Me and my friend James are sitting here playing with his newly received bbj (not counting time waiting for his key) and are wondering if there is a way to shorten the time needed to align the irs. Anyone familiar with this bird, let alone this procedure?I figured this question could go to many forums so decided to pick the one with more traffic!

Yup. You can manually align the nav system by select PPOS on the overhead and then selecting the position coordinates via position initialisation on the CDU. The nav system should then base alignment of the IRS on your position in the sim.This is basically the same as doing it manually on the real thing, but saves you the trouble of typing it - just highlight the position last known coordintates with the LSKs on the Position Initialisation page, that will put that reference in the scratchpad, and you can then put it into the position line from there.Al

Thanks Al! I was already aware of that procedure. We are just wondering if there is a modification that can be made to use the FMC alignment in under 10 minutes. As I don't own it I can't test anything now that I'm home :( Hopefully your post will help anyone else that isn't aware of that procedure! :( --If anyone else reading owns this bird that is.

I could be wrong, but I think that's the only way to speed it up, I don't think there's a 'fast align' option like there is on the Wilco 737 for example.You also need to be aware that the brand new Ariane X2.5 Boeing 737-700 BBJ has an FMC glitch at the moment that can cause the throttle to go a bit wild when using FMC speed, which Ariane are currently working on fixing. You can get around it, and apparently not everyone has it happen, but if you do get that issue, check out their support forums as there are some threads about it. They've changed VNAV on the X2.5 version FMC in order to get its behaviour closer to how the NG really has it work, but in doing so, run into that throttle issue, which is ironic, as the real 737's VNAV also had a sort of similar problem for a long time, until that too got some new FMC logic.There is a review for Avsim coming for the X2.5 700 version by the way, which I'll be doing, but I am waiting until they've finished beta testing the tweaks to their FMC logic to sort out that throttle issue (which is in progress right now), before I do the review. So be aware that as it stands, it's possibly better to hold off on buying it, or at least if you do buy it, fly it knowing that can happen and use the workarounds mentioned on their forum. It's a very good simulation of a 737, but that FMC glitch is a pain in the &@($*, and in all honesty, I would not absolutely recommend getting it until that is fixed.I have no doubt they will fix it, and when they do, it is likely to be pretty cool, but it might be a few weeks until they do so. In other words, caveat emptor, for the moment at least.Al

Very interesting. Looking forward to that review.As he is using the older FS9 version, I wasn't seeing that problem yesterday. (Though I was contemplating buying the BBJ'X' for myself) I doubt I'll fly his again before I buy one for myself. :(

The FS9 one is fine, as indeed are all the other FSX ones. That FMC issue is related to the FSX X2.5 700 with the terrain map feature. I actually really like the FS9 Ariane 737s myself, the VC is pretty cool.Al