Tutorial #9 - Autopilot Basics - Microsoft Flight Simulator

hi guys squirtle here and welcome to episode 9 of my tutorial series on microsoft flight simulator now this is a series designed to build on knowledge so i strongly suggest that you've watched previous episodes before you watch this one and don't forget to subscribe to make sure you don't miss out on anything the goal of this episode is to take a look at basic all autopilot features that you'll find in a lot of aircraft it's not really a topic i was going to discuss quite so early in the tutorial series but it has been heavily requested and i know a lot of you guys want to get up there and fly around without having to manually fly everywhere so it kind of makes sense to jump in at this point and show you some basic auto pilot systems so let's get started first thing you need to do if you want to follow along is set up your flight as i've done here so you want to choose the cessna 172 skyhawk with the g1000 uh you want to spawn at kilo romeo november tango which is a rented municipal runway three four and set your destination to be kilo papa alpha echo for your flight conditions uh turn off your multiplayer air traffic go for preset clear sky and uh go for approximately midday local time and then click on fly and i'll see you on the runway and here we are runway three four rent an airfield hopefully you spawned on the correct runway in which case you'd see that small island over there with the the water if you've been following my series you'll definitely recognize this place and down on the right screen you'll see a magenta line uh heading northbound which is the flight plan that we chose which microsoft flight sim already loads into the garmin forest all nice and handy now autopilots they come in many flavors and have different capabilities you'll find as you jump from aircraft to aircraft some of them won't even have an old autopilot system at all for example the 152 that we've been flying has no autopilot system uh this is the 172 g1000 edition if you have the deluxe edition of microsoft flight simulator you'll actually have another version of the 172 which does have an autopilot system uh but it is a standalone system it's roughly down here um on the cockpit and that standalone system has no linkage to the onboard navigation system i think in that one there's a little garmin 530 or 430 something like that uh and that's the point is that aircraft vary some of them have little standalone systems some of them like this one are built into the onboard avionics of the garmin now control layouts also varies so the way that you access the autopilot from plane to plane could vary on this particular one it's actually on the g1000 screen uh on other ones you might find it on a on like an mcp panel up here the autopilot systems but up there they do move around a little bit but they all really share the same concept and that's what i want to discuss with you today is the actual basic concepts of autopilot systems how can we use them to hold headings how can we use them to climb and descend and do we have to adjust the power it would probably make sense at this stage to talk about what an autopilot system actually does so if you think about it when you're flying uh you're normally controlling uh the roll which is your kind of clockwise anti-clockwise you control in the pitch which you know pitches the aircraft up and down you're controlling the rudder pedals down here which control the your and you're also controlling the throttle which controls the power now if you have an autopilot system it can take control of some of these systems on this this edition of the garmin uh one sorry the garmin g1000 on the cessna 172 this system has no control over your throttle at all other auto pilot systems do but they're more advanced on this one there is no control over the throttle and that is something that you must be aware of because whatever you tell the auto park to do it will do it but you must make sure that the power has been set correctly so in terms of um roll which is this um operation here when we get the autopilot to control roll what it's really doing is controlling our heading now the compass rose is here if we roll to left as you know we'll start to turn anti-clockwise on the compass and vice versa so when we get the auto part to control uh the heading we no longer need to worry about our role same thing goes for the pitch the autopilot system on board can control the pitch of the aircraft which means that's something else that we don't need to worry about and of course we know pitch controls speed so if we tell the autopilot to pitch us up we're going to have to put in more power and if the autopilot system starts to pitch down and descend we know that we're going to have to reduce the power so let's talk about how we actually set these systems up before we take off the garmin g1000 that you see in front of you there's two on the cockpits here can be very intimidating to the new flyer you look at this and you think my word i have no idea what all those dials knobs and switches and buttons do um it's fine we're going to focus on just small aspects of this and we'll still get some really useful things done so the first thing to note is that