Absolute beginners guide to flight planning, GPS, and ILS in Microsoft Flight Simulator

Hello, this afternoon we are going to respond to an email I received a few days ago where someone asked me if I could record a

flight

from A to B for

beginners

in

flight

or in the

simulator

to be able to take a plane from A to B. in the most simple possible, so that's exactly what we're going to do, we're going to use the world map to program a routine, we're going to spawn a plane on the runway and then we're going to fly a route. use autopilot and make autopilot do everything we can. Okay, so let's get started, we're already in the

simulator

, we just loaded it.

I'm not going to cover setting up the controls because everyone has different controls. but I'm only going to use the most basic controls, so all you're going to need to have working is the throttle stick and the flap sticks to basically fly the plane that we have in mind, so if we go and click on the world map What plane do we have in mind? We are going to fly the Cessna 172 Skyhawk that comes with all versions of the simulator. This is the one with the G1000 with a glass cockpit, so we'll use the Cessna 172 Skyhawk.

We are taking off from Petaluma in California, so how to find Petaluma? You can type the name in the search or you can type the code, which suddenly gives us a side conversation. running alongside the simulator, I have another software called little nav map. This is a free download from the internet if you just google little navmap and then download it, install it and run it along with the simulator you obviously won't. it works if you're running an a map, so once you've installed the simulator with any scenario or anything, you can go to the Scenario Library menu in the little navigation map and load the scenario and it will basically grab a copy for your own purposes so you can see. this, if we go and get closer to the west coast of the United States, the closer we get, the more we see waypoints, airfields, ilss and all kinds of things, and we can actually plot a little root navigation map, but we'll come back to that in Wait a minute, not really, let's do this first because it's going to make sense to visualize what the route we're going to take today is, so we're going to open the search box on the little navigation map and we're going to go from Petaluma, which is 069 . is your IO code, we can type, click on it and set Petaluma as the departure airport and you can see it's lit yellow on the map and if we go and look on the map here, we'll take off from Petaluma.

We're going to fly and land at Charles M shz or Sonoma airport, so we'll right click on Sonoma and set it as a destination so it has a basic route on the map, so what we'd like to do is get there ourselves. online with the ILS before we even get there to keep things simple, so if I right click on lusy I can add that Waypoint to our flight plan and now it goes from Petaluma via ly to Charles M Schulz, okay, so you can see that built. up on the list here 069 tusi and then ksts we also see this navigation diagram down here showing the altitudes, so we'll fly the entire route at about 1500 feet probably and there you can see it's finding out if there are any.

Hills along the way, but that's the only thing we were really interested in with this, it's just to see what the route would look like and more importantly we can see the ILS information, so let's move on to the simulator, shall we? How do we put this in? simulator on the world map screen, so select exit, click on the search box. Now we can type Petaluma which will open it and we can click on it to enlarge the map or we can type the code number so Now we will go to Ral airport and we can type ksts which will show Charles Schulz so we could also having typed Sonoma, so we'll click on that so that's our basic route on the map that you'll notice in the simulator. all those waypoint markers are missing, where are they?, so if you go to the more option at the bottom of the screen and then open the filters and then scroll down to the bottom, you will see the solution and the report Arnav position, activate that.

You can see that little white dots have appeared all over the map, so close the dialogue again and come back and then if we get a little bit closer they will all light up and you should be able to find that there is a cheeky look, there's the one we have. We were

planning

to use it, so if I left click on LY, I can now add it to our flight plan, so now we have a flight plan that leaves Petaluma and goes to LY and then flies directly to Sonoma . So you can see here that there is an important point here when we choose Petaluma: we place the plane by default on the runway, we can choose a parking ramp that we are not going to spawn on, we are going to spawn on the runway and the reason why we do.

Will the plane be ready to fly with the engine running? Additionally, the plane will already have this route programmed into its GPS system. Okay, so let's click fly and let that happen so the simulator is busy loading and we can go take a look. So, the most important thing that that little navigation map gives us, which is not so easy to obtain in the simulator, is the details of the ILS. Okay, we'll fly to Petaluma, sorry, Sonoma and follow the ILS. Let's find out what the weather is doing. Yes, there is almost no wind today, so we don't have to worry about the wind, so we can leave the weather live, it won't hurt us, so the simulator shouldn't take much time. load, so we just give it a try and here it comes, so if we say ready to fly, I'm going to turn off my head tracking.

