Real Airbus Pilot A320 MCDU Setup Tutorial in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to another video with me 320 sim pilot and today we're going to be looking at how to set up the mcdu in the airbus a320 neo in microsoft flight simulator 2020. i am a real world airbus pilot but as always this is not for any real world use it's just to give you some extra context on what we do with the real aircraft and hopefully give you some help using the flight simulator at home the mcdu or the uh is the effectively the box that we use to control the flight management system in the airbus a320 so it's sometimes known as mcdu fmgc fms depending what you're used to but either way it has the same result it's effectively the computer where we enter the route we can enter in our performance figures it can calculate our fuel burns our estimated time of arrivals lots of clever things like that so today hopefully i can give you a clue as to how to get it set up as you can see a rather stormy miserable day here in amsterdam code echo hotel alpha mic and that's where we're going to depart for our relatively early morning flight down to rome but sadly a thunderstorm has set in typically that means that one person is going to be stuck doing a walk around out in the rain as you can see uh our poor ground colleague is stood out here whilst the other uh pilot will be setting up the mcdu and luckily for us today that will be us we'll be in the nice cozy and warm flight deck to enjoy uh setting up the computer right let's get started okay so there's a simple way to remember how to set this up and the things you need to do now not all of those things are modeled in this aircraft so we'll just do what we can but it's a mnemonic called diff strip so d i f s r i p and it stands for a few different things so it goes uh data in its a flight plan secondary flight plan radio nav init b and performance so let's go through each one of those now first we are on this page and this is where the aircraft will power onto you can get to this page by pressing data and aircraft status that's why this is the d for data what we're looking at is checking that it's got all the right numbers in it and so on now this is pretty simple um and you'd also check the database is valid now this is not valid this is an old database but that's all we have in this right simulator for now in the real aircraft this would actually cover the dates you're on and you have a backup database built into it as well primarily so that you can have well you have the other one ready but also in case of any sort of corruption of the other database you've got a backup loaded there we go so that is now checked as correct now we've checked that we can go from d to i in it a so let's talk about init which is here and i'm gonna press init and this is called init a there isn't in its b if you press this arrow this is in its b but we want to be on in its a which is the the core of what we're setting up loading in our route and so on so into here i'm going to enter the route now i'm getting this from simbreven hopefully i can put up a picture of this on the screen right now simrief is an excellent website i'll put the link in the description and it allows you to generate flight plans with fuel and so on and realistic airways now if you don't want to do this you could load in the route directly from microsoft flight simulator which lets you do it on the main page where you set your departure and your arrival but i'm going to show you how we would do it in the aircraft without any other information uh or without any other pre-loading sorry so we're starting in e-ham so in principle in the mcdu you type it in and it appears at the bottom here if you see amber boxes or anything like that it means it needs information so you're going to need to give it to it so you type it in and copy the format that you see so we need e-ham slash because that's from we're going to rome which is l i r f rome freumachino lima india romeo box shot so these ammo boxes tell me i need to put that in there and there we go now it takes me to this screen and it's saying there are no company routes stored sometimes airlines will have roots loaded into the database and that way it would appear company root one two three and you could choose one of those and it would already know the route by which i mean the airways and the waypoints so on we don't have any so we're gonna return and there we go it's loaded that in now it's automatically generated a few things here 245 is there because i told the flight simulator that was my flight number for today so i'm going to put in my actual call sign sim245 which is what you put in there that's what air traffic will see when they're seeing us on the radar alternate airport again sim brief will tell you this for us today it's lima india romeo november so you can type that in there costing x again this will come from your flight plan uh there's all sorts of costing x's used the higher the number the faster it is and the more fuel you'll burn so typically anywhere from 0 30 somewhere around there so let's go for example 17 as a cost index cruising flight level it's chosen flight level 360. i want to cruise at 3 3 0 according to my simbri flight plan so i'm gonna put in three three zero slash and it should automatically give you the temperature that's the temperature in the cruise you can change that if you know the temperature is going to be different right so that is in it a done we've given it where we're going and we've sold it flight number cost the next so it's calculated a few things what cruising flight level we're using excellent now let's go to flight pan so here we go flight plan is the next step and it's totally blank we've got from eham to lirf at a decel point nothing else in there so how