Just adjust the trim until you've got everything the way you want it and then hit the AP (auto-pilot) button

And remember.....learn the basics of AP flight in the cessnas....dont jump straight to a 747

.mic

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That's an UNderstatement. But it's not just the autopilot ...  it's flying in general.. EVERY aspect  

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You've already figured out that just plopping an airplane at an airport, and then making the model behave enough like an airplane to "simulate" flying, gets boring, in a hurry..  Trust me... being told how to use the autopilot to track a GPS course, or VOR radial... so that you can watch a 737 hum along at 34,000feet will get boring, even more quickly.

The best method for getting THE most satisfaction out of simming; is to go about it, just like you would real-world piloting.

Step back and start from scratch. You're now a student pilot with a solo endorsement in a Cessna 172. Every time you sit down to sim, have a goal in mind. Be patient and deliberate focus on the fundementals and a step-by-step mastery of the same skills you'd need to prove, before even thinking about moving on to bigger, faster, and more complex airplanes.

As soon as you can; Take off, hold a heading, hold altitude, fly a perfect pattern (at pattern altitude) and execute a perfect (stabilized) approach/landing... it's time to move on to maneuvers:  

Multiple, successive, 360 degree steep turns (at least 45 degrees of bank), +/- 100 feet .. +/- 10kias ..  rolling out +/- 5 degrees

Slow flight; holding 50kias (+/- 5 knots), while making 90 degree turns (+/- 5 degrees), while holding altitude +/- 100 feet.

Turns about a point; picking a landmark and flying a near-perfect circle around it at 1500agl in at least a 20knot wind.

Fly a perfectly squared-off pattern in a 20knot wind...

When you're able to adjust your approach, for ANY wind... hold a stable crab-angle (locked on runway center-line) and manage a smooth, cross-controlled, cross-wind landing... It's time to move on to navigation.. There's no satisfaction; very little learning, and not a whole lot of fun in watching an autopilot track a GPS course, if you haven't mastered basic VOR/NDB navigation.

At this point in your student piloting, you're ready to start "going places"... and the importance (and fun) of realistic flight planning comes into play. Just like for real.. you need to have the whole thing planned before sitting behind the yoke/joy-stick. You're still a solo-student, so you won't have passengers and weight/balance planning isn't critical (yet). All you really need to plan, is your fuel burn.
                                      ---------------------
**note:  It's best to save a flight for training (might as well make it the default flight, since you aren't rated for anything other than the C172), and it's realistic to do your training out of the same (home) airport... Go ahead and leave both occupants (or take the right seat guy out if you like), but be sure to start each flight checking and setting the fuel. Kinda like part of the pre-flight... and on some of your later flights (you and three buddies and some gear) you'll need a VERY specific amount of fuel, to stay under the maximum take-off weight, but enough to make each leg (with legal reserves)***
                                       ------------------------

Assuming that you use real weather for these flights, you can go to this sight for weather info and winds-aloft forecasts   http://adds.aviationweather.noaa.gov/   (this also assumes that you know how to calculate a heading and calculate your ground speed, adjusting for the winds aloft, for each leg of the flight). This is ground-school stuff, so I'll just state the obvious.. You need to know your ground speed in order to calculate a fuel burn..

P.S.   *** absolutely NO GPS use yet  ****

Keep it simple at first... to and from some realtively close airports to get a feel for using VORs and NDBs to find them...and then expand the horizons going further and further. In no time at all, you'll feel confident in VOR/NDB use and your flight planning will get more complex.. using several nav-aids to go further and further.. even needing to have planned fuel-stops and multi-day (session) trips.

When you can confidently and comfortably navigate (no GPS)... you're pretty much a sim "Private Pilot", and ready to move on to instrument flying.. A college course worth of learning, all by itself    ... and can be done so realistically with a desktop computer, that the FAA allows up to 10 hours of your logged, instrument training to be done under a CFII's supervision.

 *** to be continued****

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EXCELLENT !     and, you're welcome...

When you have questions, or need advice, or just wanna report your progress..
we'll be here 

beaky wrote on Oct 21^st, 2007 at 11:52am:






beaky wrote on Oct 21^st, 2007 at 11:52am:


Righto, sir...

I'm off to go fly a pattern in an itty-bitty cessna.... toodle-oo!!

Boy, am I in a strange mood tonight....

TSC. wrote on Oct 21^st, 2007 at 5:36pm:


I guess I just wanted to learn the technicalities of it. That sort of thing I find very interesting.

If you're recommending I stick to the GA, are there any GA downloads in particular you'd recommend?

TSC. wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2007 at 11:55am:


Downloading the 'misty fjords' add-on as we speak; looking forward to it...

As for GA aircraft, I use the much-talked-about cessna 150 freeware package, and sometimes the also-much-talked-about King Air 300, see here

Brett_Henderson wrote on Oct 23^rd, 2007 at 2:37pm:




It's for relaxing, when on occasion I don't want the fuss of procedures and just take off and fly... if you can call flipping a king air onto it's back relaxing....

spitfire boy wrote on Oct 21^st, 2007 at 9:33am:

I learned PMDG 737 when I was 13.