I have a head tracking device, but I want this to look like you're going to see it, okay, okay. So you can see we're sitting on the end the wrong way, the engine is running. I'm just going to check my recording volumes, they look good, so if we go and look on the other side, you can see on the navigation screen our route. it's already programmed, we can zoom it out, so you have a range knob here. If we increase the range by turning it with the mouse wheel, we can see the full path, so by default in this SNA, when you log in for the first time or when you log in for the first time. turn it on this map will be facing north you can change that so what you can do is press the menu button on the navigation screen and this dialog will appear with the map settings flashing if we just get rid of this yoke by clicking the stem. so we can see all the buttons, we'll also do the same thing here, click on the bud stem and make it disappear.

What we can do is press Enter in the map settings, so press the Enter button and then we can use this outside knob. on the FMS knob at the bottom right to scroll down and then when we get to the orientation we can turn the internal knob which will change its settings and we could say go up or even head up and press Enter and the map has now turned. we can press clear now to get rid of the dialog so the map is now facing the direction we're going yeah so we just need the compass rows to be there so we have a much easier way to navigate just by looking the map, okay, before If we do anything, then we'll get familiar with some of these buttons and what they do and some of the instruments, so on the left side of this screen we have the indicated airspeed, which is actually measuring the air going through and hitting this pipe so the air pressure tells the plane how fast it's going through the air and that will be indicated here in nautical miles on the right side we have the altitude above the ground or sorry above the level of the sea notice we are at 240 right now I just pressed B and it suddenly changes so in the same way the air pressure reads the altitude when you enter the plane it may not be calibrated so at Press B on the keyboard I have calibrated, you can see it there, it is the measurement in inches.

I have calibrated the air pressure for the altimeter to be accurate for the airfield. I'm right, so we're about 90 feet above sea level here, it's okay down here. Circular instrument with a compass around it is a horizontal position indicator. Okay, that's a clever version of this. This is a whiskey compass that you can obviously look at to see which direction you are going. It has a small plane in the middle, that is, the plane. it goes this way, so the direction you're heading is always at the top of the compass and obviously it's also shown here by the angle, but notice that there's a line on this horizontal situation indicator or HSI, there's a line going through it if it has a magenta line it shows the GPS system or the lines it shows represent the route on the GPS system so if you look at the route on the GPS it goes through our plane and directly in front of us through our plane directly in front of us.

Okay, and you'll notice there's a heading knob here with a triangle on it, so this is the heading, if we try to turn it when we're in GPS mode, it doesn't do anything, so what's this all about if we change it, press the CDI button? Because you may get on the plane and find that it is in a different mode, the CDI button switches between Locator, Locator 2, and GPS charging mode, so Locator 1, Locator 2, GPS, the reason Why we need to know this is while flying from point to point. Following the route that we programmed, we will keep this in GPS mode when we get to the ILS to land on the runway, we have to switch to localizer mode, yes, so we will switch to the navigation radios, not the GPS, so the navigation are up here, there are two, so you have localizer one and two that correspond to nav 1 and nav 2 and to tune them and we can do this now we can go and take a look at the ILS of um Sonoma. 109.3 is the frequency 321° is the magnetic track to the track, okay, so if we press the center of the navigation knob, the focus will change between navigation 2 and navigation 1, so we'll do all this on the ground so we don't have We have to worry about that when we're in the air, so we want it to say 109.3 so the big knob does the whole numbers, so we'll move it back using the mouse wheel and the small knob does the decimals so we can roll it. forward and it will go through zero and come back to 109.3, but this is a standby frequency, it is not the active frequency, we can change it to make it the active frequency, so I will turn it back so that nothing is tuned and you will see Actually, you may not see the change because we are on the ground, but we will try.

