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Zibo Mod Boeing 737 Aircraft Dissected Full Text Manual
Zibo Mod Boeing 737 Aircraft Dissected Full Text Manual
Note: - I t is highly recommended that you read this manual while watching the
Aircraft Dissected series on my YouTube channel where all these systems are
explained visually. The entire manual is designed to be like a script and will
therefore contain portions where context will be very important. YOU CAN
WATCH THE ENTIRE AIRCRAFT DISSECTED SERIES WITH 16
EPISODES UPLOADED HERE: AIRCRAFT DISSECTED (ZIBO B737-800)
Introduction
This is the complete, comprehensive and unadulterated guide to flying the Zibo Mod
Boeing 737NG in X-plane 11. This text manual covers every single button, switch and
display in the flight deck of the 737-800 and explains its use and function in the aircraft
under both normal as well as non-normal operations. The guide has been written and
created very systematically, keeping the end user in mind throughout. The first few pages
will walk you through all of the major panels and systems in the aircraft, including the
overhead panels, the central pedestal and throttle quadrant as well as the forward panels.
The latter few pages cover a full-flight with the aircraft from a cold and dark state in San
Francisco (KSFO) all the way to Los Angeles (KLAX), where the aircraft will be parked
and brought to a turn around state. All in all, this work is a culmination of over 4 months
of research, scripting, video recording, intricate editing and last but not the least -
professional presentation. PLEASE CONSIDER LIKING THE VIDEOS ON
YOUTUBE AND SUBSCRIBING TO THE CHANNEL IF YOU ENJOY THE
CONTENT. IT TRULY DOES MEAN A LOT TO ME!
Important Links
- Full Aircraft Dissected Series: AIRCRAFT DISSECTED (ZIBO B737-800)
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Forward Overhead Panel ---------------------------------------- 3 - 20
Chapter 3 - Primary Flight Display (PFD) and EFIS Panel -------------- 44 - 54
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome to the first video in what I
hope turns into a long-standing series on this channel called ‘aircrafts dissected’. In this
edition, we’re specifically going to be focussing on the Boeing 737 series of aircraft
modded by Zibo in X-plane 11. I hope to make this series one of the most comprehensive
tutorials about the Boeing 737 for X-plane 11, as I plan to delve into every switch, knob
and those pesky little alarms that are located all around the plane that often confuse new
pilots attempting to learn how to operate this aircraft. That being said, I must mention
that I am in no capacity a pilot in real life. I am a 19 year old university student who has
an unquenchable thirst for aviation and the following video series is the culmination of
hours of personal research, video tutorials on YouTube and conversations with real world
pilots. I must also mention the things you learn in this series will also be applicable to the
737-700 and 737-900 series made by the ultimate team for X-plane 11. Another
important thing I must mention is that throughout the video, you’ll constantly see either a
red, yellow or green rectangle in the top-right hand corner of the screen. These rectangles
are there to showcase the importance of the switch or knob being talked about and will
dynamically change as I continue my explanation from system to system. The green
rectangle means that the system in question will be used on every flight. The yellow one
represents rarely used systems and the red rectangle of course means that the system in
question is purely for emergency purposes and not used in standard operating procedures.
I will be leaving time-stamps in the description below for each of these green, yellow and
red indicators so as to honor your time and in order to make it easier for you to watch
only certain sections of the video if you so please. Finally, it’s also important to mention
that though this aircraft is highly complex I will do my best to explain how some of these
systems work in addition to describing the functions of these switches and lights.
However, since I want this YouTube video to be as concise as possible, I won’t be able to
cover every system in great depth, so I encourage you to leave your questions in the
comments section and I will try to reply to as many of your questions as I can. One thing
is certain though, by the end of this tutorial series, you will be comfortable, if not
perfectly capable, to try to fly this aircraft yourself. I certainly do hope you guys enjoy
watching the video series as much as I enjoyed making it for you so without further
Adieu, let’s jump into the flight deck!
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make things simple, the yaw damper actively uses the rudder to assist the aircraft in
rolling or turning to either side, resulting in synchronized turning. If you have ever
wondered how your coffee never spills over when the aircraft turns or banks to either side
during flight, you have the yaw damper to thank. Up on the top right of this panel, we
have some standby hydraulic system lights that light up whenever they require the
pilot’s immediate attention. Underneath these are two switches pertaining to the
alternate flaps system. The red switch on the left is the alternate flaps master switch
which is set to off by default. In an event that the normal flaps settings don’t work, the
pilots would flip the cover and set the master to on, and then use the switch on the right to
either extend or retract the flaps accordingly. Finally, underneath this are 4 lights that
indicate problems with specific flight control subsystems within the aircraft.
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aircraft can automatically choose the most appropriate system to draw information and
data from. Underneath these three switches are 2 display related switches which, in
addition to just using the data for automatic calculations, also allow the pilots to choose
whether the data displayed on their primary displays are from the primary or secondary
backup systems. Normally, this panel is rarely touched by pilots during normal
operations except for when there is a known fault with a particular system that can’t be
fixed by local engineers or ground staff. In a scenario like this, pilots would manually
change the data source using these switches in order to get accurate data throughout the
flight.
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instead of cutting off fuel supply to the engine, fuel will directly be fed into the engine
without the filtration process being applied, and the light on the appropriate side will be
illuminated. In the middle of these two lights is a fuel cross-feed light under which is the
fuel cross-feed valve. Now to explain this, it's important to understand that the fuel
systems on either side of the aircraft work independently of each other. This is to prevent
an emergency from one side of the aircraft such as a burst fuel tank, from affecting the
other side. However, In the unlikely event that fuel is being drained unevenly from the
two wing tanks, for example, the left tank is draining at a rate of 800 gallons per hour and
the right one drains at 700 gallons per hour, this crossfeed valve may be turned by the
pilots so that fuel is shared between the two tanks. This can help prevent any problems
with the weight and balance of the fuel causing problems with the flying characteristics
of the aircraft. The light in the middle shines brightly when the feed valves are physically
moving to connect the two fuel lines and then becomes dim when the valves are in place
and the cross-feed system is working as intended. Underneath this are the 6 individual
fuel pumps that supply fuel from the fuel tanks to the engines. These two are for the
central fuel tank located in the fuselage and these 4 at the bottom are 2 individual pairs
of pumps for the left and right wing tanks. It’s also important to note that, for longer
flights which require the central fuel pumps to be used, the aircraft will drain fuel from
the center first before draining the fuel from the wings. When the fuel reserves in the
central tanks have been depleted, the pilots will get a message on their recall indicators
and they will manually shut the pumps off mid flight.
Electrical Panel
Coming to the next panel over here, we have
the primary power metering and
monitoring display. Dividing this display
into 2 parts, on the left we have a DC
ammeter and voltmeter to measure the
supply of current and voltage using direct
current and on the right, we have an AC
ammeter and voltmeter, measuring the
supply of current and voltage using alternate
current. Just above that is the CPS
Frequency indicator which highlights the
frequency with which electricity is being
supplied or used by different systems in the
aircraft. Underneath this display are three
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indicator lights which all illuminate when there is a problem with their associated
systems. The first light illuminates when the onboard main battery is about to be
discharged. The second light illuminates when there is a problem with the onboard TR
unit or the transformer rectifier unit- which is responsible for converting AC power to
DC power. This third light illuminates when there is a fault with the electrical system as
a whole. This button is a maintenance button which is only used by ground crew and
certified engineers when a particular part of the electrical system needs to be fixed.
Coming down, this left knob allows the pilot to specifically see the power draw from
various different selected systems in the aircraft using direct current. Notice how the
numbers on the display change when I go from the power being supplied by the on-board
battery to the various other electrical systems in the aircraft. The same is true for the right
knob but for monitoring AC power instead of DC power. Coming underneath, we have a
black guarded cover under which is the primary battery switch. Shutting this cover
down automatically switches the battery on, and this is normally the first button or
switch to be manipulated by pilots when starting the aircraft from a cold and dark state.
On the right we have two switches controlling electrical supply to the passenger cabin.
The left utility switch controls power being supplied to electrical heaters, cookers or
other electronic appliances that the flight attendants use to service the passengers. The
switch on the right labelled IFE/ pass seat stands for In-flight entertainment or
passenger seat power which enables passengers to use electricity to access the in-flight
entertainment systems as well as use power supplies to charge their own personal devices
for airlines that support these.
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electrical failure, so they’re extremely important and better to not be messed with. The
light on top illuminates when the standby power is manually switched off. On either side
of this system are two red guarded covers which are the engine electrical generator
switches. During normal operation of the aircraft, the electricity is generated by the
motion of the fan blades of the engines, sort of like a very fast wind mill, which drives
these generators. However, in the unlikely event that one of these generators experiences
a problem, the pilots can manually flip the covers and disconnect the generators. Note
that this is a permanent disconnection and it physically prohibits the engines’ turbines
from acting as a power generation source for the aircraft. Only certified technicians and
engineers are allowed to repair this system when the aircraft is safely on the ground, and
even then, the entire engine needs to be opened up and stripped apart for a new generator
to be installed. Again, a system that doesn’t need to be messed with during normal
operations.
APU panel
Below this is the bus transfer and
electrical source selector panel.
However, we will come back to this panel
after first looking at the APU panel, as it
is important to first understand what the
APU is and how it works before selecting
it as an electrical source. So, coming to
the APU panel, lets first understand what
it is.The APU or the auxiliary power unit
is a small jet engine situated in the tail of
the plane which works just like the
electrical generators within the engines. It
too, like a very fast mini-windmill
generates electrical power for the aircraft
while it is on the ground before the
engines are running and when there is no
GPU or ground power unit supplying
power to the aircraft. Additionally, the
APU also provides bleed air, which is a
supply of very hot air that goes through
many filtration processes to then be injected into the aircraft as breathable air for the crew
and passengers and also to be used to spin the engines to their idle speed during the
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engine start procedure. More on that later though. So, the first display we have here is
this gauge with 4 indicator lights above it. The gauge itself is an EGT or exhaust gas
temperature gauge which shows the temperature of the exhaust gas expelled by the APU
when it is running. The first light above the gauge is the Maintenance light, which lights
up when the APU is in need of maintenance but the aircraft can still fly in this state. This
is one of a very few number of important systems on the aircraft that doesn’t need to be
in perfect condition for the aircraft to operate safely. This second light is a low oil
pressure light. This light always illuminates when the APU is being started, as the APU
also requires fuel to stay running just like any other jet engine and the oil pressure is low
during the start-up phase of the APU. This is completely normal and the light should
automatically extinguish when the APU is running and is stabilized and providing power
to the aircraft. The light next to this signifies a fault with the APU as a whole and unlike
the maintenance light requires the ground technicians and engineers to sort the problem
out. The final light here is the overspeed light which illuminates when the APU was
either aborted during its startup sequence or if the APU has a general fault within it, as
the turbine is spinning faster than specified safety standards. Finally, this is the APU
master switch. The switch itself is spring-loaded and to start the APU, simply flick the
switch to the run position and release it. It will automatically switch back to the on
position. You will immediately notice the low pressure light come on as expected and the
EGT gauge will start rising to about 800 degrees, stabilize and then return to a more
reasonable temperature depending on weather conditions at the local airport.
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black guarded switch, this is the bus transfer switch. Much like the standby power switch
we explored earlier, this switch is also always left to the auto position for the aircraft to
decide which source of electricity it wishes to use to power primary systems and so that
electrical power flows uninterruptedly throughout the aircraft. These two pairs of buttons
on the side illuminate when either the transfer bus itself is off or if the transfer bus isn’t
receiving any power from a source. Underneath these lights on either side are two
generator off switches for either side of the aircraft. These lights illuminate whenever
there is an active electrical source that the aircraft can draw power from to power that
side of the cockpit- which is normally the electrical generators within the engine.
Remember how I said that the left fuel system of the aircraft runs independently of the
right? Well the same is true here as well, as the left engine supplies power to the left side
of the cockpit and the right engine supplies power to the right side of the cockpit. Below
each of these lights are engine generator source selector switches. When the pilots turn on
the engines, they can then flick these switches to then draw power from the engine
generators to power the aircraft. Similarly, this light in the center is the APU generator
off bus light, which illuminates when the APU is available as a power source for the
aircraft to use. It too has these two switches that can be flipped to power the left and right
side of the aircraft respectively when the APU comes on.
Middle Column
Ok guys so I really hope I haven’t bored you to death yet but
thankfully this next column is not as complicated as the first two
and should be more fun and relatable for you guys. Starting with
these two knobs at the top, they are both concerned with internal
lighting in the flight deck. The first knob illuminates the circuit
breaker panel behind the first officer’s seat and this second knob
provides backlighting to all of the displays and switches of the
overhead panel specifically. Coming down, this lavatory smoke
light illuminates when smoke has been detected in any of the
lavatories in the aircraft when smokers feel the need to let loose
or whatever their justification is before being fined or imprisoned
in some cases. Underneath this light are two equipment cooling
switches which control the supply and exhaust of the cool air that
is fed to all of the electrical systems in the aircraft to keep them
cool even under heavy load. These switches are normally left to
the normal mode unless an alternative mode is required for the
specific operation of the flight. Underneath this is an open black
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cover which controls the emergency exit light strips that run along the cabin floors as
well as the emergency exit signs at the top of the doors on the aircraft. In a cold and dark
state, these are normally set to the off position to conserve battery power, however,
flipping the cover down automatically arms these lights in the unlikely event of an
evacuation or an emergency. Underneath these are the seatbelt signs switch as well as the
previously used no-smoking signs switch, which has now been replaced by this new
chimes switch. This is because smoking is banned on all domestic and international civil
flights globally and hence this switch is no longer needed but can be found on some old
737s still in service. The seatbelt signs switch is normally turned on after refueling has
been completed at the departure airport and is turned to the auto position when the
aircraft reaches its cruising altitude. The switch is never turned to its off position unless
the pilots wish to bring the aircraft to its cold and dark state like you’re seeing on screen
right now. The chimes switch simply sounds a chime in the cabin when the pilots wish to
get the attention of flight attendants working in the galleys. Underneath these switches
are two small switches to alert important personnel. The attend switch is another switch
that chimes a sound in the cabin alerting the flight attendants whereas the ground call
switch alerts any ground handling personnel working with headsets plugged into the
aircraft when the plane is safely parked on the ground. Finally, these two switches control
the left and right windscreen wipers and basically work like they would in a car with
varying speed modes to be used depending on the severity of the weather.
Heating Panel
And that brings us to the final two panels on the
forward overhead panel. So, at the top of this
column, we have 4 simple window heat switches
which, when switched on, prevent icing from
occurring on the 4 primary cockpit windows and
fogging them up. This middle button is a test
button that allows the pilots to test whether the
on/off lights and the overheat warning lights are
also working for this system. Underneath these
are the probe heat switches, which electrically
heat some of the sensitive equipment on the
outside of the aircraft such as pitot tubes,
temperature sensors as well as guided Alpha
Vanes. The lights on either side of these switches
denote problems with the outside components I
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just mentioned and are normally extinguished when the probe heats switches are turned
on. If the heat switches are turned on and the lights still persist, you not only know you
have a problem with a system, but exactly which system as well.
Anti-Ice Panel
Underneath this set of switches is the
anti-icing panel, where on the left
side, we have the wing anti-ice
switch. Now just like the APU, the
engines also produce hot bleed air
which can be introduced into the
wing through the leading edge slats
of the wings in order to prevent
build-up of ice and maintain safe
operation of the aircraft even in cold
conditions. The light above
illuminates brightly when the valve
allowing the bleed air in is opening
and becomes dim when it is locked open in a stable position. To the right of this switch
are two engine anti-ice switches which are similar to the wing anti-ice switch but instead,
heat the two engines to prevent the build-up of ice. Additionally, instead of feeding the
bleed air through the leading edge slats, the air is fed into the engines through the engine
cowling- which is the front rim of the engine nacelle. The lights above each of these
switches work identically to the light above the wing anti-ice switch.
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powered by the electrical motors to fuel the hydraulics system in the aircraft. The lights
above simply display if there is low oil pressure in any of the pumps and this is to be
expected until the engines are turned on. Additionally, the pumps driven by the electrical
motor also have an overheat light to make sure that the electrical system isn’t
malfunctioning while using the electrical motor to power the hydraulics system.
Doors Panel
Coming underneath, we have a series of
lights to highlight which doors are open in
the aircraft. Any door that is not armed
and locked will have its corresponding
light illuminated in this panel, as you can
see here.
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altitude of the nearby terrain and local airport. However, the pressure is always kept
below that of what you will find the atmospheric pressure to be below 10000ft. This is
because at higher altitudes, the atmospheric pressure decreases, thereby disallowing
human beings from inhaling oxygen present in the air, leading to hypoxia and permanent
brain damage and even to death. Hence, this pressurization panel is extremely important
as it allows pilots to observe the outside air pressure represented by this longer needle
compared to the pressure that is being maintained inside the aircraft represented by the
smaller needle. A large enough imbalance between these two values near this red 9psi
range, can cause structural damage to the aircraft and can also lead to the aircraft
disintegrating mid flight due to harsh aerodynamic forces tearing it apart. This altitude
horn cutout switch on the right simply turns off an alarm that sounds when the
pressurization system has a fault.
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this knob is the landing altitude knob where pilots will set the altitude of their arrival
airport which also assists the pressurization systems in performing their tasks. Moving to
the right, we have this analogue gauge that allows the pilots to monitor the position of the
physical valve that moves to let more or less air into the cabin to manage differential
pressure. This switch in the middle allows the pilots to manually open or close the
pressurization valve outside the aircraft to manipulate differential pressure manually.
Below, this knob allows the pilots to switch from the automatic pressure system to the
alternate or manual pressure systems. This will also illuminate their corresponding lights
above these switches. However, its worth mentioning that if you’re having to switch to
these systems, you are having a really bad day, as pilots would normally never need to
use these systems on normal point to point flights.
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PACK or a pneumatic air cycle kit which cools this extremely hot bleed air to near
freezing temperatures. From here, trim air is used to fine tune the temperature of this air
now coming from the PACK systems before entering the cabin to be used as breathable
air. Hence, the trim air system is very important to control the temperature of the air
entering the cabin for both the passengers as well as the flight crew. Underneath the trim
air switch are 3 Zone temperature lights followed by 3 zone air temperature control knobs
to control the temperature in the control cabin or flight deck, the forward passenger cabin
or business class and the aft passenger cabin, normally economy class. The Zone lights
will come on if the air temperature is becoming too hot or too cold which normally
indicates a problem with either the PACK system or the trim air system.
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packs will work faster to cool bleed air that is coming from the engines. Its important to
note however that the PACK systems are normally left to the auto position so as to let the
automatic air conditioning systems in the aircraft decide the optimal usage for the PACK
systems. In the middle, we have an isolation valve switch which is extremely similar to
the crossfeed valve on the fuel control panel. The isolation valve’s function is to link the
two bleed air ducts that would otherwise work individually on either side of the aircraft in
case there is an issue with one of the PACK systems and the other PACK needs to handle
more bleed air now coming from both engines. Coming underneath we have a pair of 3
warning lights that illuminate when a problem occurs with their associated systems. The
first light on either side illuminates when there is a problem with either of the PACK
systems. The second wing-body overheat light illuminates when there is a leak in the
bleed air ducts passing through the wings and the fuselage of the aircraft. We just tested
this using the switch up above. Finally the last light down here is a bleed trip off light,
which illuminates when the bleed air being supplied to the PACK is too hot, thereby
leading to an increase in heat in the PACK system causing it to shut off. When pilots
identify this problem, they can either choose to turn off the PACK systems and allow
them to cool down, or if its only 1 pack that is malfunctioning, they can turn the isolation
valve to on and turn the other PACK system to high speed to take over the responsibility
of the malfunctioned PACK system. This Trip reset light is there to reset the
malfunctioning PACK system once its done cooling down to resume normal operations.
