can ignore everything except the bit at the bottom and there's the the clever bit the simbrief username or Pilot ID so if we come into here you can see there's a number in there at the moment if I type my username in and press enter it's popped up and says it's validated it and it's turned it into a number so what's that number that is thrown in there if we go and look in simbrief itself and you'll notice we're while we're looking at an operational Flight Plan there's a button on the far right saying my account so we're going to click on it and you can see there's all the details of my account in simbrief and there's my username but there's no sign of that number if we click on simbrief data there's the number okay that's the number that is being reflected in here so all it really is is your internal account ID for simbrief Okay so we've done that this is important you have to fill that in otherwise the Sim brief integration won't work because when the aircraft goes in our simbury for the flight plan it won't know who to ask on behalf of okay so we can come up here and there's two parts to this system we can have the tablet fill itself with data and the mcdu they're two separate systems they don't talk to each other so let's say import the Sim brief data and there's our flight that we've programmed from egss to egph yeah but that's not the actual one we want to do today because we're going to jump back out we want to go from Stansted over to Dusseldorf and the reason I'm coming back into little nav map is I want to show you the Sim brief integration here as well so we've programmed this in in little nav map using the the usual routine and if you're not sure about that you can obviously I've got a video on YouTube you can go and look at it how to do routes in little nav map so we can go to the file menu in little navmap and we can export the flight plan to simbrief there we go export flight plan to simbrief and it will say export it to sim Reef question mark it's asking that we have a logged in session in simbrief and the browser already otherwise when we click export it will go to Nowhere basically you know it would go the simbrief website would redirect to the login page and it would lose track of what we'd asked it to do so we'll say export so it's popped open a new tab in the browser and we've got a new route from egss to eddl so that stance did over to Dusseldorf which is the one that's in here so we have to generate flight again yeah so it's busy making a brand new operational Flight Plan give it a few seconds and it's done it there's our operational flight plan and it looks broadly the same as that one to get a cleaner view of it we can look at it in another graph as well so there you go so the the flight plan we have here looks the same yes okay so now we've generated this we can come back into the airplane and we could just say import it again and it's changed look from egss to eddl so we're going to Dusseldorf now and notice it's got the details there of the root which is great so the next thing to do is how do we program the actual airplane to do this route because if we go and look in the FMC or fmgc as it calls it here and clear the message from the bottom and then go and look in the flight plan page there's no flight plan yet nothing has been done so what we do is we go to the mcdu menu and you'll see atsu appear again remember atsu is the air traffic Services Unit and within the atsu there is the AOC menu which is the aeronautical operational control that's the airplane talking to the ground and within here we can go to yeah init press yeah and there's this init review page we can say init data request and it's pulled in the data from simbrief straight into the aircraft yeah so we come back into here and we can look on the flight plan now and it hasn't done it I've forgotten something what have I forgotten on the init page sorry on the init page there's two parts to this you go and do that data request in so we went to mcdu we went to atsu we went to AOC we went to init press and we did a data request which fetched the route okay then you go back to init and you do an init request in here and that fetches the flight plan so saying flight number in use take no notice of that and if we look in the flight plan now there's that flight plan that we programmed so here's the important bit look it has not got the whole Flight Plan it's got a discontinuity in the middle of it it hasn't got the Sid and the star programmed at all so pulling in from simbrief is only actually going to pull in the middle of the route all it's got is cln Nick and then nothing else yeah it's just got that and that so it has completely disregarded the standard instrument departure and the standard approach route so what you have to then do is have you have to know how this works so you have to go in to the flight plan page you click on the desk the through the departure Airfield click on departure and you tell you fill in the missing bits so this is how we are going to leave Stansted so we're leaving on Runway 22 and we're doing the cln 2E standard instrument departure and we insert those into our route then we click on eddl we click on arrival now let's go and double check we're coming into Runway two three left the lma8g approach so 23 left and scroll these through lma8g and we insert that and now if we go back and look at our flight plan we can scroll through it it will still have a discontinuity in the middle of it but we've got the full standard instrument departure up to clacton and then we've got the rest of the approach that but notice there's two discontinuities now so we have to clear both of them so we click on clear on this one oops sorry click on clear so it says clear here and then remove that one then scroll further through and click on clear again and we clear that one okay so now we have a flight plant that resembles what we saw so you can see it here look if we go and zoom out slightly and put this on plan mode and zoom out a bit further so we can actually see things it's going to centered on Nick at the moment