X-Plane 11 - Flight Management Computer

hello and welcome to this tutorial on using the default xplane 11 flight management system or as it's so often called in the community flight management computer these systems can be found in high performance aircraft and automate tasks previously performed by Navigators and flight Engineers the system is made up of the following three components the first being a flight management computer or FMC and put simply it's the hardware and software needed to run the system it's not visible to the pilot in the cockpit and it's usually located elsewhere in the aircraft number two the control display unit or CDU for short it's a small screen and touch keyboard used to operate the FMS we'll be using this primarily for our tutorial today and lastly number three the multi-function display or MFD for short this can be one or more displays that provide the pilot with navigational progress engine performance and information about the aircraft systems okay okay I put you to sleep let's cut to the Chase and demystify the default xplan 11 flight management system all right we're now inside the default 7 37- 800 if we scroll down we'll locate the control display unit but notice that the Yol is in our way if we press the y key we can temporarily hide the Yol and again pressing y will return it again I can use the CDU just like this but clicking on it once will open it up in a popup window that I can drag close and expand and it's much easier to use the index page is the first page that comes up along with the warning that says nav data is out a date if I click on the status page we'll see that the database date is only valid from October 13th of 2016 to November 10th of 2016 so this error message is valid I could pay for a subscription to something called navigraph and keep this current but for today's demo we'll simply select a clear button to remove the warning we'll now move on to database using the mouse we'll ENT enter in our departure airport which is Cy now we'll select on a dent and we'll tell us all the information we need about that airport including the longest runway GPS coordinates and the elevation I can switch between feet and meters as well if you're like me you prefer the keyboard so if you want to use the keyboard instead of the mouse click between these two square brackets also known as the scratch Pad until they start blinking now I can typee cyul L and select ENT and the information updates here's a piece of advice as long as these boxes are flashing anything you type on the keyboard will go into the scratch Pad so let's say you forget to click this off and then now you're about to land and you want to put your landing gear down so you press G on your keyboard instead of triggering your Landing here it's going to actually show up in the scratch Pad so make sure that when you want to interface with the plane that you click between the scratch pad and make sure that it's not flashing then anything you press on the keyboard will interface with the plane since the rest of this tutorial is going to be using the CDU we'll go ahead and click it back on so we can use our keyboard now we'll proceed to the flight plan we'll type in cyul l and set it to destination C yo W and set it to origin doesn't matter which order that you do this so we're going to be flying from Ottawa to Montreal company route or Co rout is if I wanted to restore a previously saved flight plan so let's say I had a Flight Plan called C yo W to Cy l i could simply type that in and then click on Company Route and it would load it for me because I'm showing you this tutorial fresh I don't have one saved yet but I'll show you how to save one later flight number is optional but I like to fly with a WestJet tag so I go whiskey Juliet Alpha and then I use today's date 0722 and I put that in for a flight number the next and very last step is to enter in our waypoints so our first Waypoint today will be avv n and we select two notice that the very first Waypoint appears in magent enter and now we have this thing called execute with a blue line above it if I don't click on the execute button to confirm the change the CDU or FMS will not accept the change so make sure you always confirm the change by clicking on the execute button to enter the next Waypoint we click next page and then ha BBS and then again two notice again the execute button has a light over it so we selected to confirm the change if you look at the top left it says via direct so it means we're going directly to hbbs or if I go back directly to avv if I wanted to follow an airway I could enter the airway and then select this via here to go the airway to that Waypoint now we'll move on to the climb phase by clicking The Climb button this page shows us everything we need from a speed perspective we can see that as long as we're climbing we won't exceed 290 knots or 74 mock we'll also see that when we're below 10,000 for an altitude we won't exceed 250 knots let's say I want to go no more than 220 when I'm below 5,000 ft I can simply enter to 205000 and select this now when I climb to 5,000 I'll be at 220 when I go from 5,000 to 10,000 ,000 I'll be at 250 when I exceed 10,000 I'll be at 290 