the screen on the left is pretty much identical to the screen on the right the only difference is it's displaying completely different things in the middle is another panel you can largely ignore this panel for now this is all to do with comms and audio and we're not going to deal with any of that today so on the actual garmin 1000 let's just quickly have an overview this knob here controls the navigation frequency you can see there's a nav one and an f2 at the top here if you push the button in the middle you will switch between nav one and nav two if you turn the outer knob it will control the megahertz and if we turn the inner knob it controls the kilohertz and when you're ready you can swap into the active frequency this one here is the active frequency if you if you see our activator identifies ydc because it's basically found a station that's on that frequency one one three decimal niner on the left below that is the heading bug or heading indicator adjuster which is here you can see the little bug there and it's enunciated as three six zero degrees if you turn this dial you'll see it goes up in degrees of ten at a time i don't actually know at the moment how to make this go up in smaller numbers that's something that's um bugging a few of us in the flight sim world but you should be able to adjust this in smaller increments also if you press it it will synchronize with your current heading it's a very good idea before takeoff to adjust the heading bug to line up with the current runway heading so once you've got yourself positioned here press in the heading bug so it's lined up with the runway then there's a whole bunch of buttons which we're going to go through shortly and then down here there is an altitude adjustment knob now the actual altitude is displayed here and you'll see you'll see it says zero that doesn't mean to say we are at zero altitude this is the ticker tape which shows our current altitude and it stays about 50 something feet however that's dependent on our pressure setting which we need to get correct the pressure setting can be adjusted with this uh outer knob here where it says increase decrease barometric pressure if you don't know what the local pressure setting is for where you are just press the b key and it will adjust itself correctly so that is the local pressure setting which means that is now our correct altitude so going back to this number here what is this this is the target altitude but the autopilot system this is what you tell it you want to go to so if we turn the outer knob which i do my mouse wheeling you can see that we can set it to be thousands of feet and if we use the inner knob we can set it to be hundreds of feet so if we wish to line up and we'd been cleared to an altitude of i don't know 3000 feet we would set it like that and that's now ready when we arm the autopilot system it will try to get us to 3 000 feet however we have to tell it how to do that we'll come to that in a minute so before takeoff really you want to set your target altitude after you leave the airfield down the bottom right is mfg controls just completely ignore those for now and ignore all these soft keys down here we don't need to worry about them equally ignore all this stuff here that's all to do with navigation which we'll discuss in later videos so as it stands right now we have set the heading book to the runway heading and we've set our target altitude to 3000 feet so we are pretty much ready to take off so let's do that right so i've taken off as you can see and i'm going to steady climb i've trimmed myself out i'm just gently correcting to try to follow the heading bug here so let's have a quick look at how to put this into autopilot mode now the autopilot controls are down here we'll discuss most of them today but some of them we won't discuss so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to turn on the flight director the flight director brings up this magenta navigation marker here this is now showing us visually what the onboard avionics system thinks we should do in order to follow our flight plan so we turn that on like this is that let me just straighten this up turn that on that gives us the the pink arrow here and what we want to do is we want to put the autopilot system on but we don't want to just immediately turn it on we want to actually tell it roughly what we want to do so first of all we click on the heading book and that will turn on heading hdg which is now enunciated here and what this is telling us at the moment is if we turn on the autopilot it's going to control the heading based on what we did with the heading bug and in terms of pitch it's going to give us full control on pitch so it won't do anything to pitch the aircraft but it will indeed follow the heading so let's turn on the autopilot and the first thing you notice is enunciates ap autopilot and then it rolls the aircraft over and aligns it with the heading bug which is cool however at the moment it is not controlling the pitch we are controlling the pitch so we set ourselves a target of 3 000 feet and we basically want to climb up to 3 000 feet and then level out how do we do that well there's a couple of ways of doing it one of them is using the flight level change mode and