"one thing i notice wouldnt a 2250 FPM make the passengers throw up all over the place??"Passengers only feel acceleration/deceleration... not uniform velocity.(Sidenote) Our Milky Way galaxy is moving towards a large cluster of galaxies at 1,000,000 mph. Can't say I've noticed though.Yes, idle is normal (do you use the accelerator when coming up to a set of traffic lights?) :(You stop using idle when levelling off (due to ATC restrictions, etc)... or intercepting the glideslope. When you are closer to the ground, you need to slow down your descent rate.CheersQ>

- Nomal descent rate is engines idle and pitch for speed.- Descent rate at final approach: rule of thumb: Ground Speed *5. (That is for a 3

I also use the 3 to 1 rule, seems to work out good.30000feet and you wanna descend to 3000 feet,30000-3000=27000/1000=27*3=81nm start descent 81 nm miles but add a few milesnow the rate ur gonna use isgroundspeed of 410/2=205 add a 0 at the end so you get 2050fpm so i would put 2100 fpm, that will change as yu descend so i recompute every so often due to speed changes as you descend. seems to always work.so for this scenario you would start descent at around 81 nm again add ten or so at a rate of 2100fpm to start, again rate will change as you descend.Hope this makes sense, it seems complicated but very easy to do aftre a few times, very fast to do also.P.S MAKE SURE TO USE GROUNDSPEED IN YOUR CALCULATIONS AND NOT I REPEAT NOT INDICATED SPEED Hope this helps.EDIT: I forgot to say i use this for all aircraft i fly not just the heavies. I also use this to figure out my rate of descent on an ils if im hand flying the ils. And as I said above it always works out good for me.So its a multi purpose rule of thumb i guess you could say :)

It seems we all use pretty much the same techniques, however, let's not forget the wind factor, holding in real life is boring enough let alone in FS

I want to thank you guys for all your info. what i keep seeing in all the posts is that i use the caculations when im supposed to know how many NM i have to desend to the atc FL. but in this case i use the build in ATC in the flight sim so it does not tell me how many NM i have to decend to it just tells me to decend to a specific FL then when im near to that FL it gives me another FL. will this calculation work for me if i dont know how many NM i have until i have to be at the FL that ATC gives ME. Also i have never Descended while my engines were AT IDLE. I will try this tonight and see how this goes.