Finally, underneath here we have three air source selector switches to acquire bleed air
from. On either side are the engine bleed switches, which when turned on take bleed air
from the engines to then use for air conditioning. In the center is an APU bleed air
switch, which allows the PACKS to use bleed air from the APU when on the ground to
cool the aircraft before engine start and to also aid in providing the air for the engine start
procedure. When the engine bleed switches and the APU bleed switches are on at the
same time, you get this dual bleed light, alerting the pilots the the PACK systems are
receiving bleed air from two different sources. As for the RAM Door full open lights,
they come on only on the ground. This is because the RAM door is a small physical valve
on the outside of the aircraft that lets cool air into the PACK system to allow it to cool the
bleed air produced by the engines. During flight, having the RAM door partially opened
will suffice, as the cool outside air is entering the RAM door at a high speed. On the
ground however, when the aircraft is stationary, the entire RAM door needs to be opened
to use the cool outside air for the PACKs.
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the retractable landing light switches which come down from their stowed position inside
the belly of the aircraft and shine forwards. These two lights on the side are the fixed
landing lights which serve the same purpose as the retractable ones, but are located on the
leading edge of the wings and don’t need to be stowed. These two switches are the
runway turnoff switches which shine a bright straight ray of light at an angle from the
front, allowing pilots to see where they are about to turn while taxiing at night as well as
poor visibility conditions such as fog. This light here is the taxi light, which simply
illuminates a bright straight light located on the nosewheel of the aircraft to allow pilots
to see where they’re going while taxiing on the ground. We have already covered the
APU, so let's keep on going, and we come to the Engine start switches, one for each
engine of course. Flicking these switches to the ground position begins the engine start
procedure, which involves taking bleed air from the APU to spin the engines to their idle
speed before injecting fuel into them. The Continuous and flight modes on this knob are
used when flying through severe precipitation such as rain or snow as it makes sure that
the engine igniters are constantly keeping the engines running regardless of the large
amounts of water and moisture entering the engines during such harsh weather
conditions. In the center we have an engine ignitor switch which pilots use to decide
which engine igniters the aircraft should use to start both engines. Pilots normally never
put this switch to both and usually choose 1 igniter for the first flight leg and the other
igniter for the return leg in order to use both igniters equally throughout the lifespan of
the aircraft. Moving further right we have some more external light switches for the
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aircraft. The logo light illuminates the logo of the airline on the tail of the aircraft. The
position light has three modes, off, steady and strobe and steady. When switched to
steady, the position lights at the tip of the wings light up as green on the right wing and
red on the left wing. This serves two purposes. Number 1 is to alert ground crew that
pilots or other flight personnel are currently working in the aircraft and number 2 is to
allow other planes taxiing around the airport to know whether the aircraft is coming
towards them or moving away from them. Flicking this same switch to the strobe and
steady position illuminates the ends of the wing in a strobe pattern so as to alert other
pilots on the ground as well as in the air that an aircraft is in their line of sight. Moving
over, this switch is the anti-collision light switch, which is a red strobe light on the top
and bottom of the aircraft fuselage. This light is turned on before engine start to alert
ground crew that the engines are about to be started and they should disconnect any
ground equipment still attached to the aircraft and move away from the plane. Finally,
these two lights illuminate the underside of the wing and the wheel-well compartment
inside the landing gear of the aircraft. Finally, this last switch helps control the lighting of
the standby compass instrument on the top of the glareshield, allowing pilots to switch
between dim and bright modes.
Conclusion
And that ladies and gentlemen brings us to the end of the exploration of the forward
overhead panel on the Boeing 737-800. If you made it this far, congratulations - you now
have a sound understanding about every major system on this aircraft and are now aware
of the functionality of practically every knob, switch, alarm and light above the pilots in
the flight deck. Now I must also mention that all of the documentation and websites I
used to research for this video are linked down below in the description, including a
written text version of this entire video, if you prefer to read those and understand more
about this aircraft. That being said the next video in the series will focus on the aft
overhead panel and the central pedestal, which houses all of the navigation and radio
equipment that pilots use to communicate with air traffic control and should be coming
out very soon. If you guys enjoyed the video, make sure to flyby the comments section
and let me know if there’s any questions you’d like me to answer for you. Make sure to
perform a full stop-landing at the like button and the subscribe button if you enjoyed the
content and press the bell icon for future notifications from this channel and usual,
thanks for flying by!
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Introduction
What's going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome to the second episode in my
Aircrafts Dissected series, wherein I delve into every switch and knob in the aircraft to
give you guys an in depth understanding of every system present in the Zibo mod Boeing
737-800. In this episode, we’re going to be taking a look at the aft overhead panel as well
as the central pedestal and the throttle quadrant, also known as the control stand in this
aircraft to understand how the pilots operate the engines, move the flaps and speed brakes
as well as understand the various ways in which pilots communicate with air traffic
control. So, last thing I would like to say before starting is that if you haven’t seen the
first episode in this series, I highly encourage you to do so, as I cover all of the systems
on the forward overhead panel in the aircraft such as the aircraft’s fuel, hydraulics, air
conditioning systems as well as the electrical systems in the aircraft. It will greatly help
you contextualize what you are about to learn in this episode, so yeah go watch that if
you haven’t already. Additionally, I would also like to thank this person on screen who
pointed out a few errors in my explanation in the previous video relating to the bleed air
and pressurization systems in the aircraft. I will be leaving this comment in the
description of all of the videos in this series so that you guys can obtain the correct
information about these systems directly from the horse’s mouth. That being said let's
jump into the flight deck and start this episode of Aircrafts Dissected!
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mentioned in the previous video, all important systems in the aircraft always have another
redundant or backup system in case of any faults or emergencies.
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which allows the pilots to switch between turning the light to be dim, bright or
completely off.
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systems that pilots can use to communicate with flight attendants. The SVC switch is the
service interphone system for pilots to communicate with ground crews such as pushback
drivers and such, and this PA switch obviously stands for passenger announcement
allowing pilots to talk over radio chatter and give public addresses to the passengers in
the back.
Coming down, these buttons allow the pilots to choose which radio communication
channels they receive audio from. The buttons in this row pertain to the same audio
channels as the row above, with these ones used to receive VHF frequency audio, these
two used for HF frequency audio and these ones for the flight interphone, the service
interphone and the PA system. However, the Zibo mod only simulates the first 2 VHF
buttons you see on screen right now. Anyway, to listen on a particular channel, simply
push the button and the button will light up. You can then spin the button around to
adjust the volume of the incoming audio. Now a note on transmission and reception of
radio communications. Selecting a button to transmit on will automatically also allow
pilots to receive audio from that source. For example, if I simply select VHF 1 as my
audio transmission source, then I will automatically also receive audio on VHF 1.
However, if I also select this VHF 2 knob, I will transmit only on VHF1 but I will
receive audio from both VHF 1 as well as VHF 2 sources. Just thought I’d let you guys
know that.
Coming underneath, this row of switches pertains to the navigational radios in the
aircraft. I must preface this by saying that my knowledge of navigation radios is quite
limited, but I will tell you guys the basics of what I found out from my research. So, if
you guys have never flown in a general aviation aircraft and have no prior experience
with aviation, then it’s important for you to understand that not all frequencies are used
for voice communications. Some radio frequencies can also be used to allow an aircraft’s
navigation systems to synchronize with different navigational beacons littered all over the
world, which allow the aircraft to perform complex visual approaches as well as perform
perfect auto-land procedures using the ILS or instrument landing system during difficult
weather conditions such as dense fog. However, along with communicating effortlessly
with the complex navigational systems present in these modern airliners, these
navigational beacons also emit different morse code identifiers to allow pilots to listen to
them and tune in various different courses, headings and tracks to be able to fly an
approach when the automatic navigation system doesn’t work as intended. Therefore,
these first 2 switches here allow pilots to listen to the two primary navigation radios.
These two switches obviously are inoperative and this marker switch I’m assuming
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relates to the approach marker audio. This speaker switch allows the pilots to redirect the
navigation audio from one of the systems to the loudspeakers in the aircraft. However,
this switch is also not simulated in the zibo 737.
Coming down here, none of these switches are simulated in the aircraft. However, as
mentioned before, I’ll just go through some of them to give you guys a brief idea.
Starting off with this switch, it is simply a push to talk switch. Push the switch up to talk
over a radio to an external radio station and push the switch down to talk over the
intercom to an external radio station. This next knob here is a filter switch, which, when
switched to the left only lets in voice audio from radio chatter, when switched to the right
only lets in the morse code identifiers being emitted by navigational aids and beacons and
lets in both when switched to the middle, both position. Finally, this last switch lets the
pilots switch between operating the radios in the normal or alternate modes.
Oxygen Panel
Under here is the oxygen indicator panel. Now, if
you guys don’t know, the oxygen masks that
deploy for passengers are very different from those
used by pilots during an emergency. The pilot’s
masks, as you can see, are very specialized so as to
allow them to breathe safely as well as operate the
aircraft in the best way possible. Hence, the oxygen
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supply for the pilots is dedicated and is separate from the oxygen canisters present above
the passenger seats that supply oxygen for the crew and passengers. The first gauge here
therefore displays how much dedicated oxygen is available for the pilots to breathe in
their specialized oxygen masks. This pass oxygen switch on the right is there to enable
the drop of oxygen masks for the passengers and flight crew. When in the normal
position, the automatic pressure systems will automatically deploy the masks in the event
of a cabin depressurization. However, the pilots can also turn the system on manually in
case the automated systems experience a fault. This light simply indicates when the
masks have been deployed.
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management computer when it calculates the aircraft’s climb performance based on the
fuel weight, passenger weight and the characteristics of the runway the aircraft is about to
depart from. We’ll be taking a more in depth look at this in the taxi and takeoff episode
of this series.
Speed Brake
Moving to this big white lever, this is the speed brake lever, which
assists the aircraft in slowing down by extending these speedbrakes
over the wings. These markers on the side indicate the range by
which pilots can extend the speedbrakes during flight. When the
aircraft is flying, the pilots can only extend the speed brakes until
this flight detent mark. However, upon landing and when on the
ground, the speed brakes can be extended all the way to the back
providing maximum aerodynamic braking action to assist the
aircraft in slowing down. Note that extending the speedbrakes mid
flight must be done manually, but this is not the case when the
aircraft lands, as the speed brakes can simply be set to the arm
position, which will automatically deploy the speed brakes when
the pressure sensors within the back landing gear detect contact
with the ground. Additionally, arming the speed brakes also
illuminates this green light in front of the pilots to alert them that
the brakes have been armed for deployment when the wheels touch
the ground.
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all the way back doesn’t shut the engines off - it simply
runs them at an idle speed, where they still produce
thrust but just not enough to gain any real speed or
momentum in a short period of time. Picture it as
having your car turned on, the parking brake released
and a feather placed on the accelerator. Now there are a
couple of buttons on the throttle quadrant that allow
pilots to turn on and off some important systems.
Firstly, on the side of each throttle lever is this button
which disengages the autothrottle system. Pilots
normally push this button when they are on final
approach to the runway and are stabilized - meaning
t5hat the flaps and gear have been selected for landing
and they want to take control of the thrust levers to
manually land the aircraft. Additionally, these two
switches in front of the thrust levers arms the TOGA
mode which stands for takeoff and go around thrust,
which is a preprogrammed thrust setting in the flight
management computer that instantly provides high
thrust during the takeoff roll, as well as during an
aborted landing sequence also known as a go-around.
In front of these thrust levers, you have
these two thrust reverser levers, which can
only be activated when the main thrust
levers are in their idle position, as you can
see on screen here. The thrust reversers open
these doors on the outside of the main
structure to let the air in from the sides and
pushed forward from the front. What
essentially happens is that the engine,
instead of applying a force backward and
accelerating forward, applies a force
forward and therefore, instead of
accelerating, begins decelerating, hence the
name - thrust reversers. This allows the
aircraft to decelerate faster and more
importantly, takes some of the responsibility
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off of the brakes in the landing gear, which can get really hot if relied upon for the entire
deceleration process. When these levers are simply lifted the engines run at idle speed
and therefore provide idle reverse thrust. However, pilots can manually pull these levers
back to increase the deceleration by running the engines at a higher setting. If you’ve ever
wondered why, before touchdown the aircraft goes extremely quiet and then just after
touchdown, it sounds like the engines are being spooled up again, its because pilots turn
the engines to their idle speed just before touchdown, and right after the back wheels
make contact with the ground, they arm the thrust reversers.
Flaps
Coming to the right, we have the main flap lever, which the pilots use to
extend or retract the flaps depending on the phase of flight. These numbers
on the side of the flap lever denote the angle that the flaps are extended at
with respect to a horizontal wing in degrees. For example, extending the flap
all the way to this 30 detent extends the flaps at an angle of 30 degrees from
the horizontal, as you can see here. To move the flap, simply lift the lever
and place it in any of these detents beside these numbers. Additionally, any
flap setting will also be displayed in this analogue gauge in front of the pilots
situated right next to the gear lever. On the right of the flap lever you simply
have another trim wheel which is identical to the one we just explored.
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an imminent danger on board. So, lets come to the obvious feature of this panel, which
are these three large switches in the middle. These switches are the engine isolate and fire
extinguishing switches for the two engines as well as the APU in the middle. Now
unfortunately, I cannot simulate an engine fire for you in the Zibo 737, so I will just give
you a feel for it by pressing this test switch one more time. However, during a real fire,
only the specific engine with the fire would light up. Assuming we have a fire in the right
engine and it lights up along with an alarm, the pilots will pull this switch up first. What
this does is that it isolates this engine from the rest of the aircraft but physically
disconnects the engine generators, the fuel lines as well as the bleed air ducts connecting
it to the onboard air conditioning system - more info on that in the first episode of this
series. After pulling the switch up, pilots would then be able to twist this switch to the left
or right to discharge the content of the fire extinguisher bottles located in the specific
engine in an attempt to extinguish the fire. When twisted to the left as we have done, it
lights up this light over here to signify which extinguisher bottle has been used and this
green light is an additional visual cue for the pilots to see that the right engine’s fire has
been extinguished. Note that firstly, these buttons can only be pulled backwards when the
automatic fire detection loops in the aircraft actually detect a fire. This is to prevent the
pilots from accidentally pulling these switches and disconnecting the entire engine from
the aircraft. However, in an event that the on-board fire detection loops have experienced
a fault or failure, there is a little button on the underside of each of these switches to
manually override this function and for the pilots to be able to pull these switches back
and extinguish the fire. Given enough time, you will see that the entire right side of the
cockpit completely loses all power, as the main power generation source for the right
side, namely the right engine has been disconnected from the aircraft, as mentioned
before. If you’re wondering, this APU fire extinguisher light is not clickable, though the
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alarm and indicators as you saw before, are indeed simulated. Finally, this test light over
here, simply allows the pilots to test whether the extinguisher indicator lights are working
as intended.
Central Pedestal
Alright ladies and gentleman, that finally brings us to the central pedestal of the aircraft,
which as mentioned before, houses some of the important radio voice and navigation
systems in the aircraft. As we did with the forward overhead panel in the first episode of
this series, we will be covering this panel in a top down fashion from left to right.
However, as you might have noticed, some of the systems on the left side - namely the
captain’s side of this central pedestal are identical to that of the first officer’s side on the
right side, with a few key differences. So then, let’s get into it!
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used to change the standby frequency. Use this larger knob over here to change the
numbers before the decimal point and this smaller knob to change the numbers after the
decimal point. This panel off switch here, when pressed, would normally turn off these
displays, however, its not simulated in the zibo mod 737. Next up, down here we have
some radio selection switches, however, only these two VHF 1 and VHF 2 switches are
currently simulated in the zibo 737. The basic premise behind these buttons is that there
are multiple different radio systems in the aircraft that can all be independently used by
the pilots. Notice how the numbers change in the display when I switch between VHF 1
and VHF 2. Now in this particular configuration of the aircraft, there are 2 of these radio
navigation panels, one on the captain’s side which is normally set to VHF 1 and one on
the first officers’ side which is normally set to VHF 2. The reason for having multiple
radio systems is simply redundancy and back up. Now notice what happens if I select
VHF 2 on the captain’s side - which as just mentioned is normally used by the first
officer. Adjusting the frequencies on the captain's side automatically changes the
frequencies on the first officer’s side as well, as the same radio system is being used by
both pilots. Additionally, in the real aircraft, a little light up here also lights up to alert
pilots that they are using the same radio system instead of the two individual ones for
each of them, however, this light isn’t simulated in the Zibo mod. Coming down here, we
have a knob which allows pilots to adjust the sensitivity of the high frequency or HF
radios. This panel is indeed movable, but doesn’t really do anything as the HF frequency
buttons themselves are inoperative in the zibo 737.
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VOR means, I’m planning to cover all of these terms in another series, where we take an
indepth look at how to fly different approaches and land in extremely difficult airports
such as innsbruck in Austria or Faro in Portugal. However, for now, a simple explanation
will suffice. Just like the communication radio panels, there are 2 navigation radio
systems in the aircraft - one on the captain’s side and the other on the first officer’s side.
You can again use the larger knob to adjust the numbers before the decimal place and the
smaller knob to adjust the numbers after the decimal place in the standby display.
Additionally, you may press this transfer button to swap the standby and active
frequencies. Just another note, if you are wondering where to find these navigational
frequencies that we’re talking about, they are normally published on aerodrome approach
charts that all pilots have access to. For example, this here is the ILS approach frequency
for runway 28R at San Francisco. Pilots would normally tune this frequency into this
panel before landing, along with the specific course of this runway on the MCP panel
which we will take a look at in the next video- to be able to perform an ILS landing on
runway 28R in San Francisco. Don’t worry, if it sounds complicated now, it won’t be so
hard when we actually fly this aircraft from point A to B and you’ll see exactly what I
mean when you see it for yourself. This test button simply allows the pilots to see if the
VOR and ILS indicators are working properly on the navigational display or ND in the
aircraft, however, this button is also not simulated in the Zibo 737.
ADF Panel
Coming underneath, we have
the ADF panel, which stands
for the automatic direction
finder. Now again, I must
reiterate that my knowledge
about navigational radio
systems in the aircraft is quite
limited, but from my
research, the automatic
direction finder uses multiple
different radio beacons on the
ground that emit morse code
identifiers to find certain navigational information such as approach courses, bearings and
headings. So, on this panel again, we have these two knobs to adjust the standby
frequency as well as this transfer switch to swap the two frequencies. Now we also have
these other two knobs here. This mode selector switch here allows pilots to switch
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between the ADF mode and the ANT mode. Normally, this switch is left to the ADF
position, where the ADF system will send the navigational bearing to the navigational
display in the aircraft. Switching this to the ANT mode provides better audio reception,
however most of the research and documentation online suggests that you won’t get any
bearing information on the nav display as you would if you leave this switch to the ADF
position. This other switch here simply switches the ADF system display on and off, as
you can see on screen here.