are we going to load in our flight plan well to start off we need to know the departure we want to use again sim reef will tell you this but you can load it in on the flight simulator homepage when you're setting up the flight if you simply select the uh sort of airways you want to use so high outstreet airways for example for this sort of client and then you can choose the sid and start there once you have selected it you'll see it drawn on the map and hopefully it will connect to your flight plan this is where sim brief is really useful because it will automatically connect the route so um your sid and your start your city's your departure your stars your arrival as you can see here selecting a vor arrival and then a star they'll tie up if you use sim brief because it will choose the right style for the waypoints on your flight plan so what i'm going to do is enter it from my sim brief generated flight plan so that says i'm going via rend rendy so select the airport that you're departing from so this press flight plan once to get to this page select next to that uh airport so that's this key up here and then it's actually this one lateral revision from em but we want to put in our departure so let's put it departure and today i think i'm departing from runway 24. now if you're not sure about this you can use air traffic control which will give you clearances and that's how you'd normally find out in real life it would just depend on what runway that airport is using um depending on the wind and so on you want to take off into a headwind um so that that would be the the main sort of criteria but if i've been in runway two four and then i'm looking for the sid that matches up to my flight plan so that is the rendy one sierra so i can select that there and there you go i've got runway two four with my sid and uh there's no transition available on this so that's fine if i click these arrows it just lets me re-choose so if you want to change your mind i could go in and choose another runway like zero nine and then fill it with it but i'm happy with two four so let's go back to runway two and rendy on sierra and insert now you'd normally check that against your chart but as we don't have that today let's see i can go back here um or you may not have it at home if you want to use navigate you can and that's what i use but it does require a subscription what we can do is just check that this looks roughly sensible so i know i'm going south east down to rome so if i go to plan up here press constraint and i've got this which is the range set to 10. now i can just scroll through the waypoints in here with that little arrow and it flies along and it shows me on this screen where the airplane will go so that all is pretty good and that's going to take me out to that waypoint at dupo okay great so a depot my symbol for greece so from a depot i'm going to take an airway the airway zulu739 so again select that point that you're going to fiddle with the route from edu boat and now select airway so it goes to ado and now i'm going to join the airway 739.0739 put that there and i'm going to take that airway up until the point misgo m-i-s-g-o and insert that there so now the airways go in the left and then the two-way point so the where you come off that airway goes on the right so from misco i'm going direct to charlie oscar lima so for that i can go back here let's go and now i can type it into this page directly for example if you're not using airways so flight simulator may if you use flight summation to generate your roots it doesn't always show you the airways it just gives you all the way points so if you'd like to tune those in one by one you can it's more time consuming but to do that to do that i simply type it in so charlie oscar lima and it's gonna go below miz go so misgo is this key here let me take you back to the correct view which will hopefully make that more simple uh so miss goes there so i'm gonna select it there now normally it will let me put it in but for some reason this simulator doesn't allow that so if it doesn't work there you can put it in the one below and now these are all it would normally tell you the distance away from you so you don't get the wrong one but i can see that this one's at north 50 whereas that one's at north 40. these are quite a long way away west 74 whereas where slightly east so i know that's the vor i'm looking for charlie oscar lima it should really be the top one on that list normally because that should be the closest one and they're never that close together unless it's the same sort of way points um so there we go i can insert that and from charlie oscar lima we go director ritsu so again i can do that straight on this page rid sue i've got to put it in there and insert scroll down read to i'm going to take an airway again so select next to the waypoint and you can see it doesn't have to be at the top of the screen just pick the way point so it's there suppressing the one next to it then airways and from ritsu i'm going to take and it tells me up here actually airway from ritsu the real airbus wouldn't show you all these old ones and this will become a problem in a second and you'll see why ritsu and then upper lima 607 from red suit up and even 607 i'm going to take that to abu ka alpha bravo uniform kilo output okay so there you go um it seems to change its mind as well i'm not sure what database is using but it's decided on its own airway sometimes it seems to do that which is not what the aircraft does i don't know why and there we go now here's the problem if i wanted to go from a buca on another airway it doesn't let me there's no way for me to scroll do any more so like i say in the real aircraft i would select now a ibuka and airways and i'd be able to type in a whole fresh page but