But seriously, I would stick with learning all about General aviation and basic navigation. When you get bored of that you can try a payware domestic / regional airliner flying on VATSIM. Trust me, flying with over 10 other people with voice ATC, flying real procedures, real world weather in a payware aircraft is nothing short of amazing.

Trust me, you probably will not find airliners boring if you do it right.

Ummm... there are a couple threads in here worth reading through (and contributing to)     

If you just want the plane to follow the direct GPS line, change from NAV to GPS on the a/p. Then hit A/P On or whatever it is for the aircraft.

Nigel© wrote on Nov 21^st, 2007 at 6:54am:


NAV HOLD on almost every freeware with a complete A/P...

No arguing that GPS is the navigating standard now. Even all of our club rental planes have IFR certified GPS... And I rarely fly by VOR in real life...

That's what's wonderfully refreshing about simming. You can learn, and stay sharp, on good, old radio navigation     It's much more fun, challenging and educational to radio-navigate in the sim. I won't even turn the GPS on, in the sim. It's SO much more satisfying to find your way around by your own skills  

Steering a plane along a moving-map, GPS line (or worse.. letting the A/P track it for you), leaves you, well.. ummm.. doing nothing  

It's like with automatic transmissions today, nobody knows how to drive a manual anymore.  My dad made me learn and drive a manual for the first couple years I drove, and now I can drive just about anything.  Only learning to use the GPS is going to stop you from flying all those "archaic" aircraft with steam gauges.  Not to mention, what happens when the GPS fails, and you haven't flown VOR approach in years?  I've had at least one RAIM outage in my short amount of instrument time, but when it happened, it caught both my instructor and I off guard, and we had to have the back-up of the VORs to navigate by.

I often wonder what redundancy flight crews will have when all of the navigational eggs wind up in the GPS basket...that's the nice thing about having some VORs and NDBs left: there's a backup in case the GPS receiver or the satellite links fail.

It does happen, and it will happen... just read a story on another forum by a PP who was on a GPS approach (to an ILS, in IMC) when he lost the uplink about 2 miles from the FAF (the dreaded "positional data lost").
He hadn't bothered tracking his position by VOR, even though there is one nearby... luckily, ATC had him on radar and OK'd him to descend a bit, to see if he could get in the clear and find the runway. He was lucky the ceiling was high enough, and luckier still to have radar coverage that low (not from the tower).  His other option would have been to go missed with no good idea of his position, then struggle back to the VOR approach fix.
And of course, without a VOR or radar coverage, he'd have been hosed.

Until they take pilots out of airplanes completely, no matter what bells and whistles you have aboard, if you can't fly by compass, chart and clock you have no business flying. I know that kind of flying is a lot harder in or above clouds, but every pilot should have at least a rough idea of their position based on dead reckoning, just in case.

ALSO: even if all you want to do in MSFS is babysit the AP on airliners, remember that in many parts of the world, enroute and terminal radar coverage is limited, and  VOR and even NDB approaches are quite common.

Brett_Henderson wrote on Nov 29^th, 2007 at 9:08am:


Why should flying be "hard"?

It's ok to pride yourself in knowing how to navigate by VORs, but there's no reason to slander GPS navigation.
Just because it's easy, doesn't make it less OKAY.
Most young pilots I socialize with are pretty handy with the GPS and can program the thing far quicker than looking up various charts for VOR holds.
The nintendo generation of the skies aren't slouches 

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No doubt about that... and a GPS in capable hands is quite a tool..  But even the Nintendo generation need to learn the basics. I wouldn't want to climb onto a regional jet whose pilot wasn't a whiz at VOR navigation..

Actually, most Airlines are not completely GPS.

They use to of used an inertial navigation system, atleast, the planes I'm familiar with. Three gyros, one in each axis, with sophisticaed instrumentation to measure the precession of each gyro as it is moved, and to use that data to calculate velocity and heading relative to a starting point (the point of initilization).

INS were later improved with (laser ring) gyros with no moving parts (AHRS - Attitude and Heading Reference System). They, as in the early B757 and B767, the laser ring units were fed updates from, IGS, VOR and TACAN (the DME portion) data for a more accurate self-updating system. Lastly, GPS is now (primarily) used in most jets depending on the airline(r) and whether they've retrofitted their fleet. So, it will make no difference if GPS fails, or if a bunch of Navaids fail. The only use I can see of not navigating by this is if you're flying into an airport that isn't in the nav database or you simply cannot mess with the CDU due to various situations.

You mentioned you use the A340.... well the CLS A340 atleast, uses the default (GPS) planner instead of modelling its AHRS and FMC. That's semi-realistic, but in real life it's not as simple as only GPS.

And lastly, ILS is always used for precision landings. GPS updates are still no where near accurate enough.

http://www.boeing.com/commercial/caft/reference/documents/RNP757767.pdf



EDIT: And any pilot who cannot navigate by VOR is probably retarded.

EDIT2: Corrected faults.

No, I'm pretty sure GPS isn't used in most 767s and 757s.

Most 767s and 757s I've encountered hadn't been retrofitted.

Wait, could you please clarify something for me. w/ FANS-1, is the position updated primarily by GPS, or is it just completely GPS?

Ok thanks.

I found out where I got it wrong.... confusing AHRS with INS....   Are you a pilot in real life?