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Transponder Panel
Coming underneath, we have the transponder panel. Now before we delve into the
switches and knobs on this panel, let's first understand what a transponder is. A
transponder is another radio device that sits in the aircraft which is responsible for
sending different important aircraft parameters such as the aircraft’s altitude, speed and
direction at any given time during flight to both air traffic control as well as other nearby
aircraft. Most modern airliners today are fitted with a type of transponder called a Mode
S or Mode Sierra transponder, which allow these sophisticated systems to automatically
send this data to air traffic control as well as to prevent mid air collisions between
aircrafts using various traffic advisory and anti-collision alarms and indicators present
within these systems. We will explore this further when we get to their associated
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switches. Additionally, before every flight when the pilots obtain clearance from air
traffic control, they are normally assigned a unique 4 digit Squawk code, which, when
tuned into this display, allows air traffic control to identify the aircrafts callsign, its
speed, altitude and other aircraft parameters mentioned before. So, let's take a look at
these switches now to understand what each of them do on this aircraft. This knob over
here is the TCAS system which stands for the Traffic Collision Avoidance System, which
sounds audible alarms in the cockpit when the transponders of two aircraft detect that
they are getting too close to each other, thereby breaching safety regulations. The knob
itself allows pilots to switch between the different modes offered by the transponder.
When switched to standby, the transponder system is running but not actively sending out
any information to air traffic control or any other aircraft in the vicinity. Switching this
knob to the test position starts an audible testing system within the transponder with some
visual cues on the ND or navigation display like so… Switching the knob to altitude off
sends positional data to the air traffic control to show where the aircraft is on their radar
displays, but doesn’t display the aircraft’s altitude. This is especially useful at busy
airports, where pilots will be instructed to switch on their transponders but set the altitude
off, as it's understood then that they are on the ground but the air traffic control will be
able to monitor their position on the ground with respect to other aircraft. Switching the
knob to altitude on to send positional as well as altitude data to ATC. Finally, this TA
mode stands for traffic advisory, which will sound an automated voice in the cockpit
whenever the aircraft gets close to another aircraft. The voice will typically say “traffic
traffic” when the aircrafts are very close to each other and “clear of conflict” when the
aircrafts have moved far enough away from each other. Finally, this TA/RA mode stands
for Traffic Advisory and Resolution Advisory, wherein the transponder and TCAS
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system will do all of the aforementioned things such as send positional as well as
altitudinal data to ATC as well as alert the pilots with an automated voice when an
aircraft gets close but will also do one more thing. If the two aircrafts approaching one
another both have mode sierra transponders, then both of these transponder systems will
synchronize and provide a resolution advisory to both aircraft to prevent a collision. For
example, if two aircraft are headed towards each other and are approximately a minute
away from collision, the transponder systems on both aircraft will synchronize and sound
and automated voice in one aircraft telling it to “climb climb” and the other aircraft to
“descend descend”. The pilots will then take over manual control and either enter a steep
climb or descent to avoid the chance of a collision between the two aircraft. Hence, the
transponder is always switched to TA/RA mode before takeoff and only switched off
when the aircraft has safely landed at the arrival airport. This switch over here is to
switch between the two transponder systems in the aircraft - 1 and 2 which is not
simulated in the zibo 737. Coming to the middle here, we have these two knobs which
allow the pilots to enter in the special 4 digit code mentioned before into the transponder
system. This outer knob on the left adjusts the thousandths place, the smaller knob on the
left adjusts the hundredths place, this larger knob on the right adjusts the ones place and
this smaller knob on the right adjusts the tenths place. Finally this button in the middle is
the identification button which is only pressed when the air traffic controllers’s screens
are cluttered with aircraft and they wish to see who is speaking to them on the radios to
direct them properly. In such a scenario air traffic controllers would instruct the pilots to
squawk ident, and when the pilots push this button, the little blip on the ATC’s radar
screens will flash for a few seconds, allowing them to locate the aircraft with respect to
the plethora of other aircraft on their screens.
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Conclusion
So that ladies and gentleman brings us to the end of this episode of Aircrafts dissected. If
you’ve stuck around so far, congratulations, you now have a sound understanding of
important navigational systems in the aircraft such as the IRS or inertial reference
systems as well as the different means by which aircrafts can communicate with air
traffic control. Additionally, you have also learnt how to operate the main thrust levers,
speedbrakes, flaps and some other aerodynamic controls within the aircraft and the
different phases of flight they are used in. Now I must also mention that all of the
documentation and websites I used to research for this video are linked down below in
the description, including a written text version of this entire video, if you prefer to read
those and understand more about this aircraft. That being said, the next episode in this
series will focus on the central panels right in front of the pilots, which includes the
primary flight display, the navigation display as well as some knobs and switches relating
to the autopilot systems within the aircraft. If you guys enjoyed the video, make sure to
flyby the comments section and let me know if there’s any questions you’d like me to
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answer for you. Make sure to perform a full stop-landing at the like button and the
subscribe button if you enjoyed the content and press the bell icon for future notifications
from this channel and usual, thanks for flying by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome to the third episode in my
aircrafts dissected series, where we delve into every switch, knob and display in the
cockpit of the Zibo mod Boeing 737-800. In the first video of the series, we covered the
forward overhead panels and in the episode just prior to this one, we covered the aft
overhead panel, the central pedestal as well as the main throttle quadrant in the flight
deck, so go check those episodes out first if you haven’t seen them already. In this
episode, we’re going to be taking a look at the main displays and switches that are
located right in front of the pilots during normal operations - specifically, this Outboard
Display Unit with the PFD or primary flight display as well as this top row of switches on
the EFIS panel. Lastly, here is the list of things pointed out to me which were partially
incorrect explanations that I made in the previous video. You can pause the video and
take a look at those if you are interested. So, without further adieu, let’s jump into the
flight deck and start our exploration of the forward panels!
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Speed Tape
Coming over to the left here, we
have the speed tape indicator which
as you probably guessed, displays
the indicated airspeed of the aircraft
in knots right in the middle.
However, it also houses some other
important information. Right on top,
this pink indicator is the selected
airspeed that the autopilot and
autothrottle systems in the aircraft
are constantly trying to achieve.
This speed is normally governed by
the Flight management computers
based on different speed and
altitude constraints along the
specified route but can also be
configured manually on the MCP
panel here depending on the phase of flight, you’ll see what we mean when we take a
look at it in the episode covering the MCP panel specifically. Additionally, this little pink
bug represents this very same selected speed visually on the tape, just as an added bonus.
Finally, down here, this is the same indicated airspeed, but in a mach number instead of
knots. For those of you who don’t know, Mach number represents the ratio by which the
speed of a moving object may be compared to the speed of sound. The speed of sound
has a mach number of 1, so this number is essentially the speed of the aircraft as a
percentage of the speed of sound. Additionally, this display only becomes active once the
aircraft gets to mach 0.4.
Attitude Indicator
Coming to the middle of course, we have the attitude indicator, which displays an
artificial horizon along with a bank angle indicator at the top, thereby allowing pilots to
see if the aircraft is pitching or rolling to either side during poor visibility conditions such
as dense fog. So, the artificial horizon, as you can see, has this blue portion which
represents the sky and this brown portion which represents the ground. This middle
portion represents the horizon. These lines over here indicate 2.5 degree pitch increments
by which the aircraft is either pointed up, down or is level with the horizon. In the
middle of the attitude indicator, we have this wing and fuselage indicator which
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systems in the aircraft are in command of all of the flight characteristics of the aircraft.
Finally, at the bottom of this display is a warning section, which only comes on when
there is a serious imminent threat or danger to the aircraft. Normally, you’ll either see a
Windshear alert or a pull up command if you are getting too close to the ground or nearby
terrain. Take a look for yourself and pray this never happens to you.
Altitude Tape
Finally, moving to the right side of this
display, we have the main altitude tape,
which, you guessed it, represents the
altitude of the aircraft. Just like the speed
tape on the left, this indication over here
represents the current altitude of the
aircraft, whereas this pink altitude on top
represents the selected altitude that the
autopilot systems in the aircraft are trying
to achieve and can be governed either by
the FMS or by the pilots on the MCP. On
the right of this altitude display, we have a
vertical speed display which simply
displays the rate at which the aircraft is
climbing or descending in feet per minute
as you can see here. Finally, underneath
here, we have the barometric pressure setting that the pilots have selected. We will come
to this in a second when we look at the various buttons on the EFIS panel.
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can be changed to follow True north instead if that is required, and we’ll take a look at
how to do that in future episodes of this series.
Okay, and that ladies and gentleman covers the primary flight display’s main
components. Next up, we’re going to be looking at this EFIS panel, which houses some
important buttons that change some of the indicators and displays on this PFD. These
include everything from the barometric pressure setting we just spoke as well as some
other helpful assets for the pilots during non-normal conditions.
are 2 on each side, allowing both the captain as well as the first officer to adjust their own
screens as per their own liking. Now we will only be covering these two knobs and these
two buttons in this video, as these are the only ones that directly affect the primary flight
display. The rest of these switches below all affect the navigation display or ND, which
we will be taking a look at in the next video of this series. So, starting from this knob on
the left here, this is the minimums selector knob, which allows pilots to select the
minimum decision height for approach and landing. The premise behind this is that
during normal weather conditions, pilots normally have the runway in sight anywhere
between 5 and 15 nautical miles away. However, during extreme weather conditions such
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EFIS (Altimeter)
Finally, we come to this
barometric pressure selection
knob, which adjusts this part
of the PFD we briefly spoke
about earlier. Now before we
jump into what this knob
does, let’s first understand
what barometric pressure is
and more specifically what
an altimeter setting is. In
simple terms, the pressure
altimeter in the aircraft
simply indicates the specific
elevation of the aircraft above a specified defined point. This defined point is an altimeter
subscale, kind of like a reference point for the barometers. When at a mean sea level of 0,
the atmospheric pressure anywhere in the world will be 1013mba or hpa, which is the SI
unit for barometric pressure. This can also be measured in inches of mercury and the
equivalent to 1013 hpa would be 2992 inches of mercury. You would often use this
measurement over the standard SI unit when flying in North America. Hence, depending
on the field elevation and weather conditions such as temperature at the local airport, this
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pressure changes, and air traffic control will often update this so that aircrafts near the
vicinity of the airport have the most accurate altitude readouts then can get. However,
once the aircrafts leave the vicinity of the local airport vertically, meaning that they climb
up to a certain altitude, then can then switch this altimeter setting back to the standard
subscale pressure which, as mentioned before is 1013Hpa or 2992inches of mercury. This
is to then put them in sync with other aircrafts flying around at high altitudes. This
specific altitude that aircrafts must reach before switching to local barometric pressure
when arriving at the airport and switching to standard barometric pressure when
departing from the airport is called the transition altitude. Any altitude above this
transition altitude is referred to as a flight level, whereas any altitude below this transition
altitude is referred to in feet. For example, throughout the US, the transition altitude is
18000 feet. So if an aircraft is instructed by ATC to climb to this point on screen, they
would say it as ‘climb to 16000 feet’. However, if the aircraft is told to climb to this
altitude on screen, they would be told to climb to Flight level 330 - implying that it is
33000 feet above mean sea level. So, coming back to this selector, this larger knob allows
you to switch between displaying the pressure in Hpa or inches of mercury, whereas this
smaller selector allows you to select. This middle std button allows you to switch
between the local and standard barometric pressure when passing the transition altitude.
All of these changes are reflected on the primary flight display, as was the case with the
minimums selector. Once again, I will be leaving comprehensive documentation down in
the description if you guys want more information about these systems.
Conclusion
So ladies and gentleman, that brings us to the end of this aircrafts dissected episode
covering the Primary Flight Display and the top of the EFIS panel. Now if you guys are
wondering why this episode was so short, you guys in the community have been giving
me some amazing feedback, but the general highlights have been that I need to talk a tad
bit slower and you guys appreciate shorter videos. So, in order to maintain the same level
of quality that you guys have come to expect, while also talking slower and keeping the
video length short, the only way for me to achieve all of those things is to divide these
videos into bite-sized bits. Let me know in the comments section if this sort of length is
okay for you or if you would like me to tweak anything else about the commentary. That
being said, the next episode in the series will focus on the navigation display or ND as
well as the rest of the buttons on the EFIS panel, as mentioned before. If you guys
enjoyed the video, make sure to flyby the comments section and let me know if there’s
any questions you’d like me to answer for you. Make sure to perform a full stop-landing
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at the like button and the subscribe button if you enjoyed the content and press the bell
icon for future notifications from this channel and usual, thanks for flying by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome back to another video in my
aircraft’s dissected series, where we delve into every switch, knob and display in the
cockpit of the Zibo mod Boeing 737-800. In the previous video, we covered the main
outboard display unit that houses the primary flight display along with these top row of
buttons and knobs on the EFIS panel - so go check that out if you haven’t already done
so. In this video, we’re going to be taking a look at this inboard display unit, which
normally houses the navigation display or ND. Additionally, we’ll also be taking a look
at this bottom row of knobs and buttons on this EFIS panel. Finally, as per usual, this is
the list of things I failed to explain properly in the previous video, so you can pause the
o without further adieu, let’s jump into the
video and take a look at it if you so please. S
flight deck!
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Waypoint Identifier
Moving to the very right here, we have some
information relating to the waypoints that the
aircraft travels through on its route. So, before
we take a look at these indicators, let’s first
understand what waypoints are and how they
work. Just like the complex road networks we
have on the ground, the air is also littered with
complex invisible air networks known as
airways. Each airway leads to a certain
direction and has multiple waypoints along it.
Think of these waypoints as train stations on a
track - with the track itself being the airways.
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So if an aircraft wishes to get from point A to point B, it will often take an airway and
keep hitting different waypoints on this airway until it wishes to change its direction.
When this point occurs, the aircraft will switch to a different airway and turn in another
direction to intercept the different waypoints on this new airway. Think of this as a train
changing tracks on a railway line when it wishes to get to new train stations. So, coming
to these indicators now, at the top we have the name of the next waypoint on the aircraft’s
route. These names are mostly unique around the world and you will see different themes
being represented as you travel around the world. Underneath the name, we have the
estimated time of arrival at that waypoint in Zulu time - which is a universally accepted
time for aviation around the world. Underneath this, we have the distance to the waypoint
in nautical miles. As you hop from waypoint to waypoint on your route, you will see this
indication changing to highlight information regarding the next waypoint at all times.
Direction Indicator
Coming to the center here, we have
some information regarding the
direction the aircraft is currently flying
in. This TRK symbol on the left here
means that the aircraft is operating in
track mode. You will also see HDG
instead of TRK here, which implies
that the aircraft is flying in heading
mode instead. The difference between
these two modes is that this track mode
takes into account the wind direction
and speed we discussed earlier and
flies a particular direction over the
ground to mitigate the effects of high
altitude winds. The heading mode
quite simply, does not. Moving to the
center, we have a numerical value to
show the direction of the aircraft on a 360 degree cardinal plane. The final indication to
the right here, just like the previous episode, shows if the aircraft is flying relative to
magnetic north or true north. Coming underneath to these three indicators, we have this
pink heading bug, which represents the specific heading selected on the MCP panel in
front of the pilots. On the right of the bug, we have this white triangle, which represents
the true heading of the aircraft and displays the direction the nose is currently pointing.
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Compass Arc
Alright so coming further
underneath, we have this compass
arc where this white line running
straight down the middle represents
the track of the aircraft. Now as you
may have noticed, though the nose of
the aircraft is pointing in this
direction, the aircraft’s track is still
showing that we are travelling
straight. This is again because of the
wind drift, as the nose needs to point
in that direction for the wind to push
the aircraft towards a straight
trajectory. Don’t worry you’ll
understand this much better when we
complete a flight from point A to B.
Moving down this white line, we
have these distance markers, where
in the centre of the display is a
numerical readout of the distance in nautical miles. These other non-numbered hatch
marks simply represent half values, so since this is 40 nautical miles, this would therefore
be 20 nautical miles, this would be 60 nautical miles and naturally, the end of this
compass arc represents 80 nautical miles in front of the aircraft. Additionally, on this
compass arc, we also have these pink stars, which are visual representations of the
waypoints we just spoke about. Furthermore, this pink line represents the direction that
the aircraft must travel to reach the next waypoint. As you can see, currently, this white
line and the pink line are overlapping, meaning that we are perfectly on track to hitting
this waypoint at this specific time. Coming further below, we have this white triangle,
which represents the actual aircraft itself - nothing more to say there.
Green Indications
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Underneath this white triangle, we have some more indications in green here. Starting off
with this FMC L indication, this simply means that the navigation display is getting its
data from the left flight management computer which is normally programmed by the
captain. In an event that there is a failure with the left FMC, pilots also have the option to
switch the data source to the right FMC and then this display here would simply say FMC
R. To the right of this are two very important indications that measure the accuracy of the
aircraft’s flight path and trajectory. So, just a brief summary before we get into these
indications themselves. The airways we spoke about previously often have certain safety
corridors or margins that the aircraft must stay between at all times. This is to prevent the
aircraft from accidentally entering another airway and encountering traffic or other
catastrophic incidents. On the other hand, the aircraft itself, though extremely state of the
art and modern, simply cannot operate navigationally with 100% accuracy. Hence, this
RNP stands for required navigation performance and shows the maximum amount by
which the aircraft can deviate from a 100% accurate trajectory. This is measured in
nautical miles, so in this case, the required navigation performance is represented by this
number, thereby implying that the aircraft can deviate by these many nautical miles
before breaching safety regulations. This ANP therefore stands for actual navigation
performance and must always be lesser than the required navigation performance to meet
safety standards. I must say however, that you should normally not have a problem with
this on point to point operations as on most flights, the navigation systems can use
various VOR stations, NDBs and a combination of GPS satellites to reduce the
inaccuracy of its trajectory. Just thought you guys should know it in theory and hence
why I put it in the video.
EFIS Introduction
So ladies and gentleman, now that we’ve had
a brief overview of the different indications
on the navigation display, we can now check
out these bottom row of buttons and knobs
on this EFIS panel and see their effects on
the ND. So to start off with, we have these
two VOR and ADF needles on either side.
So in order to understand this better, we
need to first tune in a VOR frequency and
then show its effects on this ND. So I’ll go do that now.
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Alright, so here I have tuned in the VOR frequency for an unspecified runway approach
at Watsonville Municipal airport. So, when this needle is switched to this VOR position,
you see this green line that appears on the ND which represents the radials passing
through the specific VOR station selected. Note that this green line only appears when
the range on the ND is set to at least 20 nautical miles, we will look at this knob in a
second. You can move this line by manipulating this course selector knob on the MCP,
but we will be taking a detailed look at this when we get to it in the dedicated video
regarding the MCP panel. Additionally, you will also see this green bearing pointer
which points directly towards the VOR station that has been selected - in this case, the
Watsonville municipal VOR. Finally, at the bottom, you also see the name of the VOR
station selected, in this case - SNS or Sierra November Sierra in the aviation phonetic
alphabet - as well as this DME which stands for distance measuring equipment- which
shows the distance of the VOR station from the aircraft. If the frequency and course are
selected on both the nav radios as well as both the course selectors, then you will see this
same indication on both sides when both these switches are flicked to the VOR position.
That’s a lot of ‘both’ for one sentence. Alright, flicking this switch all the way down
activates the ADF mode if you are using an ADF station for navigation instead of a VOR.
It displays basically the same indications as the VOR mode but in blue instead of green -
so you have this blue heading indicator, these blue indications for ADF 1 and 2 and so
on. Now as I mentioned in episode 2 of this series, if you don’t understand what VOR
means or what an ADF station is, I am planning to cover all of these topics in detail once
I have finished my series on the Zibo 737. So stay tuned for that.