Yes, nothing has appeared yet. This will come to life when we are in the air, obviously because it is a radio that the ground interferes with. You have to be at a certain altitude for the radio instruments um to work properly, so we'll press CDI for the moment and just show the GPS. One thing we could do right before we get there, we also talk about the heading of the runway. Not so, so we've already tuned the localizer, the navigation radio one would be nice if our heading knob was set to go 321°, so remember triangle one is the heading, there's a little diagram there that explains that and we can shoot. that round, so if we turn the heading knob we can set it to notice that we have the instrument here at 321°, so all we're really doing here is doing everything in advance so that when we're flying we don't have anything left to do , OK? so remember we're going to use GPS to start with so we change the CDI mode when it says CDI which means it's a heading deviation indicator which is the line in the middle of the HSI if we're deviating to the left or to the right. of the track that you can see on the map, that line will slide left and right, which means that the line on the map is to the left or right of us so we can follow the line, we will see what happens as we fly.

So just before we get started, let's do a quick rundown of the navigation system and autopilot buttons. The only thing we haven't covered is the heading. As we turn the course, you will notice that the market says: You can fly the autopilot in various modes, so there is heading mode, navigation mode, approach mode, vertical navigation mode, altitude hold mode, of vertical speed and many of these can be used in combination with each other, you have the flight level change mode at the bottom. Also, we're not going to worry about many of them today, what we will worry about is saying that as soon as we turn on the autopilot, we would like the plane to follow our trajectory that we have programmed.

We're going to press Nav and it's going to show GPS at the top, so this line here is going to tell us what program the autopilot is in, so the modeGPS means that the plane will turn left and right to follow the route we programmed if we want the plane to also climb or climb to a certain height, we have to tell it what heights to climb to, so at the top right we have sorry at the bottom left. Sorry, you have different designs of these knobs on different planes. um, at the bottom left of The Sassy you have the altitude, so if you look at the altitude tape here you can change the target altitude, so we want to fly at 1500, so the big knob does thousands, the small knob does hundreds, so we can say take us up to 1,500 feet, okay, and then the next thing we need to decide after choosing a target altitude is the speed at which we want to get there.

This is a huge topic because there are many ways you can program this to do it. Today we are only going to use the vertical speed mode because it is the simplest, but it is actually dangerous because the plane will climb blindly at the rate we have told it to, regardless of speed or power, so we will say vertical speed and you can see which says vs up and then you can press the nose up and nose down buttons repeatedly to change the speed in hundreds of feet per minute so we can click nose up 1 2 3 4 five times to make it go up to 1500 feet to 500 feet per minute you should now find that you can get away with about 700 feet per minute in good weather on the sassa 172 at full power, okay, so we're going to go up to 1500 feet per minute at 7, sorry.

We're going to climb at 1500 feet at 700 feet per minute and this has all been programmed into Look and the alt s means that it will capture the altitude when it gets to it, so it will stop climbing on its own in terms of direction. We are in GPS mode, so as long as we are close to the runway, when we turn on the autopilot, it will make sense and turn left or right to take us exactly to the runway, so we should try it. I'm going to press F to center the view up. In fact, I'm also going to press the space bar and then hold down the right mouse button and drag down with the mouse and that will allow us to look down to get a better point of view. of what's going on and I'm going to move us a little bit closer so we can see the map or sorry, um, the screen here, so take off the handbrake and press the accelerator to the floor and now I have to drive gently.

To maintain the centerline, I have my simulator set to maximum realism, so all forces are in play when moving the plane on the runway, so you have the torque you have. What is called the wake effect happens to you. We have the crosswind due to whatever wind is hitting the plane, so when it gets to 60 or 70 knots you should be able to turn Gent without flaps and the plane is in the air and we are flying. You can see what we have. We have a small amount of crosswind pushing us off the direction of the runway, so we'll correct that and gently climb a few degrees, about 7 and a half degrees, okay, so as we leave I can adjust the airplane to If you have some trim controls, you can use them, but if not, just press the autopilot button now so AP lights up and the plane is flying on its own, it's going up, it's going down, look, look to get to about 700 feet per minute, it's going up towards 1500 feet per minute, the speed at which the plane is still accelerating, so obviously we can control our speed with power, just as we can control the rate of climb with power, so notice that there is a marker here that appears up or down, which indicates whether you are accelerating or decelerating. based on the power that you set so you can look on the map and see us ascend towards that waypoint, so yes, as I said before, we are in GPS mode, so let's try something else, we can change the heading error and You can See it in motion, we can click on the heading bug in the middle and it will center it in the direction we're going.