the trans altitude is something that in the US in Canada is 18,000 this simply means that when you get to this altitude you got to start adjusting your cabin pressure for this flight we'll just leave it the way it is now we'll select Cruise CRZ when we get to our desired altitude we'll now be in Cruise mode and the speed that will be going is 300 or mock point 80 again if you want to change this let's say you want 29 enter that into the scratch pad and then select that for your Target speed we'll go ahead and put 300 back we now have to tell the CDU what our desired Cruise altitude is so for this flight it'll be 13,000 ft as we go through this if any errors was to occur it would come up on the bottom and say perhaps like I can't reach that altitude and then we know we have to adjust our cruise altitude so now we've done our climb we've done our cruise if we look at The Descent button we can see the same thing the speeds that we descent at are pretty similar to the speeds that we climbed at so I'll just leave them alone if I want to go and um land at a greater angle like we'll say for the Glide slope I can type in say three and select the vpa so now instead of a 2.5 Glide slope I'll have a three Glide slope the next step is the lags so if we look on here we'll see that we're going from avv n to HBS it also filled in the speed 300 and the altitude for that Waypoint and then after I reach that Waypoint you can see the next one says we have to start descent at a 3° slope slope at a speed of 290 and we have to be at 10,517 the problem is we're not complete yet we have to select our departure and arrival airports runways Sid stars and whatnot before these legs are fully filled in so if we go over here to departure and arrivals we can now select the departure button and then our Runway when you select a departure you always select the the runway first and then we'll hit confirm now that I selected my Runway if I want to fly a sid which is a standard instrument departure I can select it on the left hand side but only after I select the runway first for the purpose of this tutorial we won't select the S now we go back to departure and arrival index and now I'll select on my arrival opposite to the departure you select the star which is your standard AR Ral procedure or your standard instrument arrival before you select your approach so we're going to take the Habs 324 lstar I don't see it on this page so we'll hit next page and there we have it HBS 3.24 L we select it and again confirm it now I have a choice I can go ils2 24l or rnav which is GPS 24l we also get a warning that it's saying at the Waypoint Titus it can't get to 4,000 ft I wouldn't worry about that yet because there's most likely some mistakes in the lags that I'll show you in a second if we get the warning again after we adjust those lags then we have to adjust our cruise altitude so we'll select clear to get rid of that and I'm going to select ILS 24l and again execute to confirm now we have everything we need we've defined our departure our ride Ral the runways the SIDS and stars our climb our cruise our descent we'll click on legs and you'll notice there's a lot more than was there before so we'll go ahead and look through all these so far everything looks okay aha on the next page we see something called vectors and then something called discontinuity both of these are bad and will break your flight plan so you have to go through each of the legs and make sure you don't find vectors or discontinuity so what we'll do is we'll select next page and we'll select the first Waypoint that's a valid Waypoint so in this case SLA and then we'll go back and select the one we want to delete and then we'll execute it so now that one was removed so now again to remove vectors and you can see here the warning still happening on able 4,000 at Titus we'll clear that and try again select s L okaya and then click on vectors and then execute to confirm that notice how that error message did not happen again so that means that we're okay with our 10 our 13,000 Cruise altitude it just didn't think we could get there with that vectors and the discontinuity uh on our screen so now if we look through all our waypoints everything has a number on the right so we have our speed and our altitude and you can see here we're going to start climbing here run Runway 25 we're going to get to our 13,000 cruise at avv as long as we stay underneath 16,000 so that b means below so as long as we stay below 16,000 we're okay at Habs but the second we get the Como we need to start our descent and we're going to go down to about 11,511 we hit next page you can see below 9,000 then this above a above 4,000 and then finally at s we have to be at around 3,000 to intercept the ILS so that's pretty much all there is you can also see here how many nautical miles to reach the wayo and there is something here that says Auto or inhibit if it's set to inhibit it won't automatically advance to the next way point so once you get to AVN it won't go to hbbs unless this is at the auto so just always leave it on auto you can view this so just like we went through the legs and we hit next page to see some of these things if we go up here and we select