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ILS landing when we do a full point A to B flight using the Zibo, so I will explain how
the localizer and glideslope indications work when we get to that point. Also, on the top
right, you see information about the ILS approach that has been tuned into the navigation
radios. You see the name of the approach, the approach course as well as the DME or
distance to the ILS beacon on the ground. Flicking this same knob to the VOR position is
practically identical to the approach mode except for the lack of the glideslope indicator
on the right side. You will again see information regarding the name, the approach course
as well as the distance to the VOR station tuned into the nav radios on the top right of the
nav display. Turning the knob to the map view brings us to the main map screen we had
been looking at during the first part of the video, highlighting different waypoints on the
route, wind information as well as RNP and ANP indications at the bottom. Finally,
turning the knob to this plan mode switches the ND from being a front-view compass arc
to a proper compass with the 4 North, South, East and West cardinal directions. Now this
mode is normally used in conjunction with this FMC and basically allows pilots to step
through every single waypoint on their route to see if there are any discrepancies or
anomalies. We will speak more about this mode during the FMC programming video
when we do the Zibo full flight video, so stay tuned for that. Lastly, pressing this CTR
button once again will provide you with a full 360 degree compass with the aircraft
centered in the middle to allow the pilots to see behind them and study their peripheral
environment. In some aircraft, pressing this button again will give you this Vertical
situation display, which shows the aircraft from the side and displays the vertical path of
the aircraft. Hence, it shows when the aircraft is ascending or descending and by how
much. We will again take a brief look at this when we do a full flight from A to B.
Range Selector
Alright, so coming over to the right, this
knob over here is quite simple to
understand, as it's simply a range selector
and all of these numbers you see above
this knob simply allow you to adjust the
maximum range seen on the nav display.
This ranges from 5 nautical miles when
the knob is turned all the way to the left
all the way to 640 nautical miles when
the knob is all the way to the right. Note
that when I select say 20 nautical miles,
the end of this compass arc on the map represents 20 nautical miles and these white hatch
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marks, as mentioned before represent partial distance measurements. Finally, this middle
TFC button simply activates the traffic blips on the nav display, allowing pilots to see
other air traffic in their vicinity.
Bottom Row
Okay ladies and gentleman, so that brings us to this bottom row of buttons that all show
additional information on this nav display. Let’s cover these buttons from left to right as
usual. Starting from the left here, we have this WXR button, which activates the weather
radar. This shows different weather cells on the nav display and the different colours
represent the intensity of the weather and turbulence, with green being light and red of
course being heavy supercells. Next up, this STA button shows different radio stations
and nav aid beacons in the vicinity. This WPT button over here shows nearby waypoints
on the map and this ARPT button does the same as the previous two, but for airports, and
shows different airports around the vicinity of the aircraft. Pilots can use this in case of an
emergency and if they wish to perform an emergency landing at a nearby airport. This
DATA switch over here quite simply displays additional information relating to the
waypoints that the aircraft will pass
through on its route. This includes
the estimated time of arrival at
each waypoint in Zulu time as well
as certain speed and altitude
constraints for certain waypoints
that require these to be in place.
Moving further right, this POS
button will display a bearing line to
a nearby VOR or NDB station if it
has been selected on the nav radios.
Now I don’t quite know if this
button is simulated in the Zibo
737-800 as I haven’t been able to get it to work either on the ground or during flight. So,
if I find that it does work at a later date, I’ll be sure to leave it down in the comments
section as well as the description to let you guys know. Finally, at the very bottom, we
have this TERR button, which, like the weather radar, draws a map of the nearby terrain
around the aircraft. Again, seeing green on the display normally means the terrain is at
low altitudes and red normally represents mountains and valleys in the surrounding
region. I must mention that the terrain radar feature doesn’t come automatically with the
Zibo 737, however, there is a freeware plugin available on the X-plane.org that lets add
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this to the simulator as a whole and access terrain features and a whole host of other
aircrafts in the sim too. Just thought you guys should know that.
Conclusion
So ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of this Aircrafts Dissected Episode,
covering the Navigation display or ND as well as the bottom row of knobs and buttons on
the EFIS panel. If you’ve stuck around so far, congratulations, you now have a sound
understanding of how a 737 or any modern airliner can travel from point A to B using
waypoints, how they can fly different approaches ranging from ILS to VOR as well as
how to access different additional information on their screens such as weather and
terrain. Now I must also mention that all of the documentation and websites I used to
research for this video are linked down below in the description, including a written text
version of this entire video, if you prefer to read those and understand more about this
aircraft. That being said, the next episode in this series will focus on the MCP or mode
control panel, which will cover all of the autopilot functions of the aircraft such as
manipulating speed, altitude, vertical speed as well as turning on and off the main
autopilot and autothrottle systems within the aircraft. If you guys enjoyed this video,
make sure to flyby the comments section and let me know if there’s any questions you’d
like me to answer for you. Make sure to perform a full stop-landing at the like button and
the subscribe button if you enjoyed the content and press the bell icon for future
notifications from this channel and usual, thanks for flying by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome back to another video in my
aircraft’s dissected series, where we delve into every switch, knob and display in the
cockpit of the Zibo mod Boeing 737-800. In the previous video, we covered the main
in-board display unit which houses the navigation display, along with the bottom row of
buttons and knobs on the EFIS panel - so if you haven’t seen that video yet, I highly
recommend you to check it out. In this video, we are going to be taking a look at this
MCP or mode control panel, situated right in the middle of the pilot’s view. I want to
keep the intro short, so here is the list of things I failed to explain properly in the previous
video, so you can pause the video and take a look at it if you so please. S o, without
further adieu, let’s jump into the flight deck!
MCP (Intro)
So ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the flight deck of the Boeing 737-800 and
quite specifically, to this MCP panel right in front of the pilots. Now, this panel consists
of probably one of the most important sets of buttons and knobs in the entire flight deck,
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as it allows pilots to control the aircraft’s speed, altitude, heading, vertical speed and
allows holistic control over the autopilot and autothrottle systems within the aircraft. So
before we get started, I just want to say that in this video, I’ll give a detailed description
of what each switch and knob does and its overall functionality in flight, but to truly see
their effect on the aircraft, you’re going to have to wait for the full flight video with the
Zibo 737 coming out very shortly. Lastly, I must once again reiterate that a lot of the
concepts I cover in this video will include references to at least the previous two
episodes, such as the course selector, LNAV and VNAV modes and so on, so if you
haven’t seen the previous two episodes, I highly recommend you to watch them before
watching this one. So let’s not waste any more time and get right into exploring this
panel!
Course Selector
So starting off on the left as
usual, we have the course
selector knob which basically
allows pilots to fly to and from
a whole host of different
navigational beacons on the
ground such as VOR stations,
NDBs or non-directional
beacons as well as ILS beacons
used during instrument-aided landings. Turning this knob while having the appropriate
navigation frequency tuned into the nav radios provides pilots with appropriate
indications on the ND, as you might remember from the previous video, where we looked
at the green bearing line after tuning in the Watsonville Municipal VOR frequency into
the radios. There are 2 of these on the MCP panel, one for the captain and the other for
the first officer and both of them can be used individually as per the pilot’s liking to help
fly the approach.
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important, as without having them switched on, the entire autopilot system basically
doesn’t work. Additionally, they also provide these pink crosshairs on the PFD, which
allow pilots to see the ‘desired’ pitch and roll axis of the aircraft during climbs, descents
as well as turns. As for the switches themselves, flicking the switch up switches the flight
director on and pilots normally turn these on before engine start and only switch them off
after having landed at the arrival airport. Additionally, this MA light on top of one of the
flight director switches implies that this side is the master and the other side is the slave.
This means that, in this case, most of the primary navigation systems in the aircraft will
get data from the left flight management computer, as this system on the left is the
master. Whichever switch gets flicked on first becomes the master and the second switch
to be flicked on automatically becomes the slave.
Autothrottle Switch
Coming here, we have the
main autothrottle arm switch
which controls the engine
performance during various
phases of flight and works in
conjunction with the overall
flight management system to
assist the aircraft in going
from point A to B. Flicking
the switch up arms the autothrottle system and flicking the switch down obviously
switches it off and prevents the system from taking control of the throttles - thereby
allowing manual control over the thrust levers by the pilots. Note that the autothrottle
system may also be turned off by pressing the tiny buttons on both the thrust levers - but
more on that in episode 2 of this series.
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represents the indicated air speed of the aircraft that the pilots can select using this knob
down here. Setting a speed value in here and pushing this speed button will instruct the
autothrottle mode to fly the aircraft at that specific speed by altering engine thrust - pretty
self explanatory. This N1 button right next to this speed button allows pilots to set takeoff
thrust during the takeoff roll. Additionally, this button may also be used during a
go-around when immediate high thrust is required to start climbing the aircraft during an
aborted landing sequence. We’ll get into the N1 settings and what it is specifically when
we look at these display units over here in the next video as well as during the FMC
programming video when we do the Zibo mod full flight. Finally, this button to the left of
the speed selection knob labelled ‘CO’ stands for ‘change over' and allows pilots to select
the speed on this display as a mach number instead of indicated air speed in knots. This
may be used when ATC asks the pilots to speed up during the cruise-phase of the flight.
As for this speed intervene button on the right of this knob, we’ll come to it in a second
after we look at some other autopilot systems. The same is true for this level change
button at the bottom, as I feel you guys need a little bit more knowledge about some other
systems before explaining this button in detail, so we’ll come to it in a second.
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panel and look at this speed intervention button. Now as mentioned before, when VNAV
is engaged, the autopilot systems will manage the speed and altitude of the aircraft using
the constraints that have been programmed into the FMC. In fact, the entire speed display
will go blank, signifying that VNAV has taken over control of the speed and altitude
characteristics of the aircraft. However, say that pilots wish to use VNAV for its altitude
component but want to set the speed manually, they can press this speed intervention
button and dial in a specific speed. This will mean that the aircraft will follow all altitude
constraints programmed into the FMC but the aircraft will only obey the speed that has
been dialed manually into the speed control panel. It might sound confusing at first, but
when you see it in action, it’ll make complete sense. Arming these modes also shows
their appropriate annunciations on the PFD as we saw in earlier episodes of this series.
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Coming to the right, we have the altitude control knob, which as you probably guessed,
allows pilots to select an altitude that the aircraft needs to climb or descend to. However,
there are a few caveats to this, so let me explain them to you. Now, unlike the speed or
heading control panels, the altitude control panel doesn’t necessarily have a single button
that can be pressed to instruct the aircraft to fly to a particular altitude instantly. Instead,
there are 3 primary
methods that the pilots
must choose between
depending on their
use-case-scenario to be
able to get the aircraft to
a certain altitude. The
first one is my using this
altitude intervention
button. What this button
essentially does is that it cancels any altitude constraints programmed into the flight
management computer. Most departure and arrival procedures will have certain specified
altitudes that the aircraft must fly at between certain waypoints. For example, for this
specific departure from San Francisco international airport, the chart specifies that the
aircraft must be below 3000 feet at this waypoint. This constraint will automatically be
programmed into the FMC when the pilots enter this waypoint into their route, as these
procedures are updated monthly and each airline has access to the latest procedures at all
times. However, if ATC has too much air traffic near the vicinity of the airport and wants
to get our aircraft out of San Francisco as quickly as possible, they might instruct us to
climb to flight level 190 or 19000 feet. So, pilots can press this altitude intervention
button, which will automatically cancel the 3000 feet constraint that was programmed
into the FMC, and will then select 19000 feet in this display and the aircraft will
immediately begin climbing to this altitude. Now here’s an important note, do not press
this button repeatedly, as every press basically cancels the next altitude constraint
programmed into the FMC. So pressing this button 10 times due to impatience can result
in you accidentally cancelling important descent altitude constraints at your arrival
airport if you are on a short flight and have less than 10 waypoints in your route. Okay,
the second way to get to a certain altitude is by simply using the vertical speed button
down here and using the scroll wheel to adjust the rate at which the aircraft will climb or
descend to a certain altitude in feet per minute. Also note that arming the vertical speed
mode will also activate this speed mode on the left, so you will have to dial in a speed
that the aircraft will maintain while getting to this altitude at this vertical speed. Finally,
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the last way to set the altitude for the aircraft is by using this level change mode we
previously looked at near the speed control knob. By pressing this button, you can then
select a particular speed on this panel and also dial in an altitude on this panel- the
aircraft will automatically decide the appropriate rate of climb or descend to maintain this
specific speed and to get to this altitude. And lastly of course, you always have VNAV
mode, which will basically take you from waypoint to waypoint on as perfect a vertical
profile as possible while obeying all altitude constraints, but we already spoke about that.
As for the Altitude hold button, this will basically stop your climb or descent to any
altitude specified on this selector and will level the plane off at the exact altitude when
you pressed this button. For example, if you are climbing to 15000 feet and you press this
button when you are at 5000 feet, the plane will stop its climb to 15000 feet and maintain
5000 feet of altitude. And that’s that for the altitude panel.
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extremely useful in certain situations. CWS stands for control wheel steering and allows
pilots to set a particular pitch and roll setting on their control column and yoke and have
the aircraft fly that specific pitch and roll setting automatically. It’s basically a more
advanced version of the trim system we explored in episode 2 and removes the need for
pilots to constantly apply positive pressure on their yoke or control column during a
climb. It is especially useful during initial climbs after taking off from airports as well as
during turbulence mid flight. Finally, coming down here, this is the main autopilot
disengage switch, which, you guessed it, disengages the autopilot systems. Simply flick
this switch down to disengage the autopilot. Note that when you flick the switch down, it
not only disengages the autopilot but also prevents you from engaging it again by
pressing the main command buttons. You need to first flick the disengage switch back up
before flicking the autopilot systems on again. Just thought you should know that.
Conclusion
So ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of this Aircrafts Dissected Episode,
covering the Mode Control Panel or MCP. If you’ve stuck around so far, congratulations,
you now have a sound understanding of how pilots can control different autopilot and
autothrottle related systems within the aircraft. Now I must also mention that all of the
documentation and websites I used to research for this video are linked down below in
the description, including a written text version of this entire video, if you prefer to read
those and understand more about this aircra ft. That being said, the next episode in
this series will focus on some of the miscellaneous buttons and levers located right in
front of the pilots and will also be the final episode of our flight deck familiarization
portion of the series. The next 4 or 5 episodes after that will have us do a full flight on
this aircraft from point A to point B where we will use all of the systems we have
journeyed through so far in this series. If you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to
perform a full stop-landing at the like button and the subscribe button and press the bell
icon for future notifications from this channel. Also, be sure to flyby the comments
section and let me know if there’s any questions you’d like me to answer for you. As
usual, thanks for flying by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome back to another video in my
aircrafts dissected series, where we delve into every switch, knob and display in the
cockpit of the Zibo mod Boeing 737-800. In the previous video, we looked at the MCP or
mode control panel, which houses all of the important autopilot and autothrottle related
systems within the aircraft. In this episode, we’re going to be finishing up our cockpit
familiarization portion of this series by covering all of the miscellaneous knobs and
switches that sit in front of the pilots and will be taking an in depth look at the various
engine indications on the upper and lower display units. Now an important note,
normally, I always indicate the errors pointed out to me in the previous video and here
they are as usual, so you can pause the video and check them out if you so please,
however, I would also like to explicitly address one of my other errors that was pointed
out by multiple people here. Now if you want to skip this and simply get to the meat of
the video, skip to this point over here, however, if you want to know the error, stick
around to find out. Several people pointed out to me that I made an error in reading the
departure procedure at SFO where I said that this constraint was 3000 feet or below.
However, it actually happens to be 3000 feet or above. The concept I was trying to
explain still applies, but it’s my job as a content creator to dissuade you guys from
learning the wrong thing even if it is from me, so I put it in the video regardless.
Anyways, now that we’re done with the formalities, let’s jump into the flight deck!
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to control the orientation of the nose wheel when taxiing on the ground. Pilots would turn
this wheel anti clockwise to turn the nose wheel left and vice versa.
Caution Systems
Coming to the center here, on the
captain’s side, we have a few more
buttons, knobs and indications to
look at, starting with this master
caution panel. There are three buttons
here, starting with this red one, this is
the main fire warning button, which
lights up when a fire is detected on
board the aircraft. Additionally, an
audible alarm is also sounded
throughout the aircraft like so. You can simply press this button to silence the alarm.
Coming right next to this red switch, this is the master caution light, which lights up
whenever there is a problem or fault with any system within the aircraft. This light is
normally accompanied by an indication on this system annunciator panel, highlighting
which system has a fault. For example, here, we have a problem with the fuel, so the
master caution light has lit up and the system annunciator simply says fuel. To dismiss
this warning, simply press the master caution light and the warning goes away. However,
this dismissal is only temporary as this system annunciator also acts as its own button. If
you dismiss the fuel warning by pressing the master caution light, sure the light goes
away, but if you haven’t managed to fix the problem and press this system annunciator
button, it recalls the problem and lights up the master caution light again. Note that
sometimes you might see the master caution light up but see nothing on the system
annunciator. This is because the two master caution systems on either side of the flight
deck control different systems, so make sure to check the other side, and you’ll find the
problem.
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the left, we have a chronometer switch, which allows pilots to time the duration of their
flight. Pilots normally start this before takeoff and stop it after landing to measure their
air time. Press the button once to start the chronometer, press it again to stop it and press
it one more time to reset it. Coming below here, we have an ET switch which stands for
estimated time. This is basically the same thing as the chronometer and allows pilots to
track time. Press this ET button once to start the clock and press it again to stop it. You
can also press this little reset button to reset the ET timer. Finally, these two buttons on
the right simply allow pilots to adjust the brightness of this clock. Coming underneath,
this guarded switch allows pilots to select the nosewheel steering setting between the
normal and alternate modes.
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reset light comes on when the main autopilot command system has been disengaged and
is accompanied by an alarm. You can simply push the main autopilot disengage switch
backup to disable the alarm as well as the light or you may press this button itself, which
accomplishes the same function. Coming to the right, there is a similar switch for the
Autothrottle system but this one doesn’t sound an alarm. Over to the right, this final light
on this panel is the FMC message light, which comes on when there is a message on the
flight management computer. We’ll see more of this in the full flight episodes coming out
after this video. This test button simply allows pilots to test system 1 and 2 to see if the
lights are working properly. Coming further right, we have this main lights switch, which
allows pilots to switch the intensity of the lights between bright and dim modes.
Furthermore, flipping this switch up to this test position lights up every single light and
bulb in the cockpit to allow pilots to see if every single light is operating properly.
System Lights
Coming further
underneath, we have
some more system
specific lights.
Starting off at the left,
we have this takeoff
config light, which
lights up along with an
audible warning when
the thrust levers are
pushed to more than 74% without being prepared for takeoff. This means that either the
flaps are not extended for takeoff or the speed brakes are armed. Basically, if the aircraft
is not ready for takeoff and the pilots advance the thrust levers, this light will come on to
alert the pilots to abort the takeoff and redo their checklists. Right next to this light is the
cabin altitude light, which comes on when the pressure in the cabin exceeds 10000 feet,
thereby signifying a loss in cabin pressure. This is also accompanied by a warning bell,
but I cover the pressurization systems in great depth in episode 1 of the series, so go
check that video out for more information. Next to the cabin altitude light, we have two
lights pertaining to the speedbrake system. This top light, as mentioned in episode 2
shows when the speed brake levers have been set to the armed position. This bottom
speed brake do not arm light come on when there is a fault with the automatic
deployment of the flight spoilers when the lever is set to the armed detent. Finally, this
stab out of trim light comes on when the autopilot systems within the aircraft are unable
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to properly control the stabilizer trim system within the aircraft - more information about
that in the 2nd episode of this series.
Light Control Switches
Finally on the captain’s side, we
have a few more knobs that
control the lighting in the aircraft.
These are all hidden behind this
yoke, so in order to access them
with ease, a pro tip for you
beginners out there is to press this
yoke which makes it disappear
and then you can manipulate
these knobs with ease. So,
starting off with this main panel light, this controls the backlighting of the captain’s
forward panels. Coming further right, this knob controls the brightness of the upper
display unit, which we will take a detailed look at in a second. This next knob controls
the background lighting in the flight deck and this AFDS flood light simply lights up the
MCP panel we looked at in the previous episode. Underneath here, this knob on the left
controls the brightness of the outboard display unit. This next knob controls the
brightness of the inboard display unit and finally this one controls the brightness of the
lower display unit. So, pretty self-explanatory.
