Well the title is probably a bit of an exaggeration but it felt extremely good none the less. This was my first ever A320neo landing and I nailed it!!

So the story which I thought might be of interest as I have only had MSFS from the day of release and my prior sim experience to the last couple of week was F19 Stealth Fighter from Micropose 30 years ago. I am quite technical and have watched a few of the you tube videos of folks flying the A320.

So first of all I had picked up that Simbrief was an excellent way to prepare a flight plan. As I had never prepare a flight plan before and watching Drawyah plug one into a 320 definitely made me think I need an easy way of doing this. So downloaded and installed Simbrief and its companion app that automatically feeds the plan into a MSFS folder. I thought I would fly from Schipol to Heathrow as both airports I have flown in and out of over 100 times, both were hand crafted (in the Premium Deluxe edition anyway which I have) and they were also not too much flying time apart.

Simbrief was very easy to use and very comprehensive. I even downloaded the PDF of the flight plan to peruse. What a piece of work this software is. Absolutely brilliant.

So next step was to fire up MSFS and load in the flight plan. Extremely easy to do, just press the save/load button on the bottom of the planning page and it fires straight in there. You see all the waypoints and even the altitude profile. All very nice indeed. Now I know from a test that the system defaults to an end of runway departure point so I changed the start point to be one of the gates. I was not sure if the flight plan would get into the flight computer as the plane is fully off when you start from a gate. I thought I would give it a go and see what happened.

I had chosen the 320neo and was running it in default configuration and not with the enhanced cockpit mod. I had briefly tried that but got lost with all the steps and if you tell it to autocomplete then it doesn’t and most of the system remain off. I think I will stick to the simplified default place procedure/checklist for now which at least gets me flying. Will get more experience with that before changing over to the enhanced cockpit mod.

So after the normal load time wait (although a hardware upgrade of my gaming laptop from a conventional SSD to a NVME 1TB SSD for Windows and MSFS had halved the load time!!) I was in the cockpit with blank screens just waiting for me. I went through the checklists step by step and the plane fired into life. I was really happy to see that the flight plan was in the computer and I would not have to key it in manually. Nice!! I had the assists set to me flying the plane but the co-pilot handling the ATC comms. This was a good move as when it came to push back he told the ground services the correct way to push back the plane and to stop at the right time. If you do it manually there is quite a delay on the push back comms so you have to request stop pushback about 5 seconds before you actually want it stopped – bit of a pain but cured by letting the co-pilot handle it.

Anyway I received taxi instructions and off we went to the runway. Am new to the airport as far as plane control is concerned so I did have the ugly taxi ribbon on but was quite pleased when I pulled the A320 to a stop just before the runway and no crashes. Great!! Cleared for take off and I gingerly pull onto the runway and line up. Ease in the power and off we go and then to full power after we get moving (remembered this is what pilots do from sitting in the plane as a passenger so many times.

We blast into the sky and I use the mouse to flip the landing gear knob to pull it up. Glad I won’t be getting that ripped off and scattered over the North Sea.

Now for the big test for me – the autopilot. Well turning it on was quite easy – one button. Now I had an overspeed warning blaring out. Remembered from one of the vis that you were not supposed to be doing more than 250 knots up to 10,000 ft. So across to the autopilot system and I set the speed to 250 knots by twiddling the airspeed knob and hitting LOC, I had seen in one of the videos someone do that and the airspeed adjusts down to 250 knots – awesome!! Then I glanced down at the flight computer and saw first waypoint at 6000 ft I think it was. So over to the autopilot and twirl the altitude knob to 6000ft, press it to confirm and then EXP to feed it in. The plane is now climbing by itself hands off the controls, WHOOP!!! Now anxiously watching the altimeter to see what it does at 6000ft. It levels off and I punch the air!!!

Now I look down at the flight plan and see that the next waypoint we are due to be at 13950 feet. I don’t know when I am supposed to transition from one altitude to the next but go for kicking off the transition half way between the way points. I have the map up in the corner of the screen zoomed so I can see the last and next waypoint. About halfway I twiddle the altitude knob to 13950ft and up we go steadily. Now at some point in the next few minutes the air traffic control say we should be up at 18000 ft and is moaning we are too low. Well my flight plan had 13950 and that is what was presumably filed for ATC to know about too. So what are they up to? Virtually no planes around so I thought ‘stuff them’ I am going to stick to my plan. Not long after I hear them moaning to another plane that they are 20000 feet too high and should be at 1000ft. I did see some stories on the forum about ATC issues. Seems they are quite bad. So, anyway, for the rest of the flight I decide to stick with the flight plan.