this button over here to plan mode there we go notice how at the bottom this now says step I can now step through each way point and you'll notice on the multi-function display here that we'll see that particular part of the trip so again I'll hit step step through it again in each step you can see all the valid waypoints of our flight that's very useful to make sure that by mistake you didn't enter in the wrong Waypoint now that we've confirm everything though we'll go back off plan to our regular map mode which is much easier to see our waypoints we'll go back here to the index and then we'll select root menu and let's save this route we spent a lot of time entering this root so in case we want to use it again we don't want to lose it so we can click on the pilot root list and then give it a name so again we'll click in the scratch pad and I'll say c y w to c y l and then I select the store button here and now it shows my root save if I go to the flight plan screen now notice how the company route is now filled in with that flight plan that is how I know that uh I'm using a save Flight Plan the other option is I can go to the index page root menu and then pilot rout list which is where I saved it from and now I can see that flight plan so there's two ways for you to enter your or to load your flight plan from the flight plan page you can type your flight plan name into the scratch pad and then select Company Route it might be okay if you have a couple of them but if you if you have a lot of flight plans and you're not going to remember what they are this isn't the best thing but that is an option the other option again go to index root menu pilot root list and just simply click this button now when you first start playing with the CDU you're going to make a lot of mistakes and there's no real button on here that says reset this thing back the default so that you can start over again in practice and it sure gets annoying having to close xplane and reopen it again so there's a trick enter in a different origin and it'll reset the entire CDU so let's say instead of C yo W I'll just enter the destination into the origin so cyu L and put that in now everything's wiped out so I can start fresh and put in my flight plan so again for demonstration purposes we know that I saved a route called c y w to c y l i can collect on co- root and there we go everything's filled in my flight plan my lags it's all good to go so that's one way and I showed you the other way through the index page the last thing I'm going to show you is something called direct intercept so let's say by mistake you forgot to remove the vectors so in this case we'll say hals is the vector we'll just pretend it is so if I click on Direct two I want a b mypass Habs for some reason uh like I mentioned maybe I forgot to remove vectors or discontinuity and now I'm in the air and I can't really shut the flight management system down and restart it again so the only option I have is this direct two so I'll clear the scratch Pad Here Again by selecting clear and I'm going to select KO and then over here with this little arrow I'll select it and then execute I'm now going directly to comoo and I'm bypassing AV avv and Habs I'll show you one more trick let's pretend I want to go directly to um we'll say Titus I select Titus I go back up here but if I don't click execute let's say I made a mistake I can select cancel mod over here and it undo that change so again you have to select a confirm to to tell the flight management computer that's what you want to do if you made a mistake all you have to do again is click on that cancel mod so let's do one more time Titus the arrows again if I select exec it's going to go to Titus however if I select cancel mod it'll just reset it all back so that is the flight management system flight management computer control display unit or whatever you guys prefer to call it but it's something that will take some practice uh it's something that took me almost a week of flying 3 hours a night to really understand and this is just the flight management part I haven't showed you how to put this together with an autopilot so I'm not going to do that in this video because it's already quite long but I'll follow this up in the next few days with a video of the 737-800 following the same flight plan but using the autopilot and then we'll do a landing so I would like to hear from you guys what do you call this thing do you call it FMS do you call it FMC do you use the default one do you have a third party plugin um what else would you like to know about the FMC or FMS and uh put all that information in the comments below please subscribe to my channel I put a lot of effort into these videos and I hope that you get something from it and again look forward in a few days I'll have a new video showing you how to use the autopilot have a great night and I hope you enjoyed the video

Channel: Jason Vriends

Views: 443,718

Keywords: X-Plane 11, X-Plane, XPlane, X Plane, FMC, FMS, MFD, CDU, Flight Management System, Flight Management Computer, Control Display Unit, Multi Function Display, Flight Simulator

Id: C4B3aqULnuA

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2017