Standby Displays
Ok, so that brings us to the center of the forward
panels, where we firstly have these two standby
instrument displays that can be used during
emergencies by pilots. So, on top you have this standby
artificial horizon, which as you can probably see is a
miniature version of the PFD we looked at in detail in
episode 3 of this series. This approach button on top
brings up the appropriate scale ID annunciators to allow
pilots to fly an approach onto a runway. Pressing this
hp/in button allows pilots to switch between
hectopascals and inches of mercury to input the
altimeter setting, which can be done using this knob
over here. Finally, these two buttons to the side allow
pilots to adjust the brightness of this display. Finally,
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you also have this VOR/ADF standby instrument at the bottom, which can provide
radials to nearby VOR stations or ADF stations by using these two buttons to switch
between the two.
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hour. Coming to the top right here, this is a dedicated system annunciator for the engine
display. These top 2 lights will light up and say ‘start valve open’ meaning that the bleed
air valves are open to allow the engine to spool up to their idle speed during the engine
start procedure. The next two indications will show Filter Bypass, which is similar to the
fuel filter bypass lights on the overhead panel and will show if fuel is skipping its
filtration process and is being injected directly into the engines. Finally, this last row will
show low oil pressure indications , which is pretty self-explanatory. Finally, at the bottom
here, we see the total fuel on board as well the overall fuel distribution. We see how
much fuel is in the left, right and center tanks and we also see the units in which the fuel
is being measured, in this case: pounds.
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When this switch is flicked down to this ‘used’ position, the FF display will temporarily
change to highlight how much fuel has been used so far by the aircraft and will
eventually go back to the same fuel flow indications. Flicking the same switch up resets
the fuel used indications back to 0. Pilots may do this before a flight to not have their fuel
usage indications clash with any previous flights performed with the same aircraft.
MFD or LDU
Alright and that brings us to this
lower display unit which as you can
see is normally left blank. However,
it’s pretty simple to display
information on here using this MFD
panel. By pressing this engine button
once, you get access to all of this
engine related information on this
display. At the top, you have the N2
readout. Now, after researching a lot
about the N2 readout, I must say that
it is a hard concept for me to
understand. However, from what I
gathered, the N1 is an indication of
the low pressure spool of the engines
and thereby shows the speed of the
fan blades as a percentage of total
thrust. N2 on the other hand is an
indication of high pressure spool of
the engines and is responsible for
providing power to the aircraft. If there are any real world pilots in the comments section,
please feel free to provide me with an explanation about what N2 is as the viewers and I
both will greatly appreciate it. Coming underneath, we have the fuel flow value again,
nothing new there. The next 3 indications underneath all show information about the oil
used in the engine core of the aircraft, so we have the oil pressure, the oil temperature and
the oil quantity at the bottom. Finally, at the bottom, we have this VIB indicator which
shows the engine vibration inside the nacelle. These hatch marks on top indicate vibration
thresholds and if the engine is vibrating more than this amount, it may lead to engine
failure or even structural damage, so this is a pretty important readout. Pressing this Eng
button again will bring a condensed version of the information we just saw on the Lower
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display unit now onto the Upper display unit without the visual indications. Finally,
pressing the engine button again deletes this information from both the display units and
returns us back to our original state. Pressing this System button right next to the engine
button shows some aircraft subsystem information on the lower display unit. Starting
from the top, we see the hydraulic quantity and pressure of the hydraulic fluids in both
hydraulic systems A and B and pilots will normally check to make sure they have enough
before starting their flight. Coming underneath, we have the brake temperatures for the 4
main landing gear wheels. Underneath here, we have live readouts of the position of
every movable flight control surface in the aircraft, including the elevators, the ailerons,
the flight spoilers or speed brakes as well as the rudder on the very bottom. Pilots will
normally verify their full range of motion during a flight control check performed before
every flight. Finally this CR button is a cancel recall button which is very similar to the
system annunciator button we looked at previously. Pressing this button once allows
pilots to recall any indications on the upper and lower display units and pressing it again
allows them to get rid of these indications. And that’s that for this panel.
Autobrake
Alright, let’s move up here to these last few
buttons and indications here to wrap up this
center portion of the forward panels. Starting
off with this knob over here, this is the
autobrake knob which controls the intensity of
the braking performance provided by the
landing gear of the aircraft on landing. Pilots
can select the appropriate braking performance
all the way from 1 which offers mild braking
performance all the way to max for the most
severe braking performance. The setting that
the pilots select is based on different things
such as the condition of the runway, if it is dry,
wet or slippery as well as the runway length,
presence of a tail-wind etc. This RTO setting
here stands for rejected takeoff and pilots
switch the autobrake setting to this mode before takeoff to allow the aircraft to provide
maximum braking action if the pilots decide to abort the takeoff for any reason. This
autobrake disarm light on top comes on when pilots switch over to manual braking after
having landed to vacate the runway. We’ll see this being used during our full flight video.
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Underneath this is the anti-skid inoperative light, which as you probably guessed, comes
on when the anti-skid system is inoperative.
Flaps and Gear Lever
Moving further right, we come to this analogue gauge we
looked at in episode 2 of the series which theshows the
position of the flaps from up to 40 degrees from the
horizontal. This LE flaps transit light comes on when the
leading edge flaps and slats are transitioning into position
and this green LE flaps extended light comes on when the
flaps are locked into position. Coming further right, this
big lever over here is the main landing gear lever. The
lever itself has 3 distinct positions: up, down and off.
When switched to the down position,the hydraulic systems
within the aircraft extend the main undercarriage of the
aircraft and lock in place to be able to absorb the impact of
the aircraft’s weight when touching down. This is
highlighted by these three green lights on top. When the
landing gear is pushed up, the hydraulic systems will
retract the gear from its down position and will lock it in
place inside the wheel-well of the aircraft. When the
landing gear is transitioning between positions, these 3
lights will come on as red lights and all lights will
extinguish when the gear has been retracted. Finally, this
off position depressurizes the hydraulic systems that hold
the gear in their position in the wheel well. Pilots normally
switch the landing gear lever to this position a few minutes
after takeoff, as once the gear is safely stowed within the
wheel-well, constant hydraulic pressure is not required to
hold them there. Moving to this colourful analogue gauge
here shows the brake pressure within the landing gear of
the aircraft. Any value between 3 to 3.5 means that the brakes have good pressure and are
sufficient for flight, but a value in red means that there is too much brake pressure and a
value in yellow means that the pressure within the brakes is lacking. Again, pretty
self-explanatory. Finally, we come to the first officer’s side of emergency indications
which are identical to the captain’s except for this indication right here. This speedbrakes
extended light comes on when the flight spoilers or speed brakes are extended at a time
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when they are not supposed to be, for example during takeoff or other such phases of
flight.
GPWS
Finally, on the first officer’s side
we have the main GPWS system,
which stands for the ground
proximity warning system. This
system is responsible for alerting
pilots whenever the aircraft is
getting anywhere close to the
ground. This includes everything
from the minimums annunciations
when the aircraft is coming in to
land and is perfectly stabilized, all
the way to unstabilized
approaches, windshears, flying
into high terrain conditions and so
on. This light on top is an inop
light to signify a fault or failure
with the GPWS system.
Underneath this light is a GPWS test system which tests the automated voices that sound
in the cockpit during various different phases of flight. To hear what happens when I
press this button, go to episode 3 where I show the GPWS system’s effects on the PFD.
Finally, these three guarded switches over here allow the pilots to inhibit or turn off
certain alarms in the cockpit relating to the flaps, the landing gear and the terrain system.
These are used when either the aircraft has a problem that the pilots are already aware of
and don’t want a constant alarm to distract them or when they are flying special
approaches into certain airports that have rather weird procedures. For example, if pilots
are flying into a region with high terrain knowing that they must avoid the terrain around
them and have accounted for this, they can simply flip this cover and flick this switch up,
thereby disabling any terrain-related voice commands from disturbing the pilots. Finally,
on the right here are three knobs that allow the first officer to control his/her panel
backlight on their side as well as control the brightness of their inboard and outboard
display units respectively.
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Conclusion
So ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of this Aircrafts Dissected Episode,
covering the miscellaneous switches that lie in front of the pilots on the forward panels. If
you’ve stuck around so far, congratulations, you now have a sound understanding of how
pilots can monitor different engine parameters and various subsystems in flight. Now I
must also mention that all of the documentation and websites I used to research for this
video are linked down below in the description, including a written text version of this
entire video, if you prefer to read those and understand more about this aircraft. That
being said, the next episode in this series will be the start of our full flight portion of this
series, where we will generate a flight plan using an external software called SimBrief
and learn about all the important components within a standard operational flight plan. If
you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to perform a full stop-landing at the like button
and the subscribe button and press the bell icon for future notifications from this channel.
Also, be sure to flyby the comments section and let me know if there’s any questions
you’d like me to answer for you. As usual, thanks for flying by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome to the first video in the full
flight portion of this Aircrafts Dissected series covering the Boeing 737-800. So in the
previous 6 episodes, we took a detailed look at every single button, knob, switch, display,
panel - basically every single nook and cranny of the Boeing 737-800 flight deck, so if
you haven’t watched those videos yet and want to really see how the Boeing 737 works,
then I highly recommend you to check them out. If you have indeed watched those
episodes, then now, we’re going to be bringing all that theoretical knowledge to practice
and conduct a full flight from point A to B, starting with this first episode, where we will
plan a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the United States. We will take a look
at how to find real flights and then use a free software called Simbrief to generate a
proper operational flight plan to be able to fly the route. Finally, as always, here is the list
of things I got wrong or failed to explain in its entirety in the previous episode, so you
can pause the video and take a look at it if you so please. Alright, so without further
adieu, let’s get into the video:)
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FlightAware
Okay, so this is the main
page of FlightAware and
right off the bat, we see
certain open fields here
that you can fill out to
track real world flights.
So for our flight today,
our departure airport is
going to be San Francisco
and our arrival airport is
going to be Los Angeles, so let’s type them in here and see what results we get. Okay, so
as you can see, there are a bunch of real world flights that fly between these two airports.
This shouldn’t really come as a big surprise, as both of these airports are some of the
most popular ones in North America. On the left here, we have a bunch of filters that we
can use to choose between certain airlines, departure and arrival times and most
importantly for us, the aircraft type. As you can see, a bunch of different aircraft types fly
this route every day from the Boeing 737-800 we’re gonna look at all the way to the
Boeing 767-300 or even the Embraer E-jets. So, we’re going to come over to this ‘only’
option next to the Boeing 737-800 and click it and as you can see, the list of aircrafts over
here is reduced substantially. So I feel like flying Delta today, so let’s click on this flight
over here and we’ll be taken to a more comprehensive page for just that flight. Alright so
here we have some important information to take note of as this is the exact flight we’re
going to be replicating in the sim. To start off, at the top, we have the aircraft’s flight
number over here in both ICAO and passenger friendly formats. For those of you who
don’t know, ICAO stands for International Civil Aviation Organization and among other
things, it has assigned every airline as well as every airport and nav aid in the world with
letter codes. So for Delta, the ICAO letter code is DAL or Delta Alpha Lima in the
aviation phonetic alphabet. The same goes for the airports as well. San Francisco is
KSFO or Kilo Sierra Foxtrot Oscar and Los Angeles is KLAX or Kilo Lima Alpha X-ray,
as you can see down here. So here, we have the departure time as well as the arrival time,
which means that we’re going to set up our aircraft around 6:00 in the morning in the
simulator to give us enough time to start-up the aircraft and depart the gate at 6:58am -
that is if you want to do everything by the book. Additionally, we also see the departure
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and arrival gates over here, so we’re going to be parked at Gate D12 at San Francisco and
will be looking to park at gate 25A at LA. Additionally, here we can see the estimated
flight time of the route this aircraft took, so it took Delta 805 1 hour and 14 minutes to go
from its gate at KSFO to park at its gate at KLAX. On the right here, we see some more
information about the exact takeoff time, the landing time as well as the time the aircraft
took to taxi from gate to runway and vice versa. Alright, so that’s pretty much going to be
all the information we need from FlightAware. So now that we have chosen our flight,
let's go into Simbrief and create a fictional operational flight plan to use within the
simulator.
Simbrief
Okay guys, so welcome to the home page of Simbrief, which as mentioned before, is a
free flight planning software for flight simulation. You will need to create an account, but
once you do and you verify it using your email account, you will be brought to this main
screen with these options up top. So since we want to create our flight plan, we’re going
to go to this dispatch tab over here and click on dispatch system. That brings us to his
new page with these 4 options where we’ll go ahead and click on ‘new flight’ as you
probably expected and that brings us to the most important page where we’ll fill in all of
the required information about our flight to allow Simbrief to create an OFP for us. Now
keep in mind that unlike the flight deck familiarization episodes we’ve been doing so far,
I won’t go into extreme depth about each of these options as I want to focus on filing our
flight plan and get on with out flight because after all, this is a 737-800 tutorial video.
That being said, if you do want to see an in-depth tutorial regarding Simbrief, then let me
know in the comments section and I will surely make one for you guys. Anyways, with
the introduction aside, let’s get to filling in this information.
Information Filling
So starting from the left, we’re going to go ahead and enter the airline we’re flying with
today so DAL or Delta and the flight number which is 805. Next up, we’re going to put
the departure airport as KSFO and the arrival airport as KLAX. Next, Simbrief
automatically calculates an alternate airport for us, in this Kilo Oscar November Tango or
Ontario International airport in California. The reason for even having an alternate airport
in the first place is to be able to have a backup airport to divert to if the plane can’t land
at the arrival airport. The reasons for this are vast, ranging from runway closures, ATC
strikes or even bomb threats or terrorist activity preventing aircrafts from landing there.
Having an alternate airport also changes fuel calculations in order to have enough to
divert and land at the backup destination. Beside it we have the current date and time in
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Zulu measurements. Coming underneath, we get to select the aircraft type in this
dropdown menu. As you can see, there are a lot of options ranging from all sorts of airbus
aircraft, Boeing aircraft and even business jets like the TBM and the metroliner. We of
course want to select the Boeing
737-800 which is B738 for short
right over here. As you can see,
that automatically populates all of
these fields for us, including our
climb and descent profile;
highlighting the different speeds at
which we will fly as well as a
fictional aircraft registration
numbers and FIN numbers.
Underneath here, we see some
additional parameters that are
automatically calculated but can
also be manually filled in. We see
the scheduled time on route, the
departure and arrival runway
depending on real world weather
reports as well as weight and
balance related aspects such as
number of passengers and whether
cargo is being loaded on to the
aircraft. I personally leave all of these fields to auto except for switching this cargo field
to auto when I’m flying long haul aircraft, but the 737 with passengers on a 1 hour flight
will almost never carry dedicated cargo, so we can leave it to 0 for now. So finally,
before we move down, let’s come to the right here and configure some more options. We
can leave the OFP layout to LIDO which stands for Lufthansa Integrated Dispatch
Operation and it’s the default layout that the final OFP will be provided to us by
Simbrief. However, if you want to have maximum realism, you can choose between
various airlines here such as British Airways, EasyJet or even Delta, but we’re going to
stick with LIDO for now. Coming underneath, we’re going to switch the units to pounds
instead of kilograms because we’re flying in the US today. Finally, we can leave the
contingency and reserve fuel to auto and the aircraft will automatically calculate these
fields for us and all of these values can be checked on.
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distance. So here I’ve selected the shortest route of 7%, and then all we have to do is go
up to these dispatch options again and click on generate OFP. It’ll ask you for a
confirmation, go ahead and click yes and it’ll start generating a proper flight plan for you.
OFP Summary
Once the OFP has been
created, you will be greeted
with this page showing you a
brief summary of all of the
important information you’re
going to need on your flight.
You obviously have your
aircraft type, your flight
number and the various
important airports during your
flight, but you also have your
cruising altitude, in this case
FL350 or 35000 feet as well as
our block fuel we are going to
be carrying - approximately
14000 pounds on this flight with our Zero Fuel weight and our takeoff weight at the
bottom here. Coming underneath, we also have a visual representation of our flight
through this little map view which shows our route from San Fran to LA while we go
from waypoint to waypoint. Finally, coming underneath, we have our actual operational
flight plan. Now keep in mind that I’ll only be covering the important parts of the flight
plan and not every single aspect. If you want a detailed description of what each and
every part of this flight plan means, you can click on this little option which takes you to
an interactive custom flight plan and you can learn about every bit of an OFP. So what I
like to do personally to be able to look at this OFP better is to go up top and click this
Print/View PDF button which shows the entire OFP in a separate tab. So let’s go over the
important information we’re going to need for our flight.
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CI value, it stands for Cost index. Now in simple terms, the cost index is a number used
in the Flight Management System to optimize the aircraft's speed during cruise. It gives
the ratio between the unit cost of time and the unit cost of fuel. ... A low cost index
means that the cost of time is low or
that fuel is expensive and vice versa.
The value can range all the way from
0-500 on the 737-800 but normally
doesn’t go above 100 though. Coming
underneath, we have our ground
distance and our air distance values,
which means our journey today is going
to be approximately 300 nautical miles.
Coming underneath to this value, we
have our average cruise winds on our
flight which is represented in the
direction/speed format, so in this case,
the winds are coming from 240 degrees
at 32 knots. This can be inputted into
the FMC to allow the aircraft to better
calculate it’s progress and to accurately
determine the aircraft’s time of arrival
at various waypoints. Finally, the last important value here is the Avg ISA, which stands
for International Standard Atmosphere and is used to standardize different aircraft
instruments. Now I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on this, because I’m not, but as
I understand, in principle, it works similar to an altimeter setting which we looked at in
episode 4 of this series. Basically, it uses a thermodynamic equation to come up with an
ideal atmosphere, devoid of water vapor, wind and turbulence and by using a standard
reference for pressure, temperature, density and viscosity at various altitudes throughout
the atmosphere. When we enter this value into our FMC, the aircraft then cross-checks
the value against the ISA and thereby shows the deviation of the aircraft’s predicted
performance compared to if it were flying through a perfect atmosphere. I’ll leave a link
to an article explaining this better in the description section of the episode.
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Fuel
Alright, coming down here, we have
our planned fuel value and
distribution during various phases of
flight, let’s take a look at them one by
one, as they’re pretty easy to
understand considering it’s just an
additional chart. Starting off with the
first row, we have our trip fuel, so to
get from SFO to LAX, we need 6049
pounds of fuel and the time taken for
us to get there will be about an hour
and 3 minutes. Underneath, we have
15 minutes of contingency fuel added
to our flight in case we have any
delays due to ATC vectoring or any
other reasons. Coming underneath,
we have another 2461 pounds of fuel
added to allow us to divert to our alternate airport, which was Ontario international
airport as mentioned before. As you can see, that gives us another 30 minutes of air time.
Finally, Finres means final reserve fuel, which is another 40 minutes of backup fuel
added to the aircraft for any emergencies on the way. Adding all that up, we have our
minimum takeoff fuel, in this case, 13263 pounds giving us an air time of 2:28 minutes.
Note that our predicted airtime to get from San Francisco to LA is just over an hour, but
have an hour and 30 minutes of extra fuel as backup in case anything goes wrong, goes to
show how safe flying really is. Finally, we also have 500 pounds of extra taxi fuel added
to the aircraft, giving us around 20 minutes of taxi time bringing our total block fuel to
13763 pounds that we will be fueling our aircraft with.