it doesn't let me so how do we get around that well luckily as you can see our flight plan wants us direct to batter so i'm going to type that in that insert but now we're a bit stuck because i can't actually put in the airway from battle we're supposed to take the mic 738 it won't let me do that i've tried all these different things so it seems to just have that limitation um so all i can suggest is i'm going to skip the airways and just do the weight points now that's not how you do it in real life because some of these airways may have turns in them but here we go batter to a dosa put that in there and i can actually keep doing that i don't need to keep inserting so i should take an airway but it won't let me so let's go lumav and put that in there and you can draw out the root see and then should take another airway but it won't let me so gabra that can go in there and then rit ebb and as you can see you can just type it in and then just insert it at the end now retab is the last way point i'm going to enter in as the flight plan and there's a reason for that what i will do is just before i do anything else if we go back to our normal cockpit view and we can now just have a double check that this route looks sensible on our navigation display so i press flight plan it takes me to the start then i can press this little it looks like it's pointing up but it scrolls down through the list so there we go along the route we go let's zoom out on the range and you'll get a sense and you can see that yeah that looks sensible there's a sensible straight route down to rome francino but as you can see riteb is the final waypoint on the flight plan before the arrival again you'd need the charts if you want to go and use navigraft for that um to show you what these arrivals should look like but for here we're just going to set it up in my ios video i talk a little bit about the chart so i'll show them if you want to use them right so now because i've got up to that waypoint which is the start of the star it's called the terminal arrival i can now choose my arrival so let's select the airport next to destination l-i-r-n so select here just as we did earlier except now it says arrival not departure so let's select arrival and i'm going to select whatever i expect to do so i'm hoping for the rls onto runway let's take 1 6 left again you'd look at the weather or maybe a traffic will tell you if you need help setting up the approaches i've got other videos on that or i will certainly do soon um right i wanted the ios once it's left it doesn't seem to have it that's unusual um okay let's do an rls onto three four right instead then and it's got a fire net and it's done that automatically you can see up here this yellow line shows what i've planned in and it actually looks pretty sensible goes around from the south round and into future chino i know that my star which is currently not showing is the ritz retep so i'm going to go to written scroll all the way through again these are slightly out of date as well so your charts may not match it if you do go for the charts but there we go root said two kilo and now it's got some extra bits in it it goes written and then around these points and that's more accurate so we've got the rls approach that we want via a waypoint and star we've chosen so i can insert that and now that's done that's all in green if i go to flight plan let's go back to our cockpit view and we can scroll all the way through and if i zoom in now we'll get to see that arrival around it goes and in onto the rls and we've got the constraints pressed so we can see the as usual as it wants us to be and that's usually if you're going to go and fly the ios because as long as you're at these altitudes you should be able to then intercept the ios i have a video on the ios if you need help with that so that is the flight plan page some things to note about this page now it shows us unexpected arrival time although it shouldn't really do that it should show you the time it's expecting you to take on that route and also a distance 783 so we can check that roughly against the flight plan we loaded to make sure it's sensible and in real life we would check these things differently to make sure it's it's roughly accurate or should i say accurate okay so that is the flight plan now we have s for secondary flight plan where we can load up another of these which you might be able to use if there's a change of runway something like that sadly it does not work in microsoft flight simulator 2020 a airbus the default airbus so we can't use it today next will be radio nav so rednav here now you can see it's already tuned the ios at the other end that's into roam the is34 right but you might want to tune in a vor here for your departure depends on your charts now these days a lot of these departures are nav so you wouldn't bother because it would automatically choose what it thinks is necessary and our waypoints are based on um their points in space so they need gps effectively or some sort of high accurate navigation this is more for if you're flying a conventional departure where you need to use a vor so for example around amsterdam there is a vor called the sierra papa lima now a voi is a navigation aid i can type that in oh no it doesn't let me do it that way slash sierra public i hope it doesn't even let me do that that's normally how you can type it in so it wants the frequency um so i'm going to leave it as automatically tuning because it's a an rnav sid anyway but that's what you might choose to put in there or maybe an ndb if you're using one of those so for example a departure that says climb straight ahead to six miles on this vor and then turn left onto a radial things like that slightly more advanced navigation stuff in terms of piloting now