A little Heads-Up on the NGX...

[Benji 3]

I know at Southwest they actually don't use autoland in CAT III conditions, use of the HGS is required for that and the captain must fly the approach. Not sure what the rules are at other airlines.

Same at RYR I believe.

[Tristan Marchent 3]

AHA!! fantastic!!i know one member in particular who will be very happy with this statement,his name tristan merchant

Yeh thats right!! Awesome thankyou very Much!!! :D :D :DRegards,Tristan Marchent ;)

[Sawydz 4]

Good morningI miss the dual land indicator and flare for autoland?Best regardsMarcel

Hi Marcel, I believe everything will be at it's place in right time, the product is in alpha stage, and those guys really know their job. Let me cite RSR:

Eric-The down side for a developer showing you images taken from an ALPHA product, is that we get folks who are desperately trying to show us how smart they are by pointing out things that haven't been implemented yet... You don't know a darn thing about what will or will not be implemented- so please keep this in mind before you attempt to start a forum spat over whether RNP will or will not be implemented.Spend 10 minutes using the search function and you'd find that not only are you wrong- but you don't know nearly as much about the airplane as you let on.

Regards,

[737freak 42]

Our great kingdom of Flight Sim X has a new leader! Please welcome, Her Majesty The 737NGX. She will bring wealth, freedom and happiness. She will bring The Queen of The Skies and The Last Tri-jet to their knees. The NGX will conquer the not so great kingdom of Flight Sim 9 and defeat all evil. Her creators, our gods, will be loved and honored. Praise PMDG!Let the revolution start! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!Henk de Vries

[aceridgey 330]

Our great kingdom of Flight Sim X has a new leader! Please welcome, Her Majesty The 737NGX. She will bring wealth, freedom and happiness. She will bring The Queen of The Skies and The Last Tri-jet to their knees. The NGX will conquer the not so great kingdom of Flight Sim 9 and defeat all evil. Her creators, our gods, will be loved and honored. Praise PMDG!Let the revolution start! Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!Henk de Vries

wow, you really are a "737freak" XD XD XD XD XD

[737freak 42]

Nice metaphor, ha?:( No, serious now. I have no other words for all the magic PMDG is creating (has created).Take all the time you need, but keep the regular updates comming. I would love to see an update every weekend. (No big ones, just small updates) Henk de Vries

[737freak 42]

As much as I would love to build a cabin interior (I wish you could all see the section I had for the MD11), it really is a huge resource hog if done properly (I refuse to build a cabin with cement block seats and blurry bitmaps). We have packed so much quality into the VC and worked very hard at every turn to maximize performance. To detract from its performance by adding thousands of polygons and megabytes of bitmaps for a heavy cabin would really be a disservice to all of you, even those who like to ride in the back. Aside from that, PMDG's stated goal is to provide education and entertainment for customers interested in the complex environment of commercial aviation. The passenger experience is not a part of that.We will however be including wings you can see from the cockpit as you turn your head back.

What about a virtual Galley, so when you click on de cockpit door, you can 'walk' to the galley and open the cabin doors on both sides. I really like this feature of the Ariane 737-800X2.Henk de Vries

[rafman925 0]

Rafman925. Well that's lovely, and it looks excellent, but when O when are you releasing it. (PMDG737NGX) 2010 is nearly up, but maybe you've got another a/c to release again in front of it. Please play fare and keep a smile on my and many others faces, I have a whole family of searchers wanting to buy it for Dad's Christmas :( Rafman925EDITED BY MOD TO REMOVE FULL QUOTE OF ORIGINAL POST.

[fakeflyer737 1,022]

STOP REPLYING THE PICTURES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Ron Hamilton

[PUP4ORD 1]

I know this has'nt been asked yet, But will it be possible to put the Rwy ILS FRQ in the Heads up display....ex. RWY 32L FRQ 108.95 CHICAGO O'HARE?...:(

[michal 44]

I know this has'nt been asked yet, But will it be possible to put the Rwy ILS FRQ in the Heads up display....ex. RWY 32L FRQ 108.95 CHICAGO O'HARE?...:(

Everything is possible but why on earth would you want to do this?? This is not a contest about what can be put in the HUD but how HUDs look and work in the real world. Just think a minute whether it is logical to put frequency in the HUD - HUD is for flying approach and not for getting ready to fly them - like setting up frequencies, choosing autopilot modes, working with FMC etc.