Routing
Ok, coming underneath, we have our routing information, highlighting our specific route
we will be taking on our flight today. The route is written in a linear fashion from left to
right, so let’s go from left to right. So obviously, first we have the departure airport, Kilo
Sierra Foxtrot Oscar and the departure runway 28R. Next up we have the SID, which
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stands for Standard Instrument Departure. The premise behind this is that most airports,
especially international ones will have multiple different departure procedures depending
on which runway is active as well as the direction the aircraft is going to go. For
example, Westbound departures will take a different SID then eastbound or eastbound
departures. This is done to safely escort the aircraft out of the airport’s airspace and onto
its route. So in this case, we’re going to be taking the Wesla4 departure and this EBAYE
waypoint is going to be our transition. What this means is that we will follow the
WESLA4 departure until we hit this EBAYE waypoint, after which we get on our route
to actually get to LA. Next up, this DCT means direct, so after EBAYE, we will head
direct to this REYES waypoint here. After Rayes, we will take this Juliet 1 airway and
take that airway to head to FIM or Foxtrot India Mike, which will act as our arrival
transition to Los Angeles. Just like EBAYE, this transition will pluck us out of our route
and put us into an arrival procedure to land at Runway 25L at KLAX. This arrival
procedure is called a STAR or Standard terminal arrival, which in this case is going to be
SADDE8 arrival. So a protip to distinguish between waypoints, airways, SIDS and
STARS. SIDS and STARS will normally have a letter code followed by 1 number, like
you see here. Waypoints will always be just letter codes, like these ones, and airways will
always be letters followed by numbers and will normally be between waypoints. The
more routes you fly, the more comfortable you’ll get. Now if you don’t know what
waypoints or airways are and are confused about SIDS and STARS, go check out episode
4 of this series, where I explain the waypoint and airway system using a train track
analogy. As for the SIDS and STARS, you’ll understand how they work when we do the
FMC programming video so don’t worry too much about them at the moment.
Weights
Okay, so coming further down, we have
the weights section of the flightplan,
where we have the weight and balance
parameters for the flight. Starting from
the top, we have the number of
passengers, so 167 in this case. Next up,
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we have 0 pounds of cargo, as we had specified before. Next up, this payload section is
extremely important, as it represents the sum of the total passenger weight, luggage
weight, flight crew as well as other non-fuel related weight metrics. Coming underneath,
we have the Zero-Fuel Weight, which as you probably guessed is the weight of the
aircraft without the fuel. Underneath, we have our fuel weight, approximately 14000
pounds in this case. Underneath, we have the total takeoff weight, again pretty self
explanatory and finally the landing weight at the very bottom which shows our landing
weight at LAX assuming regular fuel burn and also assuming you didn’t just throw
people off the flight during cruise.
Flight Log
Finally, we’re going to take a brief look at this flight log, which shows important
information about every single waypoint on our route. So, let’s start from the top and take
a look at some of these indications. On the left, we have the name of the waypoint, and if
it is part of a SID or STAR, then that’s also mentioned on top. Moving further right, we
have the exact coordinates of the waypoint in latitude and longitude. Moving further
right, this represents the aircraft's altitude at that specific waypoint, so in the case of this
WESLA waypoint, we’re going to be at 8100 feet when we intercept it. This value over
here represents the distance between waypoints, so the distance between WESLA and
PORTE is 6 nautical miles and the distance between PORTE and SUSEY is 10 nautical
miles and so on. Coming further right, this number represents the remaining distance
from that waypoint to the destination and as you can see, the number decreases as we
cover travel along our route. Over here, we have our ground speed at the waypoint and
moving further
right, we have the
winds at the
waypoint. Coming
over here, we have
the estimated
outside air
temperature at each
waypoint assuming
we maintain the
vertical profile
specified on the
route, and finally,
over here is the
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estimated fuel on board at that waypoint. Pilots will often cross check this number with
the actual EFOB in the aircraft to make sure that the aircraft is flying according to plan.
Finally, the last two things I want to explain to you guys here are these TOC and TOD
indications, which stand for Top of Climb and top of descent. The Top of climb is the
point in the route where the aircraft finally reaches its cruising altitude, in this case Flight
level 350. As you can see, all previous waypoint altitudes are increasing up until TOC,
where the altitude finally states FL350. The aircraft then cruises at this altitude until
hitting it’s Top of descent point, which is the start of the aircraft’s descent to its arrival
airport. Hence, all waypoint altitudes are decreasing after the TOD point. Pilots
specifically input the particular winds and the ISA deviation at the Top of climb point
into the FMC before flight in order to assist the aircraft in accurately planning for fuel
burn, speed and other such factors. So, that’s that for all the important aspects of the
flight plan we’re going to need, to perform our flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
The rest of the flight plan is not so important in the flightsim world, as it includes
fictitious information such as NOTAMs or notice to airmen, which includes warnings
regarding construction projects near the airports to watch out for and cranes and other
obstacles during arrival and departure and so on - all of which are not important in a
simulator. Additionally, the flight plan may also contain information regarding runway
closures, noise abatement procedures and so on - again not important in the sim world, so
you don’t need to worry about any of that for our 737 flight.
Conclusion
So ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of this Aircrafts Dissected Episode,
covering both FlightAware and Simbrief to plan our flight from San Fran to LA. If
you’ve stuck around so far, congratulations, you now have a sound understanding of how
to look up real world flights and plan for one using Simbrief. Additionally, you have also
learnt how to interpret a LIDO layout of flight plan, within which, we learnt about
various fuel calculations, wind information, cost index and ISA deviation. Now I must
also mention that all of the documentation and websites I used to research for this video
are linked down below in the description, including a written text version of this entire
video, if you prefer to read those and understand more about this aircraft. That being said,
the next episode in this series will have us do an electrical power up procedure with the
Zibo 737, where we’ll start the aircraft from a cold and dark state and eventually prep it
for takeoff. If you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to perform a full stop-landing at the
like button and the subscribe button and press the bell icon for future notifications from
this channel. Also, be sure to flyby the comments section and let me know if there’s any
questions you’d like me to answer for you. As usual, thanks for flying by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome to the second video in the
full flight portion of this Aircrafts Dissected series, where we delve into every single
switch, knob and display in the flight deck of the Zibo mod Boeing 737-800. In the
previous episode, we took a look at FlightAware and SimBrief, which are two fantastic
flight tracking and virtual flight planning softwares available online, where we planned a
real flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles. So, in this episode, we’re going to be
taking all of the theoretical knowledge we have learnt in the previous 7 episodes,
covering every single nook and cranny of the Boeing 737-800 flight deck and apply it in
practice through the initial electrical power up procedure as well as the preliminary
preflight procedure. Hence, though not a prerequisite, it would be extremely
advantageous for you guys to first watch the previous 7 episodes in order to get a detailed
understanding of each and every system, if you’re really looking to learn everything
about this aircraft. That being said, if you just want to click a few buttons and get
yourself in the air, this is the video for you! Additionally, we will also be taking a
detailed look at the EFB in the flight deck to be able to configure the aircraft’s settings in
the simulator properly before starting our flight from cold and dark. This includes setting
the right units for weight and balance, configuring nose-wheel steering as well as some
visual eye-candy. For the actual procedures, I will be using a detailed 737-800 checklist
made by kennair which is available online for free. I’ll leave a link to this checklist down
in the description below but appropriate elements of the checklist will also be visible on
screen while we go from system to system for better understanding. Finally, the last thing
I would like to say is that I’m going to try my hand at live commentating in the next few
episodes. I did try to script the entire flight, but it just didn’t feel organic, and I think I’ve
done a decent job explaining all of the systems in the aircraft and when we actually do a
flight, it’s imperative that you experience the simulator with me as against experiencing it
as a fragment of intense post-processing and editing. I will do my best to be as concise as
possible, thereby maintaining professionalism, but it would be great if you could cut me
some slack in these first few videos as I learn the tools of the trade. Anyways, that’s
enough chitter chatter about what we’re going to do, let’s jump into the simulator and see
how we actually do it.
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EFB Settings
Alright people, welcome to the flight deck of the Boeing 737-800 and as you can see, the
aircraft is completely cold and dark, meaning that no instruments, panels or lights are
currently running. So, as mentioned previously, before getting into any procedures, we’re
going to configure some aircraft settings in this EFB over here. As you can see, there are
several immersion options for us here to play around with, but we’re going to get to that
later on during the flight. First, we’re going to move our mouse cursor to the right of the
EFB and as you can see it changes to this right pointing arrow, implying that there is
another page we can look at. So, click it and that brings us to page 2 of the EFB, where
we have the main settings window here which says “configure and customize”. Clicking
this option brings us to a whole host of different aircraft parameters and settings we can
adjust. Now I’ll only be walking you guys through the actual changes that I have made
deliberately, as the rest of the settings are left default. I will however show each settings
page briefly for you guys to pause the video and copy any settings that might not be
default in future versions of Zibo mod. So, starting from the top left as usual, we have
this display and variants tab, which adjusts some external as well as internal features
within the aircraft. All of the pages you’re seeing right now are left completely default, so
no changes here. Let’s press this back button here to go back to the main settings page
and let’s look at the hardware configuration. Here, this is the only setting I have changed
and I highly recommend you to do so as well unless you have a proper home cockpit with
a dedicated nose-wheel tiller. What this setting essentially does is that it maps your nose
wheel-tiller to a particular axis on your joystick- in my case, it’s my rudder pedals. So
I’m essentially able to operate the nosewheel of the aircraft while taxiing using my rudder
pedals. Next up, we have this realism tab, where we have these first two options that you
can adjust based on your convenience. These essentially change the IRS alignment time
and the aircraft fueling time. I normally keep these to short as I simply start up the
aircraft and am ready to go within 20 minutes. However, since we’re doing an
instructional video today, I have kept the times to real, meaning that the IRS systems will
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take about 6-7 minutes to align and the aircraft itself will take about 15-20 minutes to get
properly fueled up. Coming back, let’s head into the visual effects tab, where I have
changed this windshield effects setting to SKI mode, which provides amazing rain effects
on the windshield as well as passenger windows but is also heavy on FPS. So if you have
a low to mid tier system, I suggest playing around with either the ‘on’ or ‘XE’ settings.
Additionally, if you’re fishing for a few more fps, then you can also turn off the
windshield and gauges reflection here. I leave it on as my system can handle it. Finally,
let’s go back and head into this general tab, where we’re going to keep the global units to
pounds and the Baro units to inches of mercury, as we’re flying in the US today.
Everything else is left to default settings. Coming down, we also want to set the Engine
no run state to sCold and dark instead of turn around. I think it automatically defaults to
cold and dark, but if it doesn’t, you can always come here and change that setting.
Finally, these three settings have been untouched and have been left at default values, so
you have nothing to change there. Once we’ve finished configuring all of these settings,
go to the first page of the EFB by moving your cursor to the left side, go into save and
load configs and click on quick save all configs. This basically saves all of the changes
we just made in the settings tab. To get these changes to take effect, simply go up to the
menu bar, click on developer and click on reload the current aircraft and art. Your
simulator will then load up the aircraft with all of the changes we just selected.
Ground Services
Alright ladies and gentleman, now that we’ve configured some changes within this EFB,
let’s connect some ground equipment to the aircraft and get started with the electrical
power up procedure. So, what we want to do is to come down to this Ground services tab,
and on the top left, connect the GPU as well as the chocks. The GPU, as you might
remember from previous episodes stands for Ground power unit and is responsible for
providing power to the aircraft while the aircraft is on the ground and doesn’t have the
APU or the engines running. As you can see, you can see the GPU from the first officer’s
window and it’s connected to the aircraft via a wire to constantly provide electrical power
while we plan for our flight and are ready to start-up the APU. The chocks on the other
hand are similar to car wheel stoppers and are rubberized objects that are placed in front
of and behind the aircraft’s landing gear to prevent it from sliding all over the place when
parked at the terminal. So, now that we have both of those connected, let’s get started
with the electrical power-up procedure, where we’ll be using the Boeing 737-800
Procedure Checklist supplied by Kennair as mentioned before. A link to the procedure
checklist may be found in the description and you may follow along with me as we
explore the various panels. So let’s get started!
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position like so. And as you can see and probably hear, some external cooling fans have
now come on and some of the warning lights on the overhead panel have also
extinguished. We now have constant electrical power from the GPU and we’ll use it to be
able to plan for our flight before starting the APU just prior to engine start.
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“align” light on the left. Once that’s done, you move the second IRS mode selector to the
nav position as well. So just as a side note, since we set the IRS align time to real earlier
on during the video, they will take about 7 minutes to align. To see the exact progress of
their alignment, simply go up to this IRS display selector knob and switch the back knob
to the heading/status mode. So, as you can see, it’s going to take 6 to 7 minutes for both
the IRS units to align. Alright, once that’s done, the next item on the list is to turn the
voice recorder switch on. Again, this panel is not simulated in the Zibo mod 737 so
nothing you can do here. Coming back to the aft overhead panel, we make sure that the
PSEU or proximity switch electronic unit light is extinguished as well as the GPS light on
the IRS panel is also extinguished. If either of these lights were illuminated by any
chance, we’d have to call maintenance to fix the problems, as they’re both critical
systems. Moving right, we ensure that the service interphone system is set to the off
position and the engine panel is also set. What this means is that the EEC or engine
electronic control switches underneath the covers are set to the on mode instead of the
alternate mode and that the engine reversers and the engine control lights are both
extinguished. Coming further below, we need to ensure that the oxygen panel is set,
meaning that the crew oxygen supply pressure is between 1000 to 1500 psi and that the
passenger oxygen mask cover is guarded. Additionally, also ensure that the passenger
Oxygen on light isn’t illuminated as that would signify that the oxygen masks for the
passengers in the back have been deployed. While we’re here, also make sure that the
secondary landing gear light on the aft overhead panel shows all green, thereby again
signifying that the wheels of the aircraft are in the downed and locked position. Finally,
we want to come to the right here and make sure that the flight recorder switch is guarded
and that the off light next to it is indeed illuminated. Finally, the last item on this
procedure demands us to come back down next to the throttle quadrant and verify that the
parking brake is set. So make sure that the lever itself is in its pulled back position and
the big red cherry light next to it is illuminated. And that’s the end of the preliminary
preflight procedure.
Conclusion
So ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of this aircrafts dissected episode,
covering the electric power up as well as the preliminary preflight procedures. If you’ve
made it this far into this rather short video to be honest, congratulations, you now have a
sound understanding of how to start-up a Boeing 737-800 from a cold and dark state and
provide it with an electrical power source to be able to plan for a flight on the ground.
Additionally, you also know how to get the IRS systems ready for alignment and to take
various precautionary measures to start the APU within the aircraft. That being said, the
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next episode in this series will focus on programming the FMC or flight management
computer within the control display unit. In stark contrast to this episode, the next one is
going to be relatively long, as there are several things to explain such as navigation,
performance and other such important flight-related features. However, the rest of the
videos in the series will be coming out much faster than they have been up till this point,
as I only need to record one flight and the various aspects of it that need explaining. Now
I must also mention that all of the documentation and websites I used to research for this
video are linked down below in the description, including a written text version of this
entire video, if you prefer to read those and understand more about this aircraft. If you
guys enjoyed this video, make sure to perform a full stop-landing at the like button and
the subscribe button and press the bell icon for future notifications from this channel.
Also, be sure to flyby the comments section and let me know if there’s any questions
you’d like me to answer for you. As usual, thanks for flying by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome to the third episode in the
full flight portion of this Aircrafts Dissected series, where we delve into every single
switch, knob and display in the flight deck of the Zibo mod Boeing 737-800. In the
previous episode, we took a look at the electrical power-up procedure as well as the
preliminary preflight procedure, where we established electrical power to the aircraft and
prepared the IRS systems for alignment. In this episode, we’re going to be taking a look
at the Control Display Unit located in front of the pilots to program the flight
management computers in the flight. We will be taking a detailed look at how to program
a route, configure takeoff and climb performance and program our departure out of San
Francisco and our arrival into Los Angeles. Now one final note- unfortunately, the
kennair procedure checklist we used in the previous episode doesn’t have detailed
procedures for how to go about programming the FMC. Hence, I decided to go ahead and
create my own checklist. I’m pretty sure I will be uploading it to the X-plane.org forums
but nevertheless, that checklist will be linked down in the description for you guys to
follow along with me. So without further adieu, let’s jump into the flight deck.
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we’ll also come down to this central pedestal and switch the backlighting on, which is
especially useful right now as it also lights up the CDU buttons.
Configuring Payload and Fuel
Alright ladies and gentlemen, next up, we’re going to start programming the flight
management computers for our flight from San Francisco to LA. However, before
jumping back into the CDU, let’s configure the payload and the fuel for our flight. The
way to do this is again through this EFB we looked at in the previous episode. So let’s go
into the fuel, weight and balance tab and head into the payloads section. So, click on this
payload indication and you’ll be brought to this main payload adjustment page. Now if
you want, you can go ahead and enter individual values for each zone of the aircraft,
however, we’re just going to enter our total payload weight using the information from
our operational flight plan. So, under the weights section, we see that our total payload
for this flight was 38400 pounds, so let’s go ahead and enter that in. Next up, let’s go
back to the main page and select payload again. This time however, we’re going to click
on the fuel indication and dial in our total block fuel which was under the planned fuel
section of the OFP. So we’re going to go ahead and enter 13763 pounds like so. Finally,
let’s go back to the main page one more time and we’re going to select this fuel truck call
option which will bring up the fuel truck and start fueling up the aircraft. You can see this
on the outside like so as well as see the fuel value slowly going up on the bottom right of
the upper display unit.
CDU Introduction
Alright, so welcome to the central display unit or the CDU located right next to the lower
display unit we looked at in episode 6 of this series. Now I understand that a lot of people
get very confused with the complex numbers and figures we need to dial into this system,
however, it’s actually pretty easy, considering we obtained most of these numbers from
our operational flight plan in episode 7 and also because the CDU is almost like an old
Nokia flip-phone. So obviously, we have the main display in the middle and on either
side, we have 6 buttons which allow us to key in important information into various fields
located alongside each of these buttons. You’ll see what I mean in a second. Underneath
the display, at the top, we have a series of shortcut buttons that will take us to important
flight information pages on the CDU, such as the route page, the climb and cruise page,
the descent page and so on. In this video, while performing a standard point to point
flight between two large international airports, we are only going to be using these 9
buttons. On the left here, we also have a numpad, again, like one of those nokia flip
phones and we also have a plus or minus symbol to enter runway slopes or temperature
values. On the right of this keypad, we have all the letters of the english alphabet as well
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as these space, delete, backslash and clear keys at the bottom. Also, at the top of this
keypad, we have this execute button, which we will be taking a look at in a second.
Finally, beside the execute button, we have this display brightness knob, which allows
pilots to adjust the brightness of the CDU.