Okay, if we press heading mode now on autopilot, so I'll do it now, done, now it says heading here. Now the autopilot no longer follows the GPS path, but instead follows the direction of the heading error, so if we deviate the heading error from the heading, we turn left and the plane turns left. Look what happens with the CDI. The heading deviation indicator basically says that the runway is to our right, yes, so if we approach this down here, it's just a little bit far away, but you can see that it indicates that we're far from the runway, so we can place ourselves. move the heading error back put us on an intercept course so we'll wait for the plane to turn by the way we're at 1500 feet look the plane stopped climbing or descending so I'm going to pull the throttle back a little back.

Now we're not in a hurry, obviously, now we've leveled out, if we leave the throttle high we'll start to accelerate, so look, we're still, now we're back on an intercept course with the navigator or with you. Know the GPS heading, if we press Nav again, it will fly by GPS again. Note that it hasn't done anything sudden because we were close to the runway anyway, but if it's parallel to the runway, it can take, you know? a stronger angle if you are at a certain distance from it, it will take its own intercept heading to return to the runway, it is usually between 30 and 45° depending on the aircraft, so you can also see here the estimated time to the At the next waypoint you also have your GPS-measured ground speed, okay, so we'll wait and wait a moment.

You can also see the distance here. Look at 2 miles .1 mile and it will change. Look at the The leg changes color, so the magenta leg is next, so now we have 12 miles left until we reach our next waypoint, so if we go and look out the window, we can see that there is a runway in the distance, that's where we're going, so we're flying with GPS right now, so remember we can go and center the heading error on the direction we're going and go into heading mode on the autopilot to Let the autopilot continue in the direction we are going. going anyway, but now we are in heading mode, we can change the CDI, so click on CDI and it will show the locator.

Remember we've already tuned this into the ILS. Yeah, we've already set heading to runway direction 321°, so the interesting thing now is that not only do we have this, we also have a glide slope indicator that appears next to the attitude indicator here, so This line works the same as with the GPS if we are in heading mode, remember or not really, we are yes. we are still in heading mode if we press navigation while we are in localizer mode, it says localizer up here, yes, so the plane will try to center the CDI on its own, but if we go back to heading mode we can move away from it.

I'll do it just to demonstrate it to you, so we'll fly 20° away from it and you'll see the heading deviation indicator or the CDI slide to the side, so we'll fly back towards it. again, so I'm changing the header bug, so the whole point of this is you don't actually have to be able to see the outside, but I'm just showing you how this instrumentation works, what it shows us so we're in tune with the ILS remember if this was just a v station and not ILS, we wouldn't have the glide slope, but we would have this part fine, so let's press navigation and it will turn left by its own appearance.

He knows he just crossed the line and he will. straighten out so the plane flies down the runway, this is the GPS runway, remember on this map we can zoom out a little bit so we can see the destination there, so if you see the green arrow, that's the locator, the magenta arrow is the GPS and you can change the modes by pressing the CDI button, so in a moment this little diamond that you can only see half of will go down the glide slope meter, which means that there is an imaginary line across the sky at 3 degrees on this track.

Different runways have different angles, most of them are 3° on flat ground, it's a kind of standard, if you imagine an invisible line up to the runway that your plane is supposed to follow to safely reach the runway, this yellow diamond or The green diamond, sorry, represents where we are in position relative to that invisible line, so right now we are flying level at 1500 feet and the line is in front of us somewhere, so we are below from it at this altitude, so far away. so we're below the line, so when this goes down when it hits the middle it means we're on the line, if it goes below the midpoint it means we're above the line, so basically we can chase that diamond, but we don't. we make.

It's not necessary, we can have the autopilot do it, we can use the approach mode, so if I press Zoom in, you can see it's lit up and it says GS for Glide Slope, here it comes, look, we're getting closer, it's about the correct distance. for altitude then that line is right in front of us that invisible line all the way to the runway and we are getting closer and closer to it when we hit it the plane will start to descend on its own so watch our vertical speed. We'll try to get the view to show both our vertical speed and altitude when it gets to the middle because we're in approach mode on the ILS, so the ILS is tuned to the set heading, there it goes.