the other is using vertical speed mode so what we'll do is we'll do flight level change mode this may also be indicated as iis indicated airspeed mode they're both essentially the same thing if we click flc on you'll notice it says flc 63 knots what it did was it took the speed that i was doing the airspeed and it will now set a target of three thousand it will climb to three thousand feet whilst trying to hold 63 knots if you want to adjust this speed if you wanted to climb faster or slower for example if i put the nose up i can click this button here that puts it up to 73 it will pitch the nose down and it'll try to find 73 knots which of course means that it won't climb as quickly the actual vertical air speed on this is indicated here you can see 500 feet per minute is what it's now doing so whereas when we're flying the cessna 172 at 152 we had analog dials for these things or valve gauges of the old six-pack as it used to be called this is now entirely digital this ticker tape shows our altitude and this ticker tape shows our vertical speed so now we're being controlled by flight level change 73 knots this is going to continue to climb and hold that heading if we were to move the heading bug using the little heading knob here we turn it right say 20 degrees like that you can see the aircraft rolls while trying to maintain the vertical speed we selected and now because it's approaching the target altitude it's changed from being flc at 78 knots i think it was and it now says alt 3000 this is a change in mode so what what it's doing now is it's no longer doing it's no longer seeking 78 not climb it's going to adjust the pitch of the aircraft now to make sure that it levels out at 3 000 feet remember it has no control over the power no control over this throttle lever so what's going to happen is as it levels out you're going to see the air speed start to increase the rpms will start to go up which is shown over here on the mfd and the mf the rpm will climb and it will keep climbing and the aspen will keep climbing until we cause damage to the engine because it can't do anything about it it's just doing what we told it to do so it's now up to us as the airspeed increases and the rpm comes up to back off on the throttle and get ourselves a nice comfortable rpm which on a cessna 172 is about 2300 that will give us good cruise performance so that is how we use the flight level change button and remember we adjusted the vertical speed here these up down buttons have more than one use when we're in flc mode they control the speed however they'll also be used in a second when we do a vertical speed change which i'll show you now okay so vertical speed how does that work well if you remember when we did the cessna 152 tutorials you'll already be familiar with vertical speed remember when we were coming in for a nice steady power descent we be using 500 feet per minute so we can do the same thing when we're in autopilot mode the first thing we need to do is set our target altitude we can change this this won't affect our altitude this is a target so if we move that down to say 2000 feet and then we click on and watch watch the difference here instead of being out 3000 when we click on vs it changes to v speed out seek so it's what it's going to try and do it's going to try to find this target here but it doesn't know how to get there yet we have to tell it how to get those so what we do decrease vertical speed and again and again and again and again so now we've got 500 feet per minute which will take us about two minutes to get down to 2000 feet but no it's pitching down but it has no control over the power again so once again because we're descending we have to bring the power back to make sure that the speed stays under control because it has no authority over the throttle and that is how you use vertical speed if you find that you're descending too quickly you can just adjust it here make it 700 make it 300 it's up to you whatever vertical speed you set it will adjust the pitch of the aircraft to try and match that vertical descent rate and you'll see over here minus 500 it's looking for -500 and you control the power so now you're in a powered descent down to your target and when it gets down to 2000 it will change the enunciation here and pitch itself to level and level out at 2000 and at that point you need to bring the power back in there is a pattern to this green means this is what the autopilot or the avionics are doing and white is what it's trying to do you'll see this later when we do ils type approaches but if it's green it's what it's actually doing and if it's white it's what it's trying to do i know you can see it's now moved into a mode out two thousand so now it's two thousand feet you can of course do that with flight level change if you was to bring the altitude down let's bring it down like 500 feet like that so we're seeking a target now of 1500 and then we do a flight level change watch the speed flight level change 107 knots but it's not descending why is it not descending well it's not descending because it can't keep 107 knot speed and pitch down the only way it can ever pitch down and maintain that speed is if we back off on the throttle so if we pull back off on the