[Tabs 2,790]

I know this has'nt been asked yet, But will it be possible to put the Rwy ILS FRQ in the Heads up display....ex. RWY 32L FRQ 108.95 CHICAGO O'HARE?...:(

That's not a feature on the real thing, so no. Why would you need that stuff? You don't know what airport and runway you're landing on without having them always displayed haha?Just to make it clear here, we're modeling what the real HGS does on the real airplane, not just making features up or something.

[michal 44]

However, my instructor has been trying to to get me to use the autopilot to fly at least one approach before the check ride. I wont do it. I feel like I have more control and that I can be more precise if I hand fly the approach. Next time when you are flying, when you turn on the AP make sure its actually doing what you want it to do and then you probably wont feel so bad about it.

Like RR said, perhaps your beef is with rate-based autopilot. But take recent digital autopilots like the one in G1000 (GFC700). I can only dream about hand flying with half the precision of this autopilot. Also if you show up on your IFR check-ride with aircraft equipped with AP you will have to demonstrate proficiency in its use, including approaches. This is all for very good reasons - there were too many GA fatal accidents in which pilots lost control of the aircraft and never engaged a perfectly well functioning autopilot, of course John F. Kennedy Jr's famous crash is a prime example.

[Chock 17,769]

Wouldn't an autoland be safer? Less fun, but safer.

There is a current perception in avionics design and specification (not entirely without foundation) that too much automation on the flight deck can put pilots out of the loop and can make them inclined to place too much trust in automatic modes of flight. That is not to say that autopilots are incapable of doing the job and should somehow be mistrusted, but rather that pilots have sometimes made mistakes with the autopilot, such as putting them in incorrect modes or failing to notice when they have disengaged. An autopilot can only do what you tell it to do, so if you tell it to fly you into a cloud full of granite, then it will happily do so.So although it is probably true that in most cases, an autoland would be safer, that is only true when the pilots are using the autopilot correctly and monitoring things as they should. Witness for example, the fairly recent switch in cockpit nomenclature, where the pilot not on the controls is no longer referred to as the 'pilot not flying' but rather as the 'pilot monitoring', in an attempt to reinforce the fact that this is what he or she should be doing. There are plenty of examples of pilots not correctly monitoring automatic flight modes and this leading to disaster. A few which spring to mind are:Air Inter Flight 148 (where a pilot put the autopilot into a 3,300 fpm descent on approach by mistake, instead of putting it into a 3.3 flight path angle descent profile, thus causing the Airbus A320 to slice into the side of a mountain at night, killing the vast majority of people on board).Eastern Airlines Flight 401 (where a gear indicator light burned out on the flight deck and all three crew members set about trying to fix it, instead of one of them watching the instruments and noticing that the autopilot had switched from altitude hold to CWS mode, thus causing the aircraft to lose height and slam into the Florida Everglades at night, killing all but 14 passengers on board the Tristar).Aeroflot Flight 593 (where the Captain allowed his fifteen year old son to 'move the controls a bit' in the cockpit, and in doing so disconnect the autopilot, which nobody on the flight deck noticed, since none of them were watching the instruments, causing the aircraft to eventually roll through 90 degrees in the darkness. Although the pilots did eventually get it wings-level, it was too low to pull up and the A310 slammed into the ground killing everyone on board).Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 (this is the one where the crew were too busy chatting - ironically - to one of the airline's safety pilots, who was in the jump seat. With the autopilot handling the approach, the crew all failed to monitor the instruments, thus not noticing that the autothrottle had retarded because the radio altimeter was faulty, which fooled the autopilot into thinking the aircraft was nearly down on the deck when it was in fact still on approach at some height. The 737 flopped into a field short of the runway, breaking its back and killing all the flight deck crew, in addition to nine passengers).All of those accidents have a common factor, and that is, the crew were distracted and thought the autopilot was either engaged when it wasn't, or failed to monitor the autopilot's progress to determine if it was functioning as it should have been or as they expected it to. In all cases, there was nothing so wrong with any of the aircraft that they could not have been landed safely, in fact, only the Turkish 737 actually had any sort of defect which would have to be worked around to any degree, and it could quite easily have been, since the 737 has plenty of other means to determine its altitude.In all cases, if a pilot would have been hand-flying (or even simply paying attention instead of assuming the autopilot was working as they thought), then they would have been well aware of what was going on, especially if equipped with the luxury of a HUD, since that, in combination with the feedback from the controls and instruments, would have prevented the accidents. The really sad thing is, the HUD display is not a new concept in airliners either. Whilst it is true that until fairly recently, the B737 was the only production airliner in which it was fairly common, it is by no means the first airliner to have had a HUD, for the would-be 737 rival - the Dassault Breguet Mercure - was equipped with one as far back as 1974. And interestingly, although the Mercure was not a commercial success in numbers sold, it was flown right up until 1995, during which time there were no accidents with the type at all. So having a HUD must be at least some use.But perhaps of more relevance, I think beyond the merits of a HUD in the real world, the ability to use it to hand fly what would otherwise be of necessity either a diversion or an automatic blind landing in your simulated airliner, will be inclined to echo the advantage of the real world where sim pilots are concerned. That is to say, it will make 'hands on' operation more feasible and as a result, probably improve flight sim pilot skill and familiarity with the aircraft's manual flight characteristics.Al

