New Thrustmaster Airbus Captains Pack - Full Setup & FlyByWire A320 Tutorial

hello everyone and welcome to an exciting video today as we take a first look at the newly released tca captain's pack airbus edition from thrustmaster in this video we're going to go through the entire product in some detail as well as a tutorial on the actual setup of the product so you should have it working seamlessly within microsoft flight simulator so this new captain's pack encompasses the entire range of thrust masters airbus tca products we have the side stick we have the thrust levers and we also have the tca quadrant add-on which is your spoilers and your flaps parking brake landing gear etc which in the past have actually been quite infamously difficult to get hold of but this new captain's pack bundle has everything you need to be able to fly your airbus in the simulator quite realistically we'll also go through the full setup in the flyby wire a32 nx setting all this up on the tablet and calibrating all your detent so obviously when it arrives very exciting and you can see that it's all obviously packaged nice and securely i like the little remove before uh flight on on there and i was impressed to see as well that on on opening that the thrust levers and the add-on pack the spoilers and the uh and the flaps were actually already connected up together so one less thing for me to do there what really impressed me about the side stick was the weight of the device it was really rather heavy and with the rubber grips on the bottom it meant that it's not going anywhere when you're flying it will sit nice and happily on your desk without any issues of it sliding away of course the product comes with full documentation and as you can see here you do also have the ability of buying the thrust levers again separately which would then increase your capability to have four separate thrust levers for of course if you're flying a a four engine jet such as the airbus a380 or the 747 the side stick is also ambidextrous it can be turned to suit either the left-handers flyer or the right-handed flyer this is easily achieved by removing the two panels and then you can replace those with opposing buttons depending on whether you prefer to fly in the right-hand seat or the left-hand seat of your aircraft very easy to do you will need a screwdriver that is not shipped as part of the package though remember if you do decide to switch flying hands then you will need to look at the bottom of the side stick and flick the switch so you are either flying to the right-handed or left-handed side the side stick is also a one-on-one replica of the one used in the real aircraft so size wise it is exactly the same coming on to the thrust levers and the add-on pack obviously these are slightly smaller than those in the real aircraft but they are at a scale of an 8-10 size so they just fit quite nicely and obviously still give you a very realistic feeling the fact that you've got so much control over your aircraft engines and flaps and spoilers now means that when flying in the simulator particularly when you have a 2d screen in the simulator not having to look down at the pedestal and taking your eyes off the fmas and the screens etc is really really nice you've just got now a tactile feel for everything and all the switches and everything feel really nice and solid the only thing that i'm not quite sure of how to use in in the airbus 320 is the auto brake switch now obviously you can switch this low medium and high but of course as you know the a320 doesn't actually have a physical switch it just has the buttons uh by the uh by the clock and the landing gears all of the switches and buttons etc feel really great these two buttons just here aren't actually really buttons in in the real aircraft they're actually a little light which will illuminate if there's a there's a fault but thrustmaster turns into buttons and you can assign those to to whatever you want but as you can see there's the little rudder trim and a nice little spring action there the parking brake doesn't lift up as it does in the real aircraft but again not too not to worry it still feels nice and strong same with the flaps lever that actually doesn't lift up but it does feel nice and solid as as you move it the spoiler's lever comes set with a range of detents on it now the real spoiler lever in the a320 only has a detent at the halfway point so i'm going to show you how you can actually get rid of those detent uh in a little while the thrust levers move really nicely and the detents are very very solid in that so there's not gonna be any mistaking when you push them forward and pull them back to where you want them to be activating reverse idle and reverse thrust is done very realistically and obviously they snap back into place when you push it back to idle and you've also got the auto thrust disconnect button there on the side the only real setting up then you have to do before connecting everything up to your pc is you need to connect the add-on pack to the thrust levers now this is done by using the cables provided one goes there and one goes there two cables put those together and everything is linked up i then wanted to remove the tents from my spoilers lever so it was a little bit more realistic compared to the real aircraft now the way to do this you can see the top line is showing next to a groove setting so in order to turn it around all you need to do is remove the screws and then we can simply lift out the setting just here swap that around a little bit small and fiddly but once that's uh once that's done and in place you'll now see that the line matches up with a smooth straight line which basically means that there is now no detents one of the things that i did find that was each of the levers the spoilers the thrust and the flap lever were actually quite free moving which meant that it would potentially be rather easy to catch them so i wanted to try and make these a little bit stiffer thankfully