When to descend? Real Airbus Pilot Explains! Microsoft Flight Simulator Tutorial

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to another video with me 320 sim pilots and today we are going to look at how to know when you want to begin your descent in your airbus a320 in microsoft flight simulator or any other simulator in which you're using an airbus and to be honest it probably applies to a few other jet airliners as well so we'll have a look at the technique and we'll get an idea of how we can do that once again we're going to use microsoft flight simulator and the fly-by-wire a320 neo mod i highly recommend you get this mod installed if you're going to be using the a320 neo in microsoft flight simulator because it does make a big difference to the uh experience and definitely adds to the realism and it's always improving so yeah highly recommended we're currently in flight we've taken off from madrid airport in spain we're going to head to ibiza also in spain with uh that short flight taking us up to a cruising altitude of 33 000 feet and what we're going to look at now is how can we judge when we want to begin our descent from here into our destination airport as ever i am a real world airbus pilot but this is not for any real world use it's just for our use in flight simulators of all varieties at home and hopefully can give you some extra context on your home simulation right let's get started here we are in the cruise now and to give you some context i will show you on the vfr map exactly what we're doing we've taken off from madrid over here we're already over um well almost at charlie the lima sierra and then we're gonna head in towards ibiza the arrival planned this was just done in the microsoft flight simulator planning tool but it's got a star arrival and in to an ios onto runway zero six i think it is at ibiza so how are we gonna work out when we want to descend well the simplest way is what i'm gonna give you first and this is a pretty pretty robust way of doing it and it's something that i use every day when i'm flying the aircraft as well what we're gonna do is take our altitude we want to times it by three and that will give us the track miles we need to descend it's typically a three degree approach path by doing that so as we can see here i have 33 000 feet altitude the airport i'm landing at is at sea level ibiza is pretty much at sea level so i need to lose 33 000 feet i need to be able to descend that much down before i can land so if i times that by three thirty three thousand times three is going to obviously be 99 i need 99 track miles i say track miles because that is the track i'm going to fly i'm going to fly along this green line that's my track and as you can see as we get closer there's a little bit of a wobble in the line as we fly that arrival which i can show you quite easily on the vfr chart we're going to fly all of this now that is the route i'm going to fly if i just leave the autopilot flying so for this first example we'll just say we're expecting to fly all of that so i need 99 track miles we're also going a bit fast and we will be in the descent the airbus typically descends somewhere from 250 to maybe uh 280 90 you can't even descend at 330 knots if you really want to although that's a little bit rare if we go into the perth page in the mcdu and press next phase we can see the different speeds so this plane is going to descend at 287 knots anyway despite that all i'm trying to point out is we actually will need to slow down as well from our speed in the descent to our approach speed so we need to give some room for that so we said we need 99 miles because we did 33 000 times 33 by 3 means 99 miles plus 10 109 miles so we're going to need to start our descent 109 miles before the airport or before the touchdown as you can see if i go to the mcdu i can press flight plan and it will show me my track miles left to run so this says 272 i know that i actually need as we said uh 109 miles to descend and slow down so i've got a little bit of time left over 100 about 150 miles plus before i need to begin my descent so when this number here says 109 i will start my descent and i'll do that by winding the attitude down to whatever i think is safe next and then i will do open descent so engage selected altitude i'll pull that towards me and let it go to thrust idle because the descent we've just calculated is based on the aircraft using idle thrust and descending uh like that at the speed roughly the correct speed in here so that's a typical way in the airbus it's very rough it's not perfect you can't rely on it to get you exactly to the runway but what you can do is keep updating it as you go down and as you descend in the rear aircraft as well we'd get an arrow showing up on the green line here which i'll show you later in x-plane just in case it's added to this mod in the future and that way you'll have seen it and already know what what it means it also shows up in the mcdu it would say td top of descent so it does have different ways to tell you so to recap 33 000 feet i need to times that by 3 99 gives me the distance i need plus 10 miles to slow down so 109 miles and that's track miles that's the miles i'm going to actually fly so as you can see i've got 272 miles left to run so i need to descend when that says 109 the descent i'm going to do i'm going to pull the altitude lower the attitude first and then pull as i do in my autopilot basics tutorial so if you need help using the autopilot i can show you that in the video hopefully appearing on the screen now something to be aware of is that this is using track miles as we said if i was to go back to the normal page i go to arc and wind out to the range let's put it to 160. you can see that actually ibiza airport here leib is a little bit uh closer than we think it's not actually 272 miles away it's maybe 80 just over 80 so perhaps 90 miles away this means that if we were to go straight in we don't have as many miles as the flight plan is suggesting 272 in fact i don't think that 272 is uh particularly accurate today it doesn't