so if we scroll up and down while we're in plan mode on the um flight display on the navigation display we can actually see the legs of the root and it looks you know that's the end that represents here look so you can see it so yeah the takeaway here is the import from simbrief doesn't bring with it the Sid and the star the standard instrument departure and the standard approach route it only brings the basics of the legs in between okay it doesn't have the runways either so you do have to know some Basics about flight planning with the flight management computer for the simbrief integration to work so it's all it's really bringing is the roots between the said and the star um okay so there's something else you need to know about as well and that is when you program a route in Sim brief so let's go and do an a new one again so if we do a new flight and say British Airways for example one two three and so egss to egph or we do the same trick as we did earlier we go to little nav map and we say export directly to simbrief so we do it Sim brief pops up and look it's lost its login you must be logged in so we'll log in using another graph and it will have forgotten everything so it just shows you the logins are not foolproof and it's it's still got the details which is good so that has held on to them actually better than we thought it might um so we've got the the details here it's lost some of them but you'll notice down here it's saying your route is valid I have a paid never graph account so this really comes down to something that some people don't know about the simulator when you are programming navigation waypoints each aircraft potentially usually it's the simulator itself but some aircraft have their own their own database of the the waypoints the runways the airfields you know and the ILS frequencies they have their own database so usually it's the simulator for the asobo aircraft but some of the more study level aircraft have their own so the pmdg ones for example have their own database the Aerosoft ones typically have their own database as well um if you want an aircraft to have the up-to-date data if you have a paid never graph account navigraft can update the simulator for you not only that remember the data in little navmap comes from the simulator but also if you have navigraph then little navmap understands it and you get an air ax cycle in so an Air Act cycle is the version of the database so in other words you can make sure that little nav map agrees with the aircraft and unfortunately and this is the real catch if you don't have a paid navigraph account the data in simbrief is intentionally old now over time the waypoints and the frequencies and the procedures in the sky change which is why we get different versions of the database every so often because they're brought up to date with the real world unfortunately if you are using a free Sim brief account it's an old version of the database so you may put in a completely valid route for today but it won't work in simbrief because it will say that you know parts of the route don't exist for example or don't exist as far as the old version of the database is concerned yeah and the same is true of other aircraft so if you have like a an Aerosoft airplane for example which commonly have their own database you may find that you can do something in simbriefs that the airplane won't let you do yeah and it will come up with lots of discontinuities in the flight plan because it doesn't have particular waypoints or SIDS or Stars even so it's just something to keep in mind so that's half the reason that's why there are two levels of never graph account the cheaper another graph accounts just give you the data the more expensive ones give you the navigation software with all of the plates and all the rest of it okay as you can see it's even projecting the aircraft position onto the plan in exactly the same way that we can do with um a little nav map so it's doing the same trick so if we go to the tools and connect flight simulator and connect and surprised it hasn't turned up actually where's my airplane gone am I being a bit silly that should be it hasn't it's lost the internet connection hasn't it I think it's because I had a problem earlier if I go and restart this is a bit of a trick if you restart little nav map it'll re-establish the connection to the simulator there we go so I'm actually on the ground now but anyway so yeah the real takeaway this evening was don't expect wonders from the simbrief integration yes it's great and it can pull the root in but it doesn't do everything for you you still need to understand how the flight management Computer Works to go and put the missing pieces of the flight plan back in yeah so it's the the runway Choice the Sid the star you're gonna have to go and do the nice thing though that I haven't touched on if you do have the simbrief integration when you go and look in the init page there's the wind temp section because we've got simbrief in play we can do a wind request and we've got all of the Winds Aloft programmed in so therefore the flight management computer is now enormously accurate at predicting speeds times bearings the rest of it it's because it's got the accurate wind data okay so in the real aircraft they would look at the operational flight plan and program these in but we can cheat because we've got simbrief and we can pull them straight into the aircraft I mean obviously in the real plane they have got atsu they have got AOC but also they have the backup of the printed operational Flight Plan okay I'm gonna leave it there hopefully that was interesting hopefully that explains some problems you've had with the simulator potentially over time so yeah the takeaway as I said is that don't expect wonders from the simbrief integration it's not going to do it all for you okay I'm gonna leave it there and I'll see you again soon

Channel: Jonathan Beckett

Views: 25,618

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Id: EDtH2ATniKI

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 04 2023