ACARS
Alright, so with the introduction to this CDU aside, let’s get to . So, as you can see,
currently, the display gives us the option of either jumping into the FMC or flight
management computer and start programming our flight or go into this ACARS page. For
those of you who don’t know, ACARS stands for Aircraft Communications Addressing
and Reporting System and is a digital data-link system for transmission of short messages
between aircraft and ground stations via airband radio or satellite. In the Zibo mod, we’re
going to use this ACARS system to obtain the current weather information at our local
airport, AKA San Francisco. So in order to head into this ACARS page, simply press the
button adjacent to this ACARS text on this display. As you can see, we are now in the
ACARS menu. So we have a couple of things we can see here. At the top, we have the
title of this menu, which is ACARS menu and the number of pages within this menu, so
there’s only 1 in this case, and we’re on page 1. On the top left we see this ATIS request
option. Now for those of you who don’t know, ATIS stands for Automatic Terminal
Information Service which is a constant automated voice that is broadcasted on a specific
ATC frequency which contains important information such as the current weather
conditions, active departure and arrival procedures as well as cautionary messages such
as the presence of birds near the vicinity of the aircraft and so on. So since we need the
weather conditions for this airport, we’re going to go ahead and click this button right
next to this ATIS request indication. As you can see, that brings us to this ATIS request
menu. As you can see on the right, we have this airport message along with these blank
boxes below which always signify that you can type something within them. So let’s put
the ICAO code of the airport we need weather information about, so KSFO and as you
can see, it copies that message on to this scratchpad down here. Now all you need to do is
to go and click on the button adjacent to the airport indication and it populates that field
with KSFO. Note that this is how we’re going to be filling in all of the information in the
various fields today. Next up, we’re going to go ahead and click on this send button down
here to send our request to get weather information at San Francisco. It’s going to take a
second to get the required info and an ATIS indication will pop up. So line select that and
there’s the ATIS information for KSFO. Don’t worry if it looks a bit complicated as
we’re only going to need this bit of the ATIS information. So reading it from the left, we
see the current time in Zulu time. Below that from left to right, we see the ICAO code of
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the airport, the local wind at the airport, in this case 310 degrees at 15 knots and on the
right of the winds, we see the visibility, in this case, 10 statute miles - meaning its a
beautiful day to fly. Coming to the second line, from the left, we see the cloud status, in
this case few clouds at around 900 feet, the temperature, the dew point as well as our
altimeter setting, in this case 29.90 inches of mercury. And that’s all we need from the
ATIS broadcast under the ACARS tab. So simply press this menu button and you will be
brought back to the main menu to select between the FMC and ACARS pages again.
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GPS calculated coordinates for our aircraft from the left and right GPS systems
respectively. So simply go ahead and line select either one, let’s go with the left one for
today and copy it to the scratchpad below. Then we’re simply going to head back to the
previous page and line select the Set IRS position indication and voila, it fits like a glove.
Additionally, if we pan up above, we’ll see that the PFD and the ND have also come
alive thereby confirming that the IRS alignment has been performed successfully.
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as you can see, the runway field here has been populated with 28R. So to enter our full
route, we’re going to go to the second page of this route menu, where we have these via
and to indications. So the basic rule of thumb here is to enter the airways under the ‘via’
tab and waypoints under the ‘to’ tab. So after EBAYE, we’re going to head directly to
REYES, as there is no intermediary airway. When you have no airways, simply type the
name of the waypoint and enter it directly under the ‘to’ category. As you can see, the
CDU automatically understands that it’s a direct routing. Next up, after REYES, we’re
going to join the J1 airway, so let’s enter that under the VIA section and we’re going to
take that all the way to FIM or foxtrot India Mike. So that’s the end of our route and the
start of our arrival procedure into Los Angeles. So next up, we’re going to go back to the
departure and arrival page but this time, we’re going to enter our arrival information into
Los Angeles so go ahead and line select arrivals into los angeles. Once again, we’re
brought to a page similar to the departures page but instead of SIDS, we now have
STARS or standard terminal arrivals on the left. So according to our flight plan, our
predicted arrival runway is going to be 25L, so let’s select that on the right and our STAR
is going to be the SADDE8 arrival which we can also go ahead and select. Finally, our
arrival transition is going to be FIM, so let’s also go ahead and select that over here.
Finally, with the entire route selected, including the departure and arrival procedures,
pilots would normally confer with one another and make sure that the information
entered is correct. We then press this activate button, which as you can see, illuminates
this light above the execute button. So simply press this execute button and the route has
been saved into the FMS.
Performance Initialization
So that’s that for the navigational aspect of the FMC. Next up, we’re going to be
configuring the aircraft’s performance characteristics, which involves calculating takeoff
thrust, programming the cost index and so on. So the first page we’re going to look at is
the perf init page, which as you can see at the bottom is the next page the CDU is
directing us to. So let’s click it and we're brought to the performance initialization page.
Much like the position initialization page, we’re going to enter some vital information
here to allow the aircraft to get an idea of how it’s going to fly today. Starting from the
top left, we have the gross weight and the cruise center of gravity calculation. This is
pretty easy to do in the Zibo mod, as we already entered our fuel and payload, so simply
line selecting this indication will fill in the gross weight automatically. Additionally, it
will also fill in this Zero Fuel Weight indication at the bottom. Now there is no mention
of gross weight in our OFP, but we can check to make sure that the Zero fuel weight is
within the specific boundaries in our flight plan. As we can see, the zero fuel weight
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given by the FMC is 133.4 and the flightplan estimates it to be between 130.3 and 138.3,
so as long as we’re in that range, the calculations hold up. Underneath the gross weight
indication, we have our planned and total trip fuel. As you can see, the total fuel is
already filled in as 13.8 but we can also enter the planned fuel to get from San Fran to LA
to allow the aircraft to understand how much extra fuel we have on board. So we can
revisit the OFP and enter this trip fuel value as a decimal number, in this case 6.0.
Coming down, we have our reserve fuel value, which again we can find in the fuel tab as
the FINRES value, so in our case, we’re carrying 3315 pounds of reserve fuel which can
be typed in as 3.3 like so. Underneath, we have the cost index value. Again, referring
back to the flight plan, we see that our cost index was 31, so simply come down here and
type 31 into this field. I must also mention at this point that if you don’t know what
FIBRES is or cost index is, go check out episode 7 of this series, where I explain how to
read an operational flight plan in detail. So, coming to the top right of this menu, we’re
primarily going to be referring back to the flight log portion of the flight plan, starting
with the cruising altitude. On the left here, we see that the aircraft tells us that the optimal
cruising altitude for our flight based on our specified parameters should be FL375.
However, as seen on our flight plan, our cruising altitude is FL350 so we’re just going to
come down here and enter 350 or 35000 feet or FL350 - any format will work. As soon
as we enter that value in, we get a few more options and the execute light comes on. So
first thing we’re going to enter are the cruise winds, which as we can see are found over
here. So the winds are coming from a direction of 240 degrees and are at a speed of 48
knots. Finally, underneath the cruise winds, we can go ahead and enter the ISA deviation
which as you can see, is plus 10 on the flight plan. So simply go ahead and enter 10. Note
that if the ISA deviation value were negative, we would have to click this button down
here to switch to a negative symbol and then enter the chosen value. Finally, we’re going
to make sure that the transition altitude entered here is also correct. You can verify this
using airport charts, and as you can see, 18000 feet is indeed correct. So once all the
values on this page have been entered, verify that they are all correct and when you’re
happy, go ahead and push the execute button like we did for the route.
N1 Limit
So next up, let’s head into this N1 limit page, where we will be configuring our total
takeoff and climb performance. So, before we get started, I think it’s important to give
you guys a premise behind why configuring thrust performance is so important. As you
guys know, in real life, airlines pay a lot of money to be able to maintain their fleet of
aircraft and a large proportion of that money goes towards making sure that the engines
are operating at specified safety standards. Although the engines are rated to be used for
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upwards of a decade or more, there are ways to increase their lifespan and one such way
is to reduce the thrust produced by them during takeoff and climb. Large international
airports such as San Fran or LA have long runways and departure procedures, so aircraft
don’t need to go max throttle and take off as quickly as possible. Instead, they can use a
bit more of the runway in exchange for saving wear and tear on the engines. So, on the
N1 limit page, we’re going to limit the thrust for takeoff and there are 2 main methods of
doing this and this process is called “derating”. Method number 1 is to use a fixed derate.
So as we saw on the ident page, the CFM56 engines installed in this aircraft can provide a
maximum thrust of 26000 pounds, which gives us an N1 value of 98.7%. However,
underneath the 26K setting, the aircraft has two other presets providing 24000 and 22000
pounds of thrust, which have an N1 value of 94.5% and 92.3%. Now in the sim, you can
simply select one of these fixed derates to reduce takeoff thrust but in real life, pilots will
normally also use something called an assumed temperature which is another value that
the pilots will provide the FMC with to be able to properly provide the right thrust for
takeoff. Now I don’t want to go into too much detail about how to calculate this assumed
temperature value, but I’ll leave a link to a website down below that will explain what it
is and how it’s calculated. In the sim, I actually use a tool called apsoft, which is a free
plugin available on the X-plane.org forums that does takeoff and landing calculations for
you. So as you can see, upon entering the ICAO code of the departure airport, some
weather information and the predicted takeoff weight, the software spits out values for us.
So, according to this software, our assumed temperature value is going to be 39 degrees
celsius and our fixed derate to go along with that will be the lowest 22K derate. So, let’s
go ahead and start inputting the required information into the N1 limit page. So our
assumed temperature goes on top here, so let’s enter 39 here. Additionally, also verify
that the OAT or outside air temperature reading after the backslash is correct here. After
that, we’re going to come down to select the 22K derate for takeoff. As for the right side,
make sure that the N1 value is set, so for us it's going to be 90.1%. Now note that the
discrepancy between this N1 value and the one we see here is due to the fact that the
passengers, payload and cargo configuration of the Zibo is a tab bit different to the one
used in Apsoft software’s rendition of the 737-800. Just go for the one that Zibo gives
you, as that’s always more reliable. We’re also going to make sure that the N1 bugs are
set on the upper display unit, which they are, so that confirms that we’ll be spinning the
engines at approximately 90% of their capacity during the takeoff sequence. This climb
derate is similar to the takeoff derate and basically adjusts our rate of climb from the
departure airport. There isn’t really too much of a need to mess with this setting, so you
can leave the climb derate to the first, top-most setting over here. And that’s that for the
N1 limit page.
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Takeoff Page
Alright ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the final performance page on the FMC,
which is the takeoff page. Here, we’re going to set a few pretty self-explanatory
parameters regarding the takeoff in particular. Referring back to the Apsoft tool, our
recommended takeoff flaps settings is flap 5, so let's go ahead and enter that in here.
Coming underneath, let’s again verify that the takeoff derate and N1 are set, so 90.1% N1
is checked and the derate is 22K. Coming underneath, we have this CG indication which
stands for center of gravity. Now I’m pretty sure that the pilots in real life actually
calculate this value, but the Zibo mod just gives it to you if you line select it, so simply
go ahead and press this button, and we get both our CG and our stabilizer trim values
which we will set later on in the preflight procedure. Next up, on the right of this page,
we have our V speeds. Now as promised in previous episodes, I’ll provide you guys with
a brief understanding of what the three important V speeds are. In essence V speeds are
standard terms used to define airspeeds that are important or useful to the operation of all
aircraft. So in the case of the Boeing 737-800, we have three main ones. V1 is takeoff
abort speed. This means that any time before reaching V1 while moving on the runway,
the pilots can abort the landing safely and apply maximum brakes to come to a stop
without overrunning the runway threshold. The pilot flying would normally keep one
hand on the control column or yoke while keeping the other on the throttles until reaching
V1. After the pilot monitoring calls V1, the pilot flying will take his hands off the thrust
levers and place both hands on the yoke to be able to pull the control column back for
takeoff. That brings us to VR, which is the V rotate speed. When the pilot monitoring
calls rotate, the pilot flying will gently pull the yoke back and apply positive pressure on
the yoke to raise the nosewheel of the aircraft and take off. Finally, V2 is just a reference
indication and isn’t normally called out by anyone in the flight deck. Essentially, V2 is
the single engine safe climb speed. So if an engine experiences a failure after crossing
V2, the plane can continue its climb safely and vice versa. So calculating these V speeds
in the Zibo mod is pretty simple, but we’re going to give the aircraft a little bit more
information to give us the most accurate values. So let’s head over to page two of the
takeoff reference page and here, we’re going to enter the runway winds, which is 315 at
15 knots which we got from the ACARS data in the beginning of the video. Next up,
we’re going to come down here and enter the runway heading, which can be again found
on airport charts, so as you can see, the runway heading for 28R is 284 degrees. So we’re
going to come down here and input a backslash and then the runway heading, as that is
the format we see here. Now unfortunately, the Zibo 737-800 doesn’t allow us to input
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the runway slope, or we would have done that too. Finally, on this page we’re going to
select the runway condition. So we have the option to choose between dry, wet and skid
resistant runways. We’re just going to keep it to dry for now. Finally, we’re going to
come back to the first takeoff reference page and line select the V speeds. And there we
go, we have our V1, VR and V2 speeds calculated for us. Finally, on this page, we can
also make sure that the predicted takeoff weight is within the boundaries of our flight
plan like we did for our zero fuel weight calculation and as you can see, it’s well within
the specified range. So that’s that for the takeoff page and by extension, also the end of
the CDU preflight procedure.
Conclusion
So ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of this Aircrafts Dissected Episode, the
CDU preflight procedure. If you’ve stuck around so far, congratulations, you now have a
sound understanding of how to fully program the flight management computers within
the aircraft and get them ready for flight from both a navigational and performance
perspective. Now I must also mention that all of the documentation and websites I used to
research for this video are linked down below in the description, including a written text
version of this entire video, if you prefer to read those and understand more about this
aircraft. That being said, the next episode in this series will be the final preflight
procedure, after which, we will start up the engines and get ready for taxi and takeoff. If
you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to perform a full stop-landing at the like button
and the subscribe button and press the bell icon for future notifications from this channel.
Also, be sure to flyby the comments section and let me know if there’s any questions
you’d like me to answer for you. As usual, thanks for flying by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome to the third video in the full
flight portion of this Aircrafts Dissected Series, where we delve into every single switch,
knob and display in the flight deck of the Zibo mod Boeing 737-800. In the previous
episode, we looked at how to program the control display units or CDUs in the flight
deck, where we saw how to input various navigation and performance-related factors into
the Flight management computer and prepare the aircraft for the flight. In this episode,
we’re going to be conducting the preflight procedure, where we use various flows to be
able to check the position of every switch in the flight deck and prepare the aircraft for
engine start, taxi and eventually takeoff. So, without further adieu, let’s jump into the
flight deck.
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below to the displays selector, also make sure that the source is set to the auto position
and the control panel is set to the normal position. So in essence, no need to do anything
on these two panels other than verifying the correct position of the knobs and switches.
Coming further underneath, we have the fuel panel, where, starting from the top, we’re
going to make sure that both the engine and spar valves on either side are dimly lit and
the fuel temperature gauge needle is between -45 degrees celsius and +49 degrees celsius.
Coming underneath, make sure that both the filter bypass lights on either side are
extinguished and that the crossfeed valve open light is also extinguished. Go ahead and
verify that the position of the cross-feed valve switch is also broken, as you see on screen
right now, so as to suggest that the physical crossfeed valve is indeed closed. Finally,
coming underneath, make sure that all of the fuel pumps are in their off position and the
low pressure light above the wing tank pumps are illuminated and the ones on top of the
center tank pumps are not. The reason these lights are not illuminated is because we’re
not carrying any fuel in the center tanks for our flight from San Francisco to LA.
Electrical Panel
Next up, we’re going to go all the way to the top of the next column on the overhead
panel and monitor a few electrical parameters of the flight. So starting off, make sure that
these three lights are extinguished. Coming down to this DC knob over here, switch it to
battery and make sure that the current draw is 0 amps. As for the knob on the right,
switch it to ground power to see the voltage being provided by the GPU for the electrical
tasks on board the aircraft at the moment. Finally, make sure that the cabin utility and In
flight entertainment system switches are both set to on. Coming further below to the
standby power panel, we’re going to make sure that the standby power switch guard is
closed and the corresponding light is not illuminated. We also want to make sure that the
two generator drive disconnect guards are closed and the drive lights above them are
indeed illuminated. Coming below to the bus transfer and electrical source selector panel,
simply make sure that the two gen off bus bus lights are illuminated and that the bus
transfer switch is guarded and closed.
APU (Start-up)
Next up on the procedure checklist, we need to make sure that the overheat fire and
protection panel is set. We won’t be doing this in this episode, as we already covered it
and performed an exhaustive list of fire tests in episode 8 of this series, so go check that
if you haven’t seen it. So next up, we’re going to be starting the all-important APU or
auxiliary power unit within the aircraft to make ourselves self-sustainable and to get
some bleed air within the aircraft to operate the air conditioning systems. So, simply
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come down to this APU switch, flick it to this start position and release it. It should
automatically jump back to the on position and this low pressure light should come on
above. Additionally, you will also see the APU EGT or exhaust gas temperature reading
increasing on this analogue gauge over here. Now starting the APU takes around 2 or 3
minutes, so I’ll see you guys when the APU is up and running.
Middle Column
Alright next up, on this middle column, we’re going to go ahead and flick this emergency
exit light switch guard down, which automatically places the switch in the arm position.
This means that the emergency exit lights will automatically come on in the passenger
cabin in the event of an emergency. Coming underneath, we’re going to switch the
seatbelts sign to the on position. Note that you must only do this after fueling has been
completed in the aircraft. So, since we fueled up our aircraft in the previous episode, we
can go ahead and turn on the seat belts sign so that passengers entering the cabin
immediately know what’s expected of them from a safety standpoint. Finally on this
column, again make sure that the windscreen wipers are set to park mode and aren’t set to
any of the on modes by mistake.
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ahead and flick all 4 of the window heat lights to the on position and note that the green
on lights above them do indeed come on. Coming down to the icing panel, make sure that
none of the lights are illuminated and that both the wing and engine anti-ice switches are
turned to the off position. Finally, coming down to the hydraulic panel, make sure that the
low pressure lights above all the switches are illuminated and that the engine hydraulic
pumps are turned on and the electrical hydraulic pumps are turned off. Additionally, also
make sure that the low pressure lights above all the switches are indeed illuminated but
the overheat lights above the electrical hydraulic switches are extinguished, which they
are in this case. Alright, with that done, we’re going to skip the cockpit voice recorder
and the pressure monitoring panel underneath and move straight to the final column on
the right of the forward overhead panel.
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the pressurization valve switch is in the middle position and the system itself is switched
to the auto position.
Lights and Engine Master
Coming down to the external lights and engine master strip, from left to right, make sure
that all landing lights are off and the runway turnoff and taxi lights are off as well. In the
middle, make sure that both the engine start switches are set to the middle auto position
and that the engine igniter switch is either set to left or right. Make sure it’s not in both
position by any chance. Coming to the right, if you’re flying at night or during poor
visibility conditions, make sure to turn on the logo light. Moving right, make sure that the
position light is in the steady position, as we set it at the start of the previous episode.
Finally, make sure that the anti-collision light, the wing light and the wheel-well lights
are all off.
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Central Pedestal
Alright so the last set of tasks for the first officer in the preflight procedure require for us
to come back to this central pedestal we looked at in episode 2 of this series. So, to start
off, we’re going to go ahead and press this test button on the cargo fire panel to make
sure that the appropriate lights and alarms are working as intended like so. Next up, we’re
going to make sure that the radio tuning panel is set. So if you’re flying with ATC, you
would make sure that you have the appropriate ground or tower frequency dialed into the
standby radios over here. However, since we’re not flying with any ATC, we’re only
going to be configuring the nav radios over here. So we’re going to enter the ILS
frequency for runway 28R at San Francisco into these displays, which as you can see is
111.7. The reason for this is again for redundancy in case we have some sort of
emergency right after takeoff that requires us to perform a traffic pattern around the
airport and return back to the runway. Finally, we’re going to come down to this
transponder panel and make sure that the squawk code is entered as required and the
appropriate TCAS system is also set. For now, we’re going to leave the squawk code to
2000 and the TCAS system to standby.
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reverse thrust levers behind the main thrust levers are all the way down and are
disengaged and speaking of the main thrust levers, make sure they are also pulled all the
way back to the idle position and that they are closed. Finally on this throttle quadrant,
make sure that the flap lever is set to 0 degrees and check to make sure that the analogue
gauge on the forward panel agrees with that flap position, which it does in this case as it
reads ‘up’. Once that’s all done, we’re going to come back behind the throttle quadrant
and check a couple of things, starting with the parking brake, so make sure that is set.
