A newbie succeeds in a complete flight

[henri5 16]

OK I am not a complete newbie, but I am for this plane. I had a flight plan for a flight from Bergen to Shannon on FS Captain, so I loaded iot into FSCaptain and saved it in the PMDG format by clicking on the option square. I thin loaded it into NGX on the runway at Shannon usong the FMC. It was necessary to fill in a bunch of info such as weights that are not in the FSCaptain database, and make some corrections to the route. When I got it all sorted out I could not get the display to show the path, but apparently it was die to the IRS not being initialized correctly, because after I turned it off and on and adjusted some frequencies, everything looked all right. I did all the instrument setups required such as flaps, turned on both FDs, pressing LNAV and VNAV, revved up the engines to 40%, press TO/GA and the plane accelerated up the runway. When the copilot said V1, I began the rotation a bit early and took off. Then I pressed the autopilot button, closed the wheels and put the flaps up, and the autopilot took care of everything after that - namely speed and altitude. I had set 6000 as the max altitude on the MCP and 245 on the speed (which may not be necessary), and the plane climbed up to that altitude at about a speed of 240. When the FMC legs showed that my altitude should rise to 16K for the next waypoint, I set that in the altitude and pressed the little button next to it so that the altitude would stay there when it was reached. When the altitude passed 10,000, the plane speeded up past 250, and I set the alt on the CMP to 250 when the FMC indicated it was the next altitude. It turned out that I had set up some wrong SIDs and the plane made a long detour before it came back to the first REAL waypoint - the SID was probably already programmed and I had added one, I guess. Anyway the plane followed the path flawlessly and flew all the was at FL250. When I neared the approach, I ordered the altitude to go down to 3000 hopig for the best, because this is usually where things start to go wrong in the landing procedure. The plane slowed down by itself a bit too early because I started the descent a bit early (better too early than too late), but it kept the speed above stall, turned into the final approach by itself, grbbed the glideslope when I pressed the app button, and glided down the glideslope flawlessly. At one point I had to use the air brake, but unfortunately pressing "/" deploys the spoilers fully, which is not what I wanted, so I had to brake by clicking on the spot on the pedestal, and since I could not see the speed, I slowed down a bit too much as mentioned above. When the plane reached threshold it did the rotation and flare flawlessly and settled on the runway. I presume that the reverse thrust had engaged as well as the autobrakes (set to "2"), and I pulled the trigger on my joystick as hard as I could to hopefully stop before the end of the runway (the last time I overran the end and crashed into the equipment at the end). The plane stopped and I made a big sigh of relief. I taxied over to the airport, opened some doors and pressed some buttons resulting in some electrical equipment connecting to the airplane (they do appear with machines and wires and stuff). I have not read the shutdown procedure yet, so I just cut off the fuel levers on the pedestal to stop the engines, and pressed one or two buttons to use the outside power source (I hope). If I can do it, you can too! In my first two tries with the tutorial I had to land by hand because I could never get the VNAV button to engage, and in my second try, I crashed on landing because the plane kept bumping up and down on the runway without slowing down until it crashed after running off the end. So try try again and you will eventually get it. BTW there is nothing in the manual about how to initialize the IRS when you change airports, and I tried unsucessfully a number of time before it finally worked. I think you have to turn it off to erase the wrong value already programmed in the FMC, then you can program it by putting it on "NAV" and copying the coordinates from the GPS - at least I think that is what I did... Henri

[IFR7700 228]

Congratulations. I've flown the tutorial about 10 times, learning many new things each time. I'm not sure at what point I'll be comfortable trying a new route without instructions : ) Hope Tutorial 2 comes out quick.

[Paul_Yorks 97]

Good story Henri. Always good to see how practical problems affect the pilot. I did something similar last night. I flew EGKK - EGPH, following the tutorial to make sure I did all the main things. All was well till I hit the STAR for EGPH, when I realised I'd plainly chosen the wrong STAR, and there was no prospect of me hitting the runway approach accurately. So I loaded an IFR plan and switched to FSX ATC - which as ever was rubbish. I was diverted to Newfoundland before I had to head back east to Edinburgh. Ok, not quite NFLD. But it was too far. But this gave me a great chance to use HDG Select and Lvl Chg/ V/s etc to keep my bird on course. FSX ATC is so demanding (unreasonably, as a rule) that you get a real work out by trying all of this. I had to load AI Smooth, in the end - as I usually do, in Scotland, otherwise other traffic tends to ninja the approach at the last minute. But I got a nice autoland, and taxi'd to the gate smoothly. 2nd complete flight, and I was delighted. Just a great experience in the NGX. Love it.