The slippers are illuminated. and it's descending, there goes the vertical speed and the height decreases, so the plane is basically flying itself towards the runway, so no flying skills are required for this, just some knowledge of how the radios and buttons work on autopilot, so obviously we're going to accelerate because we're going downhill, so I'm going to reduce the throttle. We need to go slow enough. I'm going to go back to full idle, so we're essentially coasting so you can see the speed. Coming out of that rate of change marker shows the speed at which the speed comes out, we must enter the white area on the indicated airspeed tape, which is the area in which it is safe to deploy the flaps so that we can open the engine again. and we can start to deploy flaps obviously once we deploy them the airplane is causing a lot more drag so we will have to moderate that with more throttle so we look for full flaps and we can look from the outside because the airplane is flying on its own , remember. look, there are flaps, so the idea of ​​flaps, if you are a complete beginner in aviation, is that the plane can fly more slowly with the flaps extended, they allow the wing to generate much more lift, but at the expense of drag , okay, so I'm Now I'm using the throttle to control our speed on the way, so we don't want to get much less than 55 knots 500, so now the altitude is read below us if you want to incense your view quickly and easily just press the F key on the keyboard, so if we press F and then the space bar, we can use the right mouse button and drag down and use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out to get a nice organized view so that the plane coming in on its own, I don't even have my hand on the joystick, I'm just watching the airspeed and using the power, so we're on autopilot, we're in localizer mode or landing mode.

We're on the glide slope, you can see the glide slope. There we are on the locator, so the locator is either to the left or to the right. The glide slope goes up or down and reaches the runway completely automatically, so I'll drop the plane. On the track, normally you would flash, but I'm going to show you that you can really get away with it. It will light up a little in landing mode, but not as much as if you were doing it by hand, and again once we get just above the runway. I'm going to cut the throttle to idle to lift the nose.

Now you can see what happens. I cut the throttle to idle and we just sank to the ground. What notice? Autopilot is left on, so we have to go. and press the AP button down here and it will start flashing, which means it's turned off, so now I have control of the airplane, so we're going to bring it back to the center line and we can use the wheel brakes, we can raise the flaps and we can go off the runway, so there you have a beginner's crash course on how to fly between two points on the map with the basic Cessna that has a good autopilot, a good GPS system, and a good navigation radio system to use with ILS. so let's take the plane into a hole and put the handbrake on so we can chat if you use a program like little nav map and it's not the only program out there there's also navigraph that you may have heard of if you use something like a small navigation map, you can look at the map and see which airfields have ILS which will help you tremendously if you are just starting out or you can just go and pick any old airfield anywhere but even if we are justdrawing its route on the map, so we wanted to go there next.

We can right click on the airfield and add. We can go there next and we can right click and we can add so you can do your route for as long as you want. or you can start from scratch and make a new flight plan, say no, so we could say: right click from here, set that as our departure, right click on that, set that as our destination and just go and fly that if you wish. Obviously it will give you the direction to fly, so you can fly it manually with the compass if you want, so the idea is that you can take more and more charge of flying the plane as you get more comfortable doing it or maybe trying.

Discover the different modes in the autopilot and guidance system, but remember that if you load through the world map screen, the route will already be here. If you want to advance the map programming, the route on the map yourself can do it. on the plane just like you would in the real thing, you can press the FPL or Flight Plan button and this form appears and you can press the FMS knob and move the cursor and fill in the fields so that our departure airfield is there, for example. What we just did, there's the Waypoint we went to and the destination, so again I have full videos on how this system works.

You can find them on my channel, but just to give you that option as you go. with the simulator you can get into more and more different subject areas around the airplane and different elements of it and then obviously towards the end you learn how to fly an airplane properly, you know, regardless of operating an airplane or being able to operate an airplane. and being able to fly it properly are two completely different things anyway, I'll leave it there, I hope you enjoyed it, so if you're just starting out, don't worry about using autopilot all the time, don't worry about using the map. screen instead of programming the flight computers yourself, if all else fails there is an AI pilot at the top of the screen, so if you open it while you're in the air and tell it where you want to go, he It will take you.

Flying over the plane for you, yes, so there are tons of toys in the simulator to play with, have fun, I think that's the main thing, just make sure you have fun, if it becomes a problem, don't worry about it. You know, do something else, go do something else for a few hours anyway, put the Yoles back on. I'll see you again soon.