seem to be counting down either so i would say it definitely isn't accurate so how are we going to get around that what we need to do is look on the navigation display and judge where the airport is as we can see it's about 90 miles away in a straight line but we know we have that extra sort of uh turning to do to turn onto final because of the nature of the arrival that we have loaded in so what i'm going to do is start my descent probably fairly shortly because the best thing to do and what we do in real life is even if you see a long arrival like this on the vfr map you would plan be ready for a straight in because you don't necessarily need to fly all of this so what i can do is judge it that when i'm 109 miles from the airport on my navigation display that is also a good time to begin my descent and as you can see i'm actually at 80 miles already so i think it's time to start down first of all i'm going to put in flight level 100 just to get my descent going then i'm going to pull thrust idle open descent this will be an idle descent and down we go so we've calculated our top of descent by timesing our cruise altitude by three and then adding a little bit for uh room to slow down because we'll need a bit of miles to slow down the speed if we have a tailwind you would also need to add more so if we had say this arrow was from behind so our ground speed was even higher we would need to start the descent even earlier so maybe if you see that arrow pointing from behind you so pointing up on this screen whilst you're in the cruise so in this situation then you would need to start your descent even earlier likewise if it's pointing towards you and it was strong 50 knots then you might need to start your descent a little bit later but as a rough guide if you plan on that three times plus a little bit extra you'll be in a pretty good place so why do we do three times well it's something that we use all the time flying it's our three times table our three degree approach three degree approach means compared to a level we're going to descend at an angle of three degrees so if level is zero then we're slightly up at three degrees and we descend down just like your ils approach is usually a three degree approach that's why if we descend at three degrees that's the system of doing three times out through will work so how do we know we're descending at three degrees now well you don't really it's just a rough guide and it typically works out these aircraft thrust idle tend to be close to three degrees we can actually calculate this now to work out if you're doing three degree descent take your ground speed 430 divide it by two which is 215 and then if you take your 215 and times it by 10 you'll get 2150 so to make a three degree descent i need to descend at 2150 feet per minute which is on the vertical speed indicator here you can see we're actually doing 2700 feet per minute so we're doing better than three degrees which is great because we have a little bit of a tailwind as i said that arrow is behind us you'll typically be slightly faster on your descent higher up so you'll have more than a three degree descent and then as you get lower and you'll reduce the speed that will reduce so to know if you are at least making three degree descent you can look at the vertical speed and as i said take this number your ground speed gs is ground speed it's your speed over the ground because that's what matters because we're landing at a fixed point in space ibiza airport your tas is your true airspeed which is a different figure we're just interested in the ground speed so you take this divide it by 2 and then you can times it by 10 or just take it and divide it by 2. so for example when this says 400 i will need to divide it by two 200 so i need to do 2 000 feet per minute on the vertical speed indicator to make sure i'm keeping a three degree descent and that is something i use every day and a lot of pilots use it it's relatively simple maths but it's something that we all find useful um because it it applies to the job so much so to recap we'll take our altitude 21 or 22 000 feet now times it by three which gives us obviously 66. miles that we need plus 10 so we need 76 miles for our descent to make sure we are flying the descent correctly we take our speed 404 divide it by two so 200 and then make that 2000 feet per minute for our descent so what you do if your speed and your vertical speed are not matching up what if you're not descending fast enough well first of all make sure you have pulled the altitude with the little down arrow to make sure it says thrust idle open descent then if that's not working or you think you're high like i now can see that if i was to go straight to ibiza i'm only 40 miles away we just said i need about 70 miles which will work with this routing maybe but i think i'm actually still a bit high so what can i do well the first thing we do at this sort of altitude is increase the speed so if you pull the speed you have control of it now and you'll see it go blue on the pfd and now you can increase it so i'm going to wind the speed up if you do it carefully there we go and i wouldn't go more than 330 knots if it's not smooth air you wouldn't wind the speed up you'd do something else but by doing that you can see we immediately get a much higher rate of descent even that's a little bit excessive you get a much higher rate of descent and you have a much higher speed the reason this works is because you have a lot more drag at higher speed there's a lot more air hitting the aircraft and that gives you more drag which means you descend quicker so as you can see although our ground speed has increased again we're back at 420 knots our vertical speed is going to be significantly higher so this is the simplest way initially to do it but when we get lower we can't do this anymore also because we're so fast we need to be able to get that speed back again so how do we do that well there's a really obvious way so for example if air traffic now insists on 250 knots or we we're too close to the terrain so we don't want