Things are going really well from the cockpit so I decide to have a look outside using the external view. I look back at the plane and can see ice on the base of the wings. Oooh, I think I can fix that. I read somewhere about de-icing heaters. I put the flight on active pause for a second while I start looking round the cockpit. This took some time. Eventually found the buttons on the overhead panel and I turned the heaters on. Warm and cosy for the wings.

So back to the flight and we are making very nice progress across the North Sea and I can see England approaching out of the side window. Just as we come over the land in Essex we are supposed to be down to about 9000ft and I punch that in the autopilot and we are descending nicely although the air traffic control man still thinks we should be at 18000ft. Now down to 6000ft and the air traffic control flips over to Heathrow approach I think it is who wants use down to 3500ft. So if I had not ignored the North Sea air traffic man then I would have had to descend from 18000ft to 3000ft in a very short space of time. About this time air traffic man is getting me to reduce airspeed too and a twiddle of the speed knob allows me to obey him with ease. All very nice indeed- this is very pleasurable.

So we are now at 3000ft and approaching Heathrow and have hit the approach button on the autopilot. Nothing seems to be happening and Heathrow is rapidly approaching. I flip to external view to see a very, very close Heathrow with 27R only now landible if I was in a Helicopter and could drop pretty much vertically – few swear words, flip to cockpit, turn off auto pilot and back to external view under full manual control. The air traffic man had gone completely silent, I presume so sort of cardiac arrest as he saw this jet soar over his runway!! I am now into Cessna single prop style flying. I make a big swing to starboard and decide to do my own circuit of Heathrow with absolutely no knowledge of where the real circuit should be, think I am now flying over Ealing with a rough plan to come in for a second go under completely manual control. I decide to do this in the style I adopted when first flying F19 30 years ago. That is get the speed down way early and put on a load of flap and get the gear down. So for the next couple of minutes that is exactly what I did. I flew over quite a lot of West London at about 1000 ft quite slowly for a jet with all down. I then began to line up again on Heathrow using only the map window to help guide me. I was now down to an indicated 500ft but think must have been lower as some of the tower blocks seemed to be shaking as I blasted past. I also was finding it very heard to see the airport /runway even though we must be pretty close as I was so low. Fortunately, with the map and a bit of luck I eventually could see the runway and I was not too far skewed off to the left. A bit of light banking and rudder and we were fairly well lined up and was now seriously skimming over the tops of trees! I was aware of something about lights at the end of the runway and I was supposed to have two white and two red. Well that was all out of the window and this was pure seat of the pants. So, I cleared the end of the runway quite low and I killed the power are the same time with a slight pull of the stick we are looking really good. I touched the runway with the rear wheels with a puff of smoke and the front came down, loads of brakes, who knows what button gave reverse thrust so just piled on the brakes and we were rapidly slowing, we were down!!!!  So awesome, I was whooping and shouting. FIRST EVER LANDING AN AIRBUS!!!!!!

I cleared the runway and lo and behold the air traffic man had be resuscitated and advised me of my taxi route to the stand. I did this very carefully and slowly as I did not want to crash having achieved the landing. I pulled up to the stand, man crossed his wands, turned off the engines and I told ground services to bring in the walkway. It was VERY satisfying to see that arrive through the left cockpit window.

WHAT A GAME!!!!! 

 

CJ

 

 

Sounds like uncommon procedures but hey, you had fun. That's what matters. 

Well done on getting the thing down in one piece. 🙂

Any landing you can walk away from is good. Still having a serviceable aeroplane afterwards is excellent. 

Mmmm.... Had a look at the pdf of the flight plan from Simbrief which seems to indicate a 18,000ft cruise like the air traffic controller was calling for. I guess I misinterpreted the flight computer. Will have to try again. I also watched Drawyah's Helsinki landing in the 320 and saw a whole load of extra stuff he did to the landing waypoints to get a STAR landing. I did not do any of that and didn't do the ILS thing so will be doing that on the next flight. I am going to try Schipol to Helsinki as it should be very similar to his flight which should help. I will let you know how it goes.

CJ

Fortunately, the passengers did not notice any of this! 😅

I think if they had looked out of their windows on final approach they could have waved to the people looking out of their high rise flats with their mouths open!

CJ