Beginner 'stepping stone' plane suggestion

[Darkskythe 0]

Hi, am new to flight sim and using Prepar3d v4. Am looking for a nice turbo prop passenger plane with a basic (but functional) FMC to use as a stepping stone rather than getting overwhelmed with the likes of the Majestic Q400 and PMDG range of planes (when i move on to doing longer flights in jet aircraft). I like the looks of the Carenado F50 and S340. Would either of these planes be ok for learning some of the basics please ? Just looking for something relatively simple where you enter departure and destination in the fmc, along with the route and approach etc, take off, hit autopilot and let the plane do most of the work whilst you watch and learn, maybe having the ability to tweak some headings/altitudes along the way if possible.

I would rather something where the included FMC works out of the box and not be spending extra on something like the GTN750 gps unit as my long term goal is to be flying the more advanced stuff and doing longer flights (eventually online in a virtual eirline if i even get that competent and confident enough to do so). Hopefully someone with experience using either or both these planes could suggest which one would be the better option or if they are still too buggy, maybe suggest something with a relatively simple to use FMC/autopilot and easy to follow concise instructions (would rather learn by doing than dedicate several hours reading a manual at the moment).

Many thanks to anyone who takes the time to read and respond.

[tamsini 278]

Hello dark and welcome aboard. In my opinion, if you want a beautiful (and willing to not settle on nice), you should actually try your 1st suggestion for a turbo-prop - the Q400. The FMS works as it should as opposed to any of the Carenados that require a bit of guesswork and will to make them work (Carenado enthusiasts - correct me if I'm wrong).  Plus, any Carenado A/C is lots more pleasurable when using the GTN750 which, understandably, you want to avoid.

The Q400 is a great learning experience especially if you follow the tutorial (and enhance your learning by checking out the numerous youtube videos/tutorials). It really is not as complicated as it seems. 

At least you'll know that you'll ne learning the "right way".

[Chock 17,769]

A nice (and very inexpensive) intro turboprop aeroplane just to get you up and running with flying a simple flight plan, would be one of Virtualcol's many offerings. They are in no way fancy, but they look reasonably good (the virtual cockpits can be a bit basic, so check out some screenshots and decide if you can live with that, but they do work sufficiently for what you are after). Apart from being inexpensive, Virtualcol's add-ons also enjoy the benefit of getting very good frame rates in your sim, and you get a lot of variants  with them too, plus many paint jobs. As noted, they all have a fairly simple, yet functional cockpit, and they will load up default flight plans and allow you to fly those with a couple of button presses, so they are great when you just want to to 'jump in and go' without reading a manual the size of a small novel. 

Virtualcol website: https://www.virtualcol.com/v.php

Note Virtualcol have quite a lot of turboprops to choose from, so you won't be stuck for choice, including: ATR-42/72, Bombadier Dash 8 100/200/300/400, Dornier 328, SAAB 340, BAe Jetstream 31, Fokker 50, Shorts Skyvan SC7/Skyliner/SD330/S23 Sherpa/SD360 and all of them are pretty cheap to buy. I'd recommend clicking on a few of their websites 'where to buy' links to find the best price, as you can often find them even cheaper still at some online stores when they have a sale on.

The Majestic Dash 8 Q400 is a great add-on by the way, along with the FSL A320, it's probably the best and most realistic flight sim airliner you can get hold of, which is why I bought both of those, but, I also have the Virtualcol Dash 8 too, in fact I have pretty much every Virtualcol add-on they make because I really like their simplicity and fun factor and their product support email is excellent as well if you have a problem.

Sometimes when I just want to jump in and go, that Virtualcol Dash 8 is the best choice as it can be set up in seconds, so even though the Majestic Dash 8 is superbly realistic in terms of all the switches and dials working in the thing, my Virtualcol one still gets regular outings in my sim. You can't go wrong with Virtualcol if you want some cheap and cheerful simple flight sim fun.