that very high rate of descent then obviously put out those speed brakes in the a320 they only work up to 50 percent after 50 they um don't actually deploy any more although you can move the lever but it doesn't do anything however i'm not sure if that's true in the microsoft flight simulator a320 even with the neo mod so i'm not entirely sure yet but there we go now with the speed breakout you'll see a rapid deceleration the rear aircraft wouldn't level off like this it would continue some sort of a descent because that traffic gets very confused if you level off but there we go so now 250 knots with the speed breakout and we are going to regain that profile with a higher rate of descent thanks to the speed break remember as well once you are descending to keep monitoring your progress so now i can see i'm 30 miles away from ibiza if i was to go in a straight line there and try and land i'm slightly high because i'm at 12 000 feet so i need 36 miles and it's only 30 miles plus i need a bit more to slow down so it gives you a constant update you can constantly adjust you can work out whether your three degrees is working or not so i've put the speed brakes back in as you can see there they are fully forward and my vertical speed now is 1400 ground speed of 313 so actually i'm doing slightly less than three degrees because at 300 knots i need to be doing 1500 feet per minute so this might be a time to use the speed brake again i have some videos showing mcdu setup but what i'm going to do here is set up my arrival which you would have done in the cruise in reality to the ios24 oh sorry rls06 zulu in ibiza then i'm going to insert that and that is now loaded in as we can see the track mars seems to be frozen so don't rely on that too much uh the distance to go now if i go to radnap i can see the ils 06 has been tuned by the aircraft so if i select ils or ls here in the real aircraft there it is it will display your distance so i can see i'm 20 miles from the runway which is the same as what i can see on my navigation display but it's just another backup this is not a reliable gauge a long way out more than sort of 30 miles out and this number will not be very relevant so don't rely on it for long distance navigation that's where we will use vors and other features which i'll show you in x-plane shortly but it does have its uses and especially when you're on final approach you can use it there to judge your height as well so here we are now in x-plane 11 and this way i can show you a few other features that we use in the real aircraft once again we are flying from madrid to ibiza at 33 000 feet at the moment as you can see similar sort of routing but now we have a few extra little details i can show you first of all let's have a look at the down arrow this does occasionally appear in a microsoft flight simulator so you may see it it's this white arrow here this shows us our top of descent that is where the aircraft expects us to begin our descent from our cruise flight level of flight level three three zero we would of course check that ourselves and cross check it but it is a usual indicator i've got the exact same arrival loaded into the flight plan so if i scroll through on the flight plan page you can see that it is identical and we'll zoom in a bit so you can actually see what's going on there we go in and around and all of that so the magic of the rear aircraft as well is i can bring up the mcdu press progress and i get this page bearing distance so i know i'm landing in ibiza onto runway zero six i've got ibiza zero six there and if we select the arrival it is the ios zero six zero same as before if i go to the progress page i can now type in leib which is the airport code and i can actually get this from the flight fan page leib and i'm landing on runway zero six so i type it in there then press progress and enter it here with this line select key now it shows me 207 miles to go to the threshold of that runway once again we can use the same calculations 33 so as we said it's going to be 99 so 109 miles required to descend so about 100 miles from now that would be if we go straight in because this is a straight line to the airport so i expected to send in about 100 miles is my descent point on the navigation display it's in about 80 miles that's probably because the mcdu has altitude restrictions so you don't have to always plan just on your descent to the runway you can also plan on different altitudes so this wants us to actually be 3000 feet and fly most of that arrival so all that all those curves and turns and the last stage of the approach all of this is going to be flown at 3000 feet according to the mcdu but we're not going to do that today we'll plan on potentially cutting the corner just as we did earlier so the mcd will account for altitude restrictions like that and that will be the case in microsoft flight simulator eventually i hope so yeah be aware of that it this straight in may always not always match up for that reason it depends on the altitude constraints on the arrival or departure that you are flying okay so we have our down arrow that's uh one feature we have here and we have the progress page that shows us our distance to go so these are two things we can use for our descent in the airbus in explain 11. let's have a look what happens when we actually begin our descent to illustrate this point what i'm going to do is send us direct and i'm going to send this direct to we're going to skip out the entire arrival let's go to the final approach fix for the ils 06 in ibiza so i've done direct to that point go to plan now we can actually see i'm going straight there and then and i've got to be there at 2 000 feet now my track miles show me an accurate distance 194 so i would expect to descend in around about 80 miles at the latest if we go to arc we can see our descent point is about 70 miles so that works seems pretty reasonable now in this aircraft because we have vertical navigation i don't have to pull this and go into a thrust idle open descent again talking about autopilot mode i could actually