throttle the aircraft can now pitch down and maintain our target speed of 107 so what's happening now is we're using our throttle to control our rate of descent and the aircraft is pitching for the speed that we set so it's a different way of doing it instead of saying i want you to go down at 500 feet per minute and i'll control the throttle to give them the speed you're saying to the avionics i want you to control the speed with your pitch and i will control our rate of descent with throttle two sides of the same coin some people prefer one some people prefer another certainly the flc mode on descent is very useful when you're trying to keep a certain speed so if you know you're talking to atc and they want you to send but they don't want you to slow down flc is pretty good because you can guarantee you're going to carry on flying at the same speed and you can control the rate of descent but it's just another way of doing the same thing and you notice that it's enunciated back to 1500 and don't forget when it levels out put the power back in and get back up to your cruise rpm a couple more things before we wrap up wrap up here uh on the actual buttons for the autopilot system over here we've looked at the bottom four now we've also looked at the flight director and autopilot on and off and we've looked at the heading there's also one here that says alt this is old altitude mode now by default when you tell it to climb to a certain altitude when it gets there it goes into alt alt hold mode it's called it's holding this altitude it's pitching the aircraft to make sure we stay at 1500 if we just want to go into an open climb what we can do is we can click it again which then turns off altitude hold mode it says pit which is pitch so now we can pitch the aircraft back and you'll notice that it's still holding our altitude just put a bit more power in so it's still dealing with our heading but it's now up to us to basically control the pitch of the aircraft and therefore the altitude and the speed and because i've been a bit too heavy on the controls it's now getting disengaged the autopilot which is what that little ding was so that's fine let's um let me just pitch it back up again i'm just going to trim it for a climb so i can demonstrate something there we go okay so autopilot dissing disengaged which is what happens if you wiggle the controls too much so it's no longer doing the role of the aircraft or the pitch of the aircraft so one thing you can do is you can say i want heading mode and i want altitude hold mode and send the autopilot back on and it will immediately level the aircraft out for 2200 altitude which was what we was on when we clicked out some reason it didn't take the heading bug so really what i'm trying to say is out is something that you can press if you want to just hold the current altitude and um it's the default after you've finished climbing your descendings to your designated altitude now one other thing i can see we've shot past the uh the airfield so a couple of other things to do with the heading and the nav mode let me just show you this for a second so notice where the heading book is right now if i was to spin the heading mode to the left side the aircraft will pitch left if i go past 180 degrees when it's pitching left watch what happened if i carry on and then i go to the right side the aircraft will start to make a right turn that's something to be aware of because if you want to turn more than 180 degrees but you want to do it in a specific direction you can't just spin the wheel around like let's say let's just turn it on this heading for a second north this will make it easy let's say i want to go westerly but i don't want to turn left to do it i want to turn to the right i can't just spin it clockwise and go all the way around to the west it won't work the aircraft will start to turn left as soon as i go past south so what i need to do is do it in stages i need to allow it to turn and then when west is less than 180 degrees away which will be in second then i can carry on turning until we get to our target heading and you might think to yourself well why would you ever need to do that and you do you do need to do that sometimes perhaps because of i don't know a mountain range or some hills perhaps because the procedure you're trying to fly perhaps because atc to give you a specific vector and told you to turn in that direction there can be all kinds of reasons but it's just something to be aware of that's how it works right there's a couple more things that i want to quickly show you before we wrap up this video now in terms of this autopilot systems here we've seen v-speed with sin flight level change mode we've seen up and down uh approach and back course we're not going to cover today and more to do with ils approaches which we'll look at in a later video we've not seen v nev and i won't be showing you that today either because that's more to do with vertical flight planning which is a subject for a different time i will show you nav mode in a second we've seen ap flight director we've seen altitude holding and we've seen heading however with heading there's one thing i want to show you before we start when you move the heading bug if you move it more than 