we've done uh radio now the next page we're gonna look at is init b so again press init and as i said earlier you press this little arrow either one will get you between the two pages and now we're on to init b for this page hopefully it's set up about right really you need to know the balance and performance of your airplane you can check your weight in here um it gives you an idea but it doesn't really show you the the cg or so on so you need to have seen that from before you loaded up the flight really which is a bit of a nuisance um what you can do is if you know what your cg is from having loaded up the flight earlier and i'll show you how to do that now so on the aircraft page when you're setting up your flight you'll be able to see a weight and section in here you can set it to pounds because we always load fuel in weights really i don't know why it mean cannons and you can see over here the mac so this is the cg number so here in this case you can see it is 21.6 if you adjust the weight like if i increase the economy class weight you'll see it move and that's pretty much what that is uh you'll need to make sure you know the weight in kilograms instead of pounds so that would involve a bit of conversions sadly so what you can do is type in that zero of your hcg into here so put in the slash and then whatever it is let's say it's 26 today and you can put that in now won't let me do it so i think it's going to make me demand that i do the whole thing there we go so if it doesn't there you you can type in the whole thing to do that um up here taxi fuel i'm going to put in 200 kilos so 0.2 so it knows i'm going to burn that now why it doesn't have a trip fuel i don't know it should calculate how much fuel it thinks that route will take same for final reserves alternate fuel i can take that from my sim brief so my sim brief reckons the alternate fuel is going to be 1.7 tonnes so 1.7 nope not taking that either oh well and final reserve fuel 1.2 typically there we go that works final reserve fuel or this final time is the amount of fuel you need to land with even if you divert you still have this much fuel in tanks so it's about 30 minutes normally and that is 30 minutes holding at 1 500 feet above the destination so in an airbus it's typically around 1 to 1.2 tonnes having said that in a neo actually it could be a bit less maybe i should change that to about 0.9 uh the neo is obviously burning less fuel great block fuel would go in here now we have 10.6 stands on board a bit much for that route probably but there it goes to get my take off weight now the aircraft should show me this but we're going to have to calculate it but that's fine sir if you're at 50.2 plus 10 so that's 60.2 plus 0.6 so that's 60.8 so let's just add those two together and put those in the landing weight again it should calculate because it should know how much fuel it's going to burn i wouldn't have to type that in normally trip wins you can put in a plus or minus i don't know if that works let's say it's a hedge under 10 knots so i put in -10 oh there we go it calculates a headwind for the flight extra time is uh showing the extra fuel you've got based on the numbers you've given it so again it doesn't seem to be working landing weight would be my take of weight minus the fuel i'm expecting to burn which is about five tons um plus the taxi fuel so about 5.2 so let's say it's going to be to do [Music] 55.6 there we go okay so there we go we've now done the uh init b page like i said normally in the real aircraft you would just type in the zero fuel weight and the cg and the block fuel and then it should fill the rest on its own um pretty much but there we go um it's you know we do what we can so that's init b page stand finally p for performance so let's go to there now it's currently set to take off you can go through the phases using next and previous phase but obviously we are interested in taking off so let's go to the takeoff page which is the one it would automatically go to because the airplane knows that's the next step so take off from runway two four and then it says take off shipped now it's rare to have to use that these days you'd only use takeoff shift if you're taking off from an intersection in an aircraft without gps normally what happens in the airbus is when you take off it updates the position of the aircraft in its mind and it needs to know where you're taking off from but when it has gps it can simply update the position using the gps so it doesn't need this um so for example if you're taking off not from the full length of the runway but from maybe 400 meters into it it's in meters you'd put in 400 into there and there you go it doesn't even work i don't know why i talked about it uh flaps trimble horizontal stabilizer so for this one and this is a bit different um we're going to put in the flaps we want for takeoff so for today i think i want to take off plant one so put it in that one th s is trimmable horizontal stabilizer and i'm not going to put a setting in there most airlines don't it is rare too you can and it's based on your performance calculations and your cg which we don't have a way of really showing here in this flight simulator right now so i'm going to leave it blank which is what you would do in most airlines flex to temperature now this is a number where you will tell the aircraft to de-rate the engines on takeoff we don't take off using maximum thrust normally in the air mass you typically can lower the performance of the engines a bit it saves fuel it saves uh noise and it saves the engines life so they'll last longer so obviously it's a good thing to do the basic principle is the higher the temperature in here the less flex sorry the less thrust it will use on takeoff so it does have a maximum and a minimum and that