use a manage descent mode where it will follow its profile loaded into the box which makes my life very easy what i can also do is i can see top of descent in the mtdu t d type of descent it shows me where it's coming and that is drawn then on the navigation display tells me the time i'm going to arrive there so 1353 it's currently 1345. as we reach our top of descent arrow our little white down arrow we will get a message shown to us by the aircraft so let's just have a look at what that is just for context we are currently 130 miles from our destination as we pass over the arrow we can expect a message saying decelerate there it is it says decelerate and if we look on the mcdu we get the same message saying decelerate the reason is if you can't descend because their traffic control isn't letting you you need to do something else to get the energy out of the airplane so if i now bring the speed back let's say decimal seven one which is reasonable it's above our green dot speed in the cruise i can press clear on the mcdu to get rid of the decelerate message and this way we are reducing the energy in the aircraft even though we know we are getting high and now if i begin my descent let's start again with flight level 100 and i pull thrust idle open ascent there's our 100 and as you can see we are now starting our descent i can now wind the speed up because i'm in a thrust i'll open descent let's put it all the way up to decimal seven eight and the airplane will put the nose down it will do a high rate of descent and we'll have a chance to get back to where we want to be because we took the energy out by slowing down earlier something else we get in the toadus a321 is the yo-yo or donut as it's called depending it's this little green you can see it's half a circle here on the bottom of the altimeter tape this shows us the predicted profile or the calculated profile in the aircraft when we're on profile we will be in line with this green doughnut so if i keep increasing that speed let's do decimal seven nine and if i use some speed break you can use full speed breaking the 321 but you can't in the 320 with the autopilot in i should say without the autopilot and the a320 you can use full speed brake but when the autopilot is engaged you can only use half whereas in the 321 even with the autopilot we can use full speed brake so there we go i'll put that away and that's the green some people call it donut some people call it yoyo that gives you a good idea if you're on the calculated profile that the computer the mcdu has predicted for your arrival we're now below it which is good because we're fast so i'm going to press manage speed and now because the airplane is going to start slowing down to that speed we'll actually start to reduce that rate of descent and probably come back towards that profile i can also on the mcdu i can see that with the vertical deviation b dev i am currently 1 300 feet below the profile as we get closer that will change to closer to zero so this is just another tool we have to calculate our descent but even with all of these great features i will still be looking at my total distance 100 miles i'm at 23 000 feet so i need 60 i need about 70 miles and plus 10 i need about 80 miles so yeah i'm in a good place i'm i've got room to get down and decelerate even with that tailwind you can see that we actually need that tailwind uh we need that descent to be slightly earlier today because of this 40 knot tail when the arrow is behind us now minus 300 if we're getting back towards the profile and just as we're reaching the profile this green donut or yoyo you can see we are at idle speed on the thrust and now the aircraft will lower the nose and we'll end up back on the profile alternatively of course i can push one dot or push the altitude control towards the aircraft you'll go into des mode where it will follow the vertical profile itself with a little bit of adjustment on the speed range which is the the simplest way uh it certainly requires less effort or thought but even then you're going to be backing up very closely the numbers with what you predict and also if you're expecting as we are we're getting a straightened approach you just have to be ready for all these different things to change so it's just about managing the energy so you don't find yourself either too low and having to fly in with the engine spilled up too long which is obviously not very efficient or too high where you can't make a safe approach because you're just too high and you need to fly for extra track miles to get yourself in which is also not very efficient so we like to try and get it right the the first time if we can so there we have a few tools to help you plan your start of descent in the airbus for all of these things we have to be aware of terrain if the terrain is causing you to be high you can't descend into it obviously so you'll have to slow down or come up with other plans like using speed brakes or flaps later on in the approach if you need to so this is very much a basic when there's no terrain issue sort of guide as you get closer in keep updating your plan and keep looking at those altitudes that you're aiming for and how many miles you think you need to your touchdown that's all for today's video thank you very much for watching i hope it's been useful for you just a few more tips and tricks to hopefully get you through your a320 flights in flight simulators at home there will be more tutorials and tips coming on the channel soon as well as other live streams in both microsoft flight simulator and x-plane so do please subscribe if you'd like to see more of those in the near future that's it then thank you very much for watching i look forward to seeing you again in another video soon keep safe and well thank you bye

Channel: 320 Sim Pilot

Views: 113,470

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, descent tutorial, a320 descent tutorial, descending in microsoft flight simulator, how to descend airbus

Id: 9wg7q1-ETNs

Length: 25min 14sec (1514 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020