[ahsmatt7 1,213]

Gents-I wouldn't make any judgments about about the autopilots in use aboard airliners based on your experience in GA airplanes.GA airplanes for the most part are using rate-based autopilots that are very good for still air, but do only a marginal job controlling the airplane in turbulence or anything beyond light winds.Inertial autopilots are FAR more precise and don't have the problems that plague rate-based systems.Now- as to whether pilots should/should not use the automation- and whether airlines should set policies that require pilots surrender the airplane to automation under certain conditions- here is my opinion (based on my experience flying GA airplanes, warbirds, airliners and being an airline Chief Pilot):The person who should decide whether to use the automation or to fly the airplane is the Captain. Both crew members should be entirely and completely comfortable with all phases of the automation available to them, but they should also be entirely and completely proficient in all aspects of flying the airplane manually.An airline that requires their pilots surrender to automation is betting the house on the fact that no failure will ever happen that would render the automation useless, requiring airmanship in conditions where better alternatives aren't available.Example: I had a dual screen failure on both sides of the airplane AND dual AHRS failure as a result of water that was allowed to enter the flight deck when a window was left open during a period of significant rain. Me and my brand new first officer wound up shooting an approach to just above minimums on the standby gauges, which isn't fun- but we weren't all that concerned about it because we were comfortable operating the airplane manually...Counter Example: The pilots that crashed that 737-800 because of the radalt failure should shoulder 100% of the blame for that accident. They were busily engaging in conversation and non-essential activities while the airplane's systems failed all around them. They then made gross errors while attempting to recover airspeed and ultimately crashed their airplane, killing people who trusted them to pay closer attention to the jobs for which they were being paid. It was inexcusable...At any rate- I am a HUGE believer in automation- but you have to know what its limitations are- and you have to know how to make it reduce your workload... Hope that helps. :-D(Oh- and BTW: The fellow above who talked about leaving the A/P off after discovering that the conditions were too much for it to handle... GOOD DECISION!)

I wasnt comparing APs at all lol. I myself just feel like I have total control of the aircraft. Being that I am still wet around the ears about IFR Ops and approaches, I think that knowing exactly what the aircraft is doing is paramount for being able to keep learning and improving. I can say though, that as I get older in my career, I will become more comfortable with the automation. I just feel I have more control of the aircraft during an approach.