It's worth noting too however, despite the fact that fancy flight sim add-ons such as those by PMDG, FSL, Majestic etc will let you fiddle with every single switch and dial, this is in some ways not as realistic as one might suppose. For example, all the circuit breakers in the Majestic Dash 8 actually work and this is cool to play with, but in practice, the real pilots rarely mess with those switches, they would typically call out an airline engineer to deal with that. And all commercial airliners have at least two pilots operating them, so it's very often the case that one of them will simply be doing the flying and barely touching any switches, whilst the other pilot works many of the other functions. This means that for simulating a real airliner flight, it's not entirely unrealistic to fly one of the simpler airliner add-ons in your sim and simply 'simulate' the idea that the other guy is flipping those switches for you, thus not having some of those functions on your flight sim add-on is not as unrealistic as it might seem.

A good example of this kind of notion would be the payware GSX add-on which adds a lot of ground service functionality to P3D and which many flight sim airliner fans have, whereby you can call up a menu and ask for the baggage carts, conveyor belts and high lift platforms to come and load or unload your aeroplane, choose to connect a ground power unit, attach an air bridge or stairs, open the doors etc and even see the passengers board your aeroplane.

Whilst this is cool and it looks great, it's not actually what real airline pilots do; when they taxi their airliner onto the stand at the airport, the pilots just concentrate on their own job of driving the plane, it is other people who handle those other jobs, because operating an airliner is a team effort; the cabin crew work the doors, the turnaround coordinator works the jetway, and for all that cargo and baggage stuff, the ground personnel just get on with doing all that loading and unloading without even speaking to the flight deck crew. About the only thing ground personnel do to interact with the crew on the flight deck when an airliner taxies onto stand (granted it's different when pushing an aircraft out off the stand for departure, ground personnel do speak to the crew on this occasion), is knock on the side of the cockpit to get the crew's attention, then give them a hand signal to indicate they've connected the ground power unit so the pilots know they can shut down their auxiliary power unit and still have the aeroplane powered up.

GSX is great, and I like it, but in spite of it increasing functionality and the visual realism of what your airliner can do in the sim, it doesn't increase realism in terms of what the pilots actually do and experience in real life, and that's similarly true with a lot of the whistles and bells and functionality of some of those fancy payware airliners too. Don't imagine that flying a simpler add-on aeroplane in your sim is necessarily less realistic, because in some ways it's actually more realistic to not be handling stuff you wouldn't genuinely be handling when working as an airliner pilot. 😉

Edited September 15, 2018 by Chock

[Darkskythe 0]

Thank you for the replies, i have just watched some youtube videos on the Dash 8 (both Virtualcol and Majestic), going to purchase the Virtualcol for now, just to get some flight time with minimal effort and once i have it mastered and get to learn more about navigation, programming the fmc etc. will move on to the Majestic. 

[tamsini 278]

Excellent - remember rule number 1: HAVE FUN!

[Darkskythe 0]

3 hours ago, tamsini said:

Excellent - remember rule number 1: HAVE FUN!

Thank you, having lots of fun. Have read the manual and just been practicing a short flight from Cardiff (EGFF) to Bristol (EGGD), it's a shame the manual does not really explain a great deal about using the autopilot, especially when it comes to approaches. At the moment i just fly at low altitude until i get a visual of the runway and land. Maybe i should try a longer flight to get some waypoints set into the fmc, it may give me more time to figure things out along the way as cannot really find any tutorials regarding the Virtualcol planes (plenty of flights so have watched and tried to mimic those as well but it's challenging trying to do certain things when you do not understand what they do and why you are doing them. There are an abundance of video tutorials on the Majestic q400 so can see me getting that in the near future and just sucking the learning curve up, lol.

[Chock 17,769]

Try this:

Fire up P3D, choose the Virtualcol Dash 8 in FlyBe livery, then go to the Flight Planner and choose to start at Gate 50 at EGCC (Manchester Airport), then pick  EGPD (Dyce) aka Aberdeen Airport as your destination (this is a real flight which FlyBe does). Choose 'IFR' for the type of flight plan and pick 'High Altitude Airways' for the routing type. Choose to fly it at somewhere around 20,000 feet, then load that all up into P3D and it should give you a fairly realistic flight to try.