thrustmaster have thought of this too and they've made it really really easy all you need to do with a cross head screwdriver is turn these clockwise to increase the tension and level of resistance within the within the levers and of course the opposite is true as well so i went ahead and tightened all these up and one side done they really were not too stiff but much more realistic so that you can't just nudge them by mistake you need to make sure you put some force on them to make sure that the levers move and that was particularly true of the spoilers lever after removing that detent setting after i was happy with the setup of the hardware i then connected the side stick to the pc using the usb cable the driver is automatically downloaded for this one so you don't need to do anything else and as you can see as soon as that's connected windows will find it and it's all calibrated and working nicely right from the off next then it was time to connect up the thrust levers but before you do that you do need to go to the thrustmaster website and download their driver for this product once that's all done you'll then be asked to connect the device up and upon opening the properties you'll be able to see that everything is already configured and working or at least it certainly was for me right out of the box you've got your thrust levers and of course all of the other switches and you can just go through and test that everything everything is working and you can see an input registered as you go through and press all the different switches and dials and make sure enable virtual buttons is turned on and checked to make sure that everything works correctly once we're happy with that let's jump in the simulator and have a look at how well this product works so with everything connected up i've simply launched into the simulator in the flyby wire version of the airbus a320 and i'm gonna go and bring up the menu just to see how this is all set up on opening the controller options i was quite amazed actually to find out that the thrustmaster a320 side stick and the thrustmaster throttle quadrant had already been detected and selected for me and a default setting was already waiting for me now azobo have already given us a default profile for this setup so i then wanted to go in and check how everything works in the aircraft without touching anything obviously we can go in a little bit later and refine any sort of key bindings and things for what we want but i wanted to see what the default setting was like and just how well it was going to work without me having to go and tinker around with things so i jumped right in set up uh cold and dark at the gate and i just wanted to see if i started moving things on the throttle quadrant would they move in the simulator and sure enough yes they did uh so thrust levers worked perfectly spoilers as well of course the flaps did all with the set detents automatically detected and working i also then had a quick play with the engine starter switch and engine 1 and engine 2 both all working and going through everything it seemed everything is already set up with nothing to add on the thrust lever setting side of things all of this works exactly as it should out of the box the only thing then i did go in and edit with regards to key binding is the two little buttons which are beneath the engine starter switches i keybound one of those to toggle arming and disarming the spoilers and with the other one i set to the anti-ice so they became useful straight away because sadly with the spoiler lever on the thrust master set you can't lift it up to arm the spoilers as you would do in the real aircraft so those two buttons straight away now we're now in use but i did have to set those up myself let's go over now and look at calibrating these thrust levers with the fly-by-wire aircraft using the efb or tablet [Music] so now i'm going to take you through the calibration setup in the flypad of the fly by wire a32 nx from the tablet we need to go down to the settings which is the bottom left cog wheel and then if you go to sim options and at the bottom there you have the detents and calibrate tab now this is already calibrated uh for me but i'm gonna go through the procedure that uh that i did for setting up the uh the thrust master throttle set and it is straight out of the box with nothing other than the driver download which i spoke about previously being done so any of the settings that you see here in the control page hang on if i just bring those up uh so if i go here and then on to the sensitivity settings here these are all default i have not changed these at all so as you can see if i move the thrust levers they are exactly where they are when i came and just installed it for the first time of course you've also got the spoilers lever and the flaps lever as as well so let's uh come out of that because we're going to leave it exactly where it is and just one final note actually before i leave this page you can see that thrust idle at the moment is right bang in in the center if i then want to go into reverse idle you can see that's uh housed just there and then the full reverse is right down at the bottom but again you don't need to mess with these because they are exactly where where they are out of the box so let's just uh go back to the flypad okay and as i'm moving the thrust levers all the way to the top and down to the bottom detent the idle detent you can obviously see that they're showing there and because we have two independent axes make sure that that is fixed we've also got a reverser as well with the thrust master set so make sure that is turned on as well so the way that i went and calibrated these is let's just see if we can get you in a little bit closer there we go so what you mustn't do is have a look at your thrust levers in the sim the virtual thrust levers when you're calibrating them this doesn't matter these can be anywhere doesn't matter where they are all you're bothered about is your physical thrust