depends on the aircraft and the engines you're using so for today a high flex would typically be a temperature of 69 which would be using the maximum amount of flex that the aircraft can give it depends on your sea level and sorry it depends on the elevation of the airports and the temperature on the day and if you have performance issues so if you're taking off on a short runway you can use a lower number and maybe we'll put it down to say 50. if it's really short maybe we'll use more flaps so we can take off flat two and you can even take off plates three in the air pass you normally take off flats three on a short runway but the problem is when you're in the air you've got more drag so if it's a long runway we prefer if that's one if it's a long runway with an obstacle in front then definitely flats one and you've got flats too as well i mean normally airlines will have a performance tool for doing this what's interesting about the microsoft flight simulator airbus is it doesn't seem to change these numbers until you actually change the flat lever position there we go so i'm going to put that to one which would be typical for a long runway like amsterdam 50 degrees flex so we're going to use a fair bit of thrust engine out acceleration so if an engine fails when do you want the airplane to accelerate 1680 that's absolutely fine it's about 1500 feet above the runway slightly more actually because we're in amsterdam which is slightly below seat level threshold and acceleration it says 1500 nothing so let's put in slash 1500. and that's quite normal so the airplane will climb in its normal takeoff modes up until 1500 feet and then it will lower the nose and try and accelerate it should climb somewhere around v2 plus 10 up to that point now we do know that there are some glitches in the airbus in flight simulator so some of this stuff does not work like i'm describing so don't be alarmed if the simulator that happens to you it's not your setup usually um there are some things about it that are not quite coded quite right i don't think it needs a little bit of work at the takeoff base certainly but there we go so that's normally adjusts to the elevation automatically so if i was in geneva with about a 1500 feet elevation that would say three thousand three thousand now again in flight simulator it doesn't do that so you need to work this out based on where your current altitude is so you can look that up here i'm currently at zero assuming you've got the correct q and h set um which i have today which is at 299.2 or one zero one three and it's at zero feet uh so as long as your qh is set correctly on there which you can get from our traffic control you'll be able to then enter the attitude into here that you need to be so 1500 is good for today and the v speeds are here v1 that's the speed where we have to continue the takeoff once we get through that vr is when we're going to rotate the aircraft and v2 is the speed at which we'll climb away even if we have an engine failure we'll climb at v2 using our take-off thrust once you've done all that you'll end up with the flight deck looking something like this and now what you need to do is just check we have done what we think we've done so i'm going to just set this to hba because that's what you use in europe and it's 101.3 today which is fine look at your pfd and check you've got the right modes so climb blue and that blue by being written in blue it's telling me it's armed so it's ready in the background so that is correct i'm also going to turn on the flight directors so they are on both sides so we have one ft2 so that is the guidance that will come alive it doesn't normally show up now it will show up when we get into the takeoff we can also see 128 up there in magenta which is our v2 speed and that is correct that would show up there in magenta what doesn't show is the numbers below it which uh sometimes or they will show up normally as you're taxing out but they don't in flight some later but there we go lever mct that is a warning message normally that appears when the airbus wants us to do something um so i just moved the thrust it was there to try and clear it but it shouldn't be there now i don't know why it is but there it is so you can disregard that because we don't want mct we want idle when we start the engines so now we've got some guidance we've got a route i can set this back to arc that's probably where most people would have it for takeoff i can see oh look i can see other airplanes that's pretty good i can see my route and the constraints that we want to meet and you might want to increase the range so you can see where you're going it might have to rain on if there's terrain around but other than that that is setting up the mcdu so we've loaded in the performance we've got a flight plan in there now and we've given it some weights and so on that's all for today's video thank you very much for watching there will be more videos where we cover some of the other pages that are modelled in the mcdu in this airbus as well as looking at other aspects of the flight the take-offs the landings the initial setup from cold and dark and that sort of thing so do subscribe if you'd like to see more of that content otherwise thank you very much for watching and i hope to see you again in a video very soon thank you very much

Channel: 320 Sim Pilot

Views: 242,017

Keywords: real airbus pilot, real pilot tutorial, microsoft flight simulator 2020, MSFS2020, MFS2020, A320 NEO tutorial, airbus tutorial, microsoft flight simulator tutorial, real pilot msfs2020, mcdu tutorial, microsoft flight simulator fms tutorial, microsoft flight simulator mcdu tutorial, real pilot mcdu tutorial

Id: c7UJlJMJdfk

Length: 28min 25sec (1705 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020