180 degrees in one direction the plane the avionics will always try to turn to the angle that's less than 180 degrees in other words if i spin this bug clockwise all the way around and go back to east it will immediately make a left turn i can show you this by the way it's gone back to single degrees now rather than 10 degrees i have no idea what i clicked to make it do that but apparently he's doing it so if i keep going as soon as we get to the point where more than 180 degrees which is now the plane will now turn to left because it can get that way quicker than it can get that way and that's an important concept because if you must make it a turn in one specific direction but it's more than 108 degrees you will have to basically feed it uh like i'm doing here so if i wanted to go west now but keep going left i can't just spin it all the way to the west because it'll turn right i need to basically make sure that this heading bug doesn't go past the the bottom mark and wait for west to come around and keep this left turn going and the moment it gets past the the bottom like that i can then choose west and we know it will keep turning left to go west so that's an important concept just whether the kind of heading hole system works is that uh over 180 degrees it will literally turn the plane the opposite way so nav mode what is nav mode at the moment we are following our heading book because we're on heading mode if we flick to nav mode there are three possible um navigation sources that it can use the first one which is what it currently has here is gps if we was to put nav mode on at the moment it will try to track this gps uh course here you can see that our flight plan uh the magenta lines that current active leg of our flight plan in magenta so if we flick on nav mode the plane will try to get this line back into the middle here and the reason it's on the left is because we are currently if you look we are to the right of the line that were displaced over here this here is the course it wants to maintain but our actual magenta line is left of us so this is a in effect what they call a command instruction if you want to get to this line you need to turn left as you can see you need to turn left and meet the line this line is going to come across because we're heading in that direction but if we enable nav mode now you'll see it now says gps instead of heading it's following the gps course it's what it's doing is it's turning towards an intercept for that line because it wants to follow a course of 337 degrees which is the tip of this line there tipping that arrow 337 degrees is literally the that the track of that magenta line 337 we can't change that the gps system has worked it out now we don't have to follow um and now we can let's just put it back on heading a second and turn it to the right touch so it will now follow heading at the bottom here if we click on get rid of that click on cdi we have vor1 and vor2 they are frequencies voils are stations navigation stations that we can basically fly um towards or away from and what we can do is we can put the nav frequency in nav and if we put that frequency across into here huh that's one of the vor so if we flick back to vr1 now we can navigate to it and we can even adjust sorry wrong one we can adjust the course here and say if we spin that around like that so it's lined up that station is actually three three four degrees away that's the and if we put it into nav mode now it will say vor and it's now tracking that vo off that voice station huh i won't go into detail vo our stations right now how to use them because that is honestly a completely different subject what you need to understand right now though is if you want to follow your flight plan that you set up in the main menu and you're confused as to why despite putting nav mode on it's not doing that you need to check what mode it's in so it needs to be in gps mode here and then you turn on nav mode like that and it will say gps here in green if that's the case it will follow that magenta line only if it's in gps mode well guys that concludes this tutorial so i hope you found that useful on the basics of autopilot systems in future videos uh on the autopilot navigation system will look a lot more in-depth at uh voir navigation and violet approaches i know you guys are asking for all kinds of stuff around uh flight planning and flight management but honestly we need to build up the knowledge i jumped ahead slightly with this one and showed you how to use your autopilot systems because i know you want to get up and fly around and uh not have to hand flight at worst so totally understand that and i hope you got something out of this video please give me a thumbs up if you did until the next one guys take care happy flying

Channel: Squirrel

Views: 263,597

Keywords: simulator, gameplay, commentary, walkthrough, tutorial, asus, microsoft flight simulator, msfs 2020, cessna 172, takeoff, landing, new, preview, overview, review, flight, journey, weather system, experiment, guide, series, step by step, for beginners, getting started, new to flight sim, learn how to fly, flying lesson, msfstt

Id: 7FizDT608bw

Length: 29min 18sec (1758 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020