When the flight loads, you can either contact ATC and have them direct you, or just fly it without ATC if you prefer. Turn on your navigation lights, then when you are ready to go, turn on your anti-collision beacon light. Press Shift+P to push your aeroplane off the stand and press Shift+P again to stop the push when you are at the taxiway, set the parking brake and then start your engines. Taxi out to runway 23 Right (23R), which is a just short distance away, set one stage of flaps when you get to the runway hold point, turn on your strobe lights and your landing lights as you enter the runway, line up and then take off.

When you're airborne, raise the landing gear, then as your speed builds, raise the flaps, when you get to about 400 feet off the ground, you can engage the autopilot with Control+Z or you can use the buttons on the cockpit's autopilot control panel. Be sure to choose 'FMS' as the Nav Source on the autopilot panel switch so your aeroplane will fly the flight plan route for you on the autopilot. Control the altitude by using whatever autopilot controls you prefer (either Vertical Speed to maintain a specific rate of climb/descent, or Altitude Hold).

Keep your speed below 250 knots until you pass 10,000 feet, then you can fly without that speed restriction. As you pass 10,000 feet, turn off your landing lights. Climb up to your cruise altitude and fly the route on autopilot. When you get to the last waypoint before your destination (probably the BALID intersection), throttle back and commence a descent to 5,000 feet (remember to turn your landing lights back on when you descend down lower than 10,000 feet, then remain at 5,000 feet until you get lined up for the runway approximately 10-15 miles out from it and bring that baby in for a landing. Full flaps and gear down, then maintain approximately 120 knots speed on the landing approach. Cut the throttle back at about fifty feet before your touchdown. Get on the brakes early when you touch down, the runways are not too long at Aberdeen!

Congratulations. You've just made a pretty realistic flight. Should take about an hour if you do it right.

Edited September 16, 2018 by Chock

[Darkskythe 0]

@Chock Thank you so much for that, just tried it and things started to (slowly) click for me. Must have messed something up as could not find a Gate 50 at Manchester (EGCC) so choose gate 5. It went great until the BALID intersection when ground control told me to make a 90 degree turn off the course and drop altitude to 4000 feet. Could change the altitude but then started to panic as could not figure how to change the heading so turned off the autopilot to make the turns myself, turned it back on and crashed, lol. All the same it was great fun and will be spending the best part of the day trying it over and over until i (hopefully) nail it, and work out changing headings within the autopilot.

Thanks again.

[Chock 17,769]

2 hours ago, Darkskythe said:

 It went great until the BALID intersection when ground control told me to make a 90 degree turn off the course and drop altitude to 4000 feet. Could change the altitude but then started to panic as could not figure how to change the heading so turned off the autopilot to make the turns myself, turned it back on and crashed, lol. All the same it was great fun and will be spending the best part of the day trying it over and over until i (hopefully) nail it, and work out changing headings within the autopilot.

Thanks again.

Don't fret about crashing in a simulator, that's what they're for and anyone on Avsim who says they've never crashed their sim plane is lying lol. As long as you're having fun and figuring stuff out, that's all that matters. Yeah, if you are using the ATC, they will give you headings to line you up for the runway, but sometimes the route they give you can be a bit long winded.

One thing you might want to try is putting a bit less fuel in your plane. P3D tends to load up planes with 100 percent fuel and whilst that's not impossible to come across in the real world, it would be fairly unusual and a full fuel load will make your take off and landing speeds faster and the plane is more inclined to stall in a slow turn if it is heavier. The Bombardier Dash 8 has a range of about 1,100 miles with full fuel tanks, and that's way more than you need to fly from Manchester to Aberdeen, so you could drop the fuel level to perhaps 50 percent and still have plenty of fuel for the trip, including some spare for if you have to go around and try the landing again etc.

With regards to not finding Gate 50, I'm guessing that is because the default scenery for Manchester Airport doesn't have it. I use UK2000's add on scenery for Manchester, but hey, any gate will do. Flybe tend to mostly use gates up around near 50 at the real airport so that's why I suggested it, but it's not unknown to find them in other places at the airport, including Gate 5, in fact, just near gate 5 is gate is Gate 16 and 17, and there's nearly always a Flybe Dash 8 on one of those stands because I drive past it all the time on the way to the baggage hall and see it there regularly, so Gate 5 was a really good guess by you!

Anyway, glad you're having some fun. 😊

Edited September 16, 2018 by Chock