levers that you've got your hands set on so let's go back over to the tablet so now i have put my thrust levers in the idle gate so right down at the bottom so i'm then going to go to idle and then i'm going to click set from throttle set from throttle and apply and then going to move it up to the next gate which is the climb gate i'm going to select that set from throttle set from throttle and apply now up to the flex and then select it set from throttle set from throttle and then of course all the way up to toga and if we go up there we can set from throttle set from title again so now all of those gates have been set the toga the flex the climb and the idle and you can check that those are working by then after you've done that going to check the sort of virtual ones here in the simulator so there's idle i can hear it clicking nicely into the climb gate flex and finally toga and then we need to do exactly the same with the couple of reverse gates so if we bring that all the way down let's not try and set it on here again we're going to go back to our tablet and if i now pop this into the reverse idle position and then select it and we can set that from the throttle set that from the throttle and now i'm going to go down to the lowest setting reverse full set from throttle and set from throttle okay so now i can see that i've got a little message it says reverse full overlaps with reverse idle so the reason for that is because i forgot to change this so let me just go back to reverse idle set that set that now i'm going to go down to reverse throt full set that again there we go and i'm still getting a message telling me that reverse idle and then it tells me whereabouts that is overlaps with idle if you're getting a slight overlap of these two detents well then what you can do is you can reduce the dead band so let me just show you so at the moment these two are overlapping each other so if i go to reverse idle and if i just decrease that let's go no point note 2 and set that and then set this one and set that actually i made a slight mistake here because my physical thrust levers are still in the reverse fall position so it's very easy to sort of get yourself confused because there's a lot to make sure that you remember you do as you're going down the first four are relatively straightforward because they are quite a way away from each other in the gates but let's now just go back to reverse full and i know my thrust levers physically i've got my hand on them or right down at the bottom so let me just reset that again set that reverse set from throttle set that one from throttle now let's go up to reverse idle and i need to remember to actually select reverse idle let's set that now and that one and suddenly because i have reduced that deadband well now i haven't got a problem now i haven't got a problem the tablet will allow me to click apply and also save and apply make sure you select uh both of those then you know that what you've saved will will be working now when i go and check all of these detents out i can go idle climb flex together all the way back down to idle and then if we want to go into the reverse gate we can go either reverse full or we can go just to reverse idle and there they are so that's how that has been calibrated using the efb and that will work nicely now meaning that because of the way the thrust levers are set and they're really really solid it means that we can quite happily no longer have to look at our thrust levers as we're flying we can concentrate on the fma's navigation display etc what's happening in the general flight deck picture and with my hand on those thrust levers i know instantly whereabouts i am without having to pan the screen around so nice and easy to set up and uh thanks to the flyby team for making that uh pretty straightforward the only thing left for me to do after this was to start flying around with my new side stick and become accustomed to obviously using this rather than the hardware that i had been using previously it does take a little bit of getting used to but it is fantastic now after you've done that of course you've got i think it's 16 buttons on the on the side stick which you can obviously set to anything that you want the red button is usually used for the autopilot disconnect that's set by default you've got a hat switch on the side stick as well which by default is set to different points of view i wasn't completely happy with that so i went and just amended what the uh what that could do i use that now for my custom views but then as for all the other buttons on the um on the side stick it's entirely up to you and of course with all the different keybinds available in microsoft flight simulator uh the possibilities are endless i've set mine to control some of the lights because anything that's on the overhead panel of course when you're flying you you don't want to be having to pan up to have a look at it it's easier just being able to press the button on the side stick so you know that it's there one nice little thing that i have set up is the uh thrust wheel on the side stick i've actually set now to my trim wheel so i can set the trim wheel semi realistically now when flying thank you so much for watching guys i hope you found that video useful if you have got any questions regarding this hardware setup from thrustmaster then please do get in touch let me know in the comments down below and if you have had this recently let me know what do you think of the product i personally think it's fantastic and all my flights and live streams now will be conducted using this setup big thanks to thrustmaster for releasing this full captain's pack edition i look forward to seeing you all next time thank you very much for watching and i'll see you all again very soon bye bye for now

Channel: Easyjetsimpilot

Views: 50,691

Keywords: thrustmaster airbus tca pack tutorial setup

Id: CCB64Epjtvg

Length: 20min 16sec (1216 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021