Next up, make sure that both the engine start levers are in their appropriate cutoff
position. Finally, make sure that both the stabilizer trim cutout switches are set to the
normal position and the metal guards in front of them are indeed in place to prevent them
from accidentally moving to the cutout position. And that’s that for the captain’s preflight
procedure.
Conclusion
So ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of this aircrafts dissected episode,
covering both the captain’s and the first officer’s preflight procedures. If you’ve made it
this far, congratulations, you now have a sound understanding of how to appropriately
flows in the 737-800 flight deck to monitor the various correct positions of knobs and
switches on the forward overhead panels. Additionally, you also know how to perform
various tests across the flight deck and prepare the aircraft for engine start. That being
said, the next episode in this series will finally have us pushback from the gate and start
the engines to get ready for taxi. Now I must also mention that all of the documentation
and websites I used to research for this video are linked down below in the description,
including a written text version of this entire video, if you prefer to read those and
understand more about this aircraft. If you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to perform
a full stop-landing at the like button and the subscribe button and press the bell icon for
future notifications from this channel. Also, be sure to flyby the comments section and let
me know if there’s any questions you’d like me to answer for you. As usual, thanks for
flying by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome back to another episode in
my Aircrafts Dissected Series, where we delve into every single switch, knob and display
in the flight deck of the Zibo mod Boeing 737-800. So, in the previous video, we took a
look at the preflight procedure for both the captain as well as the first officer. In this
video, we’re going to be taking a look at the engine start procedure and then eventually
also push-back from the gate to get ready for taxi and takeoff. Lastly, I would also like to
address a few other points that aren’t exactly related to this episode, but are indeed
related to this series as well as the direction this channel will take in the near future. So if
you simply wish to get into the meat of the video, skip to this time-stamp on screen here;
if not, keep on watching. So firstly, I want to address my absence for the last week. If
you’re a regular viewer of the series, you might have noticed that I actually haven’t
posted for around 2 weeks now, and I didn’t even inform you, which is inconsistent and
unprofessional on my part, so I just wanted to apologize for that. Next up, for the rest of
the series, the videos will all be coming out much more consistently, so as to compensate
for the lack of videos for the past 2 weeks and also because I will be scripting the entire
rest of the series together in order to record and edit everything in one fell swoop. Finally,
I wanted to also address the arrival of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 on the market and
specifically talk about the direction this channel will take to cater to that content. So, I
would like to clarify that NO, I will not be moving exclusively to MSFS 2020 for all
future content on my channel and there are several other well-developed aircraft and
tutorial-worthy topics available on X-plane 11 that I would like to tackle first. That being
said though, I will be covering some aspects of MSFS 2020, simply because it’s new and
I am as excited as anyone else who’s been an avid simmer for a long time for this new
generation of flight sim to hit the market. So in conclusion, you can expect to see content
on MSFS 2020 on this channel, but I just want to reiterate the non-exclusivity of that
content on FlyBy Simulations. With that all said, let’s leave the formalities aside and
jump into the flight deck and start with the before start procedure on the Zibo 737.
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CDU Revisited
Next up, we have a few more actions to perform within the CDU that we programmed in
episode 9 of this series. Now one thing to note is that in the detailed FMC programming
video I did, I only explained the very important parts of programming the on-board
computers to be ready for flight. This was done in order to not make the entire process
even more overwhelming than it already is by introducing too many new concepts at
once. However, now that you guys have a sound understanding of how to program the
FMC, I would like to introduce you guys to another important page on the CDU known
as the legs page, wherein pilots will find every waypoint on their route and will also see
specific speed constraints, altitude restrictions, headings and distances between
waypoints. In this case, we’re going to be using the legs page to be able to see our entire
planned route on the ND. So, in order to do this, simply go up to the EFIS panel and
switch this ND mode selector knob to plan mode. Also, set the range selector knob to 20
nautical miles to be able to see each waypoint. Next up, what I like to do to make it easier
to follow along the plan is to go down to these display selector knobs and move this
navigation display down from the in-board display unit to the lower display unit, right
next to the CDU. Finally, we then come down to this CDU and click on this legs page
button and voila, as you can see, we see a full list of constraints, headings as well as
distances between all of the waypoints on our route today. So the specific indication we
want to focus on here is this ‘step’ indication, which, when pressed, allows pilots to step
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through their route from waypoint to waypoint and follow that along this pink line on the
ND here. As you can see, each time I press this button adjacent to the ‘step’ indication,
the ND moves a little, so as to show a progression from waypoint to waypoint. We just
want to make sure that we have no abnormal turns or weird routings in the middle of our
route and step through the route. Now once we get to page 3 of the legs page, we come to
the final stages of our arrival procedure into Los Angeles. Here, I want to specifically
focus on this VECTOR indication here. Now note that this is not actually a waypoint but
is instead an indication to the pilots that after this Sierra Mike Oscar or SMO waypoint,
the pilots should expect approach vectors or directions from ATC to guide the aircraft to
the start of the ILS approach in order for the aircraft to capture the localizer and
glideslope and land on runway 25L. More info on what a localizer and glideslope is in
episode 5 of this series. As you can see, this pink vector line essentially travels
indefinitely parallel to the runway. Hence, in our case, since we won’t be travelling with
ATC, we’ll be self-vectoring ourselves. This means that we will deactivate the LNAV
and VNAV modes at this point and make a base leg turn at around this point in order to
hit this HUNDA waypoint at 3600 feet and then turn once again for our final approach to
runway 25L. Alright, so once we’ve taken a look at our entire routing and are satisfied
with it, we’ll go ahead and set the captain’s CDU to the takeoff page by clicking on this
route button and then going over to the takeoff page like so. On the first officer’s CDU,
we’ll set the legs page so now we have the two most important indications for the takeoff
sequence right in front of us. Next up, simply come up to this display selector knob and
move the lower DU knob to the normal position and also set the ND mode selector knob
back to the map view. Additionally, at this point we will also verify that we see the N1
bugs on the upper display units as well as the indicated airspeed bugs on the PFD, which
we can just about see our V-speeds here, so we’re good to go.
MCP
Next up, we’re going to be configuring the MCP or mode control panel for flight. So as
seen on the Kennair checklist, we’ll be setting the V2 speed into the IAS mach display
over here so as to give the aircraft a maximum speed during the takeoff procedure. Then
we’ll come over to both the LNAV and VNAV switches here and arm them. Note that if
the LNAV switch doesn’t arm, that is perfectly normal, as some departure procedures
have very tight turns right after takeoff which require the pilots to put the aircraft on the
right course to intercept the LNAV path before it can be captured, so you should be able
to arm it above 400 feet AGL. In our case though, we have a straight our departure, so we
have armed it successfully. At this point, we will also turn on the autothrottle system,
which will allow us to engage Takeoff and go around thrust during takeoff. Now different
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airlines engage the autothrottle switch at different times, and this is completely dependent
on SOPs or standard operating procedures, but I like to engage it now so we don’t have to
worry about it later on during the taxi. Next up, we’re going to come over to the heading
display and set the runway heading in here which is 284 degrees as we saw in episode 9
of this series, so put that in there and finally, we put the initial altitude in the altitude
display. Now normally, ATC will issue the initial altitude to the aircraft, but since we’re
flying without ATC today, we’ll basically be climbing to the top altitude for our Standard
Instrument Departure procedure: the WESLA4 departure, which happens to be 3000 feet.
I’ll show you where to find this in the Taxi and Takeoff Brief.
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Departure Procedure
Alright, so here we have the WESLA 4 Departure Procedure. So, I’m going to be going
through this pretty quickly, as I only want to cover the most important bits and nothing
more. So, as you can see, we’ll be flying on a runway heading 284° as we depart
northwest towards the pacific. Then we hit Welsa at or above 2000 feet at a maximum
speed of 230 knots. We then take a left turn direct to the PORTE and we continue
climbing slowly to our cruising altitude. After PORTE we head southeast to SUSEY
while flying parallel to the San Francisco Bay Area and following the Pacific Coastline
and we eventually get to EBAYE, which is our departure transition if you remember from
previous episodes. At EBAYE, we expect to already be at our cruising altitude of 35000
feet, after which, we will resume our normal route southwards towards Los Angeles.
Finally, if we come down to this information placard at the bottom right, we see our top
altitude listed here, which is 3000 feet, hence why it was dialed into the altitude display
on the MCP previously in the episode. Alright, with the departure procedure explained,
let’s get back into the flight deck and configure the aircraft for engine-start.
Pushback Procedure
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So ladies and gentlemen, for the pushback procedure, I highly recommend you guys to
install the Better Pushback plugin for free from the X-plane forums. It is regarded as one
of the best plugins for X-plane 11 and also has native support for the Zibo 737-800. Once
downloaded, simply come up to this menu bar on top, hover over plugins, then over
better pushback and select start pushback. As you can see, we have a top-down map of
our aircraft. Now this isn’t a comprehensive tutorial for Better Pushback, but basically,
you can take the aircraft and position it to face outwards from the terminal building like
so and hit enter. As you can see, the tow will slowly drive up to the aircraft and insert a
bypass pin into the nosewheel of the aircraft to lift it up and push us back to the right
position. The theory behind this bypass pin is that it allows the nosewheel’s turn radius to
increase from 78° towards the left or right to upto 95 degrees to either side. This is
especially useful during pushback in order to make tight turns around the apron or
terminal, however, the pin must be removed after pushback has finished to restrict the
nose wheel turn movement to only the forward 78 degree radius. Don’t worry, all of this
will be automatically done by the pushback driver. All you have to do is monitor it.
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basically him visually showing us that he has disconnected the bypass pin. So what
you’re seeing here is the pushback driver showing us that he has indeed taken out the
bypass pin from our nose wheel landing gear. So, now that we’ve verified all that, we are
cleared to start our engines.
Conclusion
Alright ladies and gentlemen, with that, we have successfully started both engines, In the
next episode, we’ll be taking a look at the taxi and takeoff procedure where we will take
this aircraft from here to runway 28R and also takeoff from the runway. I’m going to
keep this conclusion short as I want the transition from this episode to the next to be as
seamless as possible, so if you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to perform a full
stop-landing at the like button and the subscribe button and press the bell icon for future
notifications from this channel. Also, be sure to flyby the comments section and let me
know if there’s any questions you’d like me to answer for you. As usual, thanks for flying
by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome to the sixth episode in the
full flight portion of this Aircrafts Dissected Series, where we delve into every switch,
knob and display in the flight deck of the Zibo mod Boeing 737-800. So, in the previous
episode, we completed the engine start and pushback procedure and in this one, the main
highlights, as you can probably tell from the title and thumbnail of this video are going to
be the taxi and takeoff procedure. So without further adieu, let’s jump into the flight deck
and get started.
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tubes and guided Alpha vanes. As you can see, turning them on gets rid of the amber
lights on either side of the two switches, thereby signifying that the systems are working
as intended. Coming further down, we don’t want to make any changes to either the wing
or engine anti-ice, as it’s a nice warm day here in San Francisco without any signs of
visible moisture around. Next up, coming to the right, we’re going to go over to the air
conditioning panel and turn the PACK systems back to auto so they can resume air
circulation within the cabin for passenger comfort. While we’re here, let’s also turn the
isolation valve from the downmost ‘on’ position now to the middle ‘auto’ position. This
will allow the pneumatic and air-conditioning systems within the aircraft to automatically
handle the passage of air and its circulation throughout various regions of the aircraft.
Next up, we’re going to turn off the APU because as mentioned before, we no longer
need it since the engines are providing both bleed air as well as acting as an electrical
power source. So the first thing we’re going to do is to restrict the bleed air being
produced by the APU from entering the cabin. To do this, simply turn off the APU bleed
switch over here, as you can see the dual bleed light up here automatically extinguishes,
thereby signifying that there is now only 1 source of bleed air in the aircraft, namely the
engines. Next up, come over to the main APU switch and turn it to the off position, which
will completely turn off the APU. The final action to perform on the forward overhead
panel is to go ahead and turn the engine start switches to the ‘continuous’ mode. As
mentioned in previous episodes, this prevents the engines from accidentally turning off
due to electrical surges or heavy precipitation as it arms the engine ignitors continuously.
And that’s that for the forward overhead panel.
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conduct the flight control check, which involves testing the full range of movement of all
of the physical, movable surfaces within the aircraft. So in order to do this, simply come
over to this MFD panel and press this system button, which as you can see, will provide a
live representation of every movable surface within the aircraft on the lower display unit.
So, we’ll go ahead and test all movements one by one, starting with the ailerons, so turn
the stick full left, and as you can see, the appropriate ailerons and spoilers are moving as
intended to be able to make a ‘full left’ turn. Next, we’ll go full right, again, making sure
that we have proper movement of all of the flight surfaces as intended. Neutral, full up,
now make sure the elevator is getting pushed up all the way and full down. Finally, we’re
also going to test the rudder, so rudder full left and rudder full right. There we go, the
flight control check has been completed. Once this is done, we’re going to make this
Lower display unit blank by again going up to this MFD and pressing the engine button
twice. The first press switches the Lower DU from the system page to the engine page
and the second press provides a condensed version of engine indications on the upper DU
while making the lower DU blank. The reason we like to keep the lower DU blank
throughout the flight is because any problems, faults or failures with the engines or flight
control systems always appear on the lower display unit, and if the lower DU is blank, the
entire screen will light up when there is a problem as compared to only a part of it if
lighting up when the lower DU was left on. Essentially, having an entire screen come on
has a much higher chance of grabbing the pilot’s attention as compared to a small
indication appearing on an already complicated and lit up page. Hope that makes sense.
Finally, the next item is something I missed in the before start procedure in the previous
video, which is setting the trim for takeoff. Again, I have this button mapped to some
buttons on my real, physical joystick, but simply come down to this trim wheel and set
the trim value stated on the takeoff page on the CDU. The value doesn’t need to be exact,
just around the right value should be just fine. Alright, with that all done, let’s come over
to this light strip on the forward overhead panel and turn on the taxi light over here.
Furthermore, if you’re flying at night, I also recommend turning on these runway turnoff
lights as well as the logo and wing lights, but since we’re flying during daytime, I’m
going to keep those off for now. Finally, come back to the main forward panels and press
this recall button to make sure that all systems are working as intended. And that’s that
for the before taxi checklist.
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that has all the information regarding the taxi and takeoff procedure. That being said, I
will try to put a little live schematic of our entire taxi route on screen for you guys to be
able to follow along the route as we go from taxiway to taxiway and eventually get to
runway 28R. So let’s go down here and release the parking brake. Next up, advance the
thrust levers a tad bit, maybe to around 27-30% N1 just to provide the aircraft with a little
bit of an initial kick so that it begins to roll on the tarmac. As you can see, the aircraft has
started to move. Now the specific indication that I would like you guys to keep an eye on
is this GS or ground speed indication on the top-left of this ND. This is your exact
taxi-speed and you want to keep it below 30 knots at all times when taxiing. However,
note that you can only travel on the ground at 30 knots when you’re on a straight stretch.
During turns for example, you must restrict the speed to below 15 knots and for tighter
turns, try and restrict the speed to below 10 knots just to be safe. As you can see, we have
taken a right here as mentioned in the previous episode and will soon be transitioning
from this Alpha taxiway we’re on right now to the Foxtrot taxiway. Again, try not to keep
advancing and retracting the thrust levers during taxi. Try and find a thrust setting that
provides constant momentum while not going too fast or too slow. The more you taxi, the
more you’ll learn, so feel free to play around the thrust setting as you please.
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shutter on top, which allows you to push all of the lights down at the same time. At this
time, also turn off the taxi light, as we now have the main landing lights illuminating the
front of the aircraft. Finally, we’re also going to go ahead and start the captain’s clock
here to log our actual airtime. With that all done, let’s line up and wait on the runway, so
disconnect the parking brake and get onto the runway.
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Conclusion
Alright ladies and gentlemen, with that, we have successfully taken off in the Boeing
737-800. In the next episode, we’ll be taking a look at the climb and cruise portion of our
full flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Just like the previous episode, I’ll be
keeping this conclusion short as I want the transition from this episode to the next to be
as seamless as possible, so if you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to perform a full
stop-landing at the like button and the subscribe button and press the bell icon for future
notifications from this channel. Also, be sure to flyby the comments section and let me
know if there’s any questions you’d like me to answer for you. As usual, thanks for flying
by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome to the seventh episode in the
full flight portion of this Aircrafts Dissected Series, where we delve into every switch,
knob and display in the flight deck of the Zibo mod Boeing 737-800. So, in the previous
episode, we covered the taxi and takeoff procedure and in this episode, the main
highlights, as you can probably tell from the title and thumbnail of this video are going to
be the climb and cruise phases of flight from San Francisco to LA. Once again, sorry for
the delay between episodes, the new academic year has now begun for me and managing
university work as well as YouTube can get hard sometimes. However, the good news is
that I have the next 2 episodes after this one already scripted and planned out so they
should be coming out right on schedule. Anyways, with all of that aside, let’s jump into
the flight deck and get started.
Flap Retraction
Alright ladies and gentlemen, welcome yet again to the flight deck of the 737-800 and as
you can see, the simulator is currently in a paused state as I want to properly walk you
guys through the flap retraction procedure as well as a few other key actions to perform
right after takeoff. So, speaking of flap retraction, the area where pilots would be able to
get an indication as to when to retract the flaps would again be on the PFD or primary
flight display. In essence, the general guidelines for flap retraction dictate that you must
not retract the flaps unless you’re at or above a speed which is your V2 speed, in our case
146 knots plus 15/20 knots. This means that we shouldn’t retract any level of flaps until
reaching at least 161-166 knots in our case. Additionally, another rule also dictates that
you must not retract the flaps before reaching 1000 feet AGL or above ground level. Note
that this is different from 1000 feet above sea level as some airports may be located at
high terrain environments and the ground proximity is what matters in this case. Luckily,
you can simply look at this radio altimeter indication right in the middle of the PFD to get
an accurate indication of what your exact altitude is above ground level. Okay, so coming
to some actual flap indications, I would like to bring your attention to these green
markers on this speed tape over here. As you can see, we currently have two of them with
one reading ‘1’ and the other, at a slightly higher speed reading ‘UP’. These indicate the
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safe flap retraction speeds for our flight specifically which are calculated by the aircraft
in order to facilitate a smooth climb out of the departure airport. Essentially, pilots are
allowed to retract the flaps to the specific degree mentioned on the speed tape when they
are within 20 knots of that speed. So for our example here, our takeoff flap position was 5
degrees; so according to our speed tape, we are allowed to retract the flaps two notches
up to this 1 position as long as we are at or within 20 knots of this speed right here. The
same goes for this UP indication. We are allowed to retract the flaps completely while we
are at or within 20 knots of this speed right here. Now in real life, with a low flap
departure like we had with only 5 degrees of flaps extended, pilots would normally not
retract the flaps in stages and will just fully retract them when they get close enough to
the full ‘UP’ flap retraction speed. So, abiding by procedure, we will be doing the same
thing. As we get close enough, namely within 5-10 knots of the green UP indication on
the speed tape, we will go ahead and retract the flaps completely. And that’s that for the
flap retraction procedure.
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At 10000’
Alright, so as you can see, when we get to 10000’, the aircraft automatically pitches
down and decreases it’s vertical speed to be able to slow down its climb. The aircraft
does this in order to start increasing its speed because now that it’s above 10000 feet the
250 knots speed constraint no longer applies and it can begin speeding up to eventually
get to it’s cruise speed. This is all done automatically, as programmed within the FMC on
the ground and the VNAV or vertical navigation mode correctly plots out a vertical
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profile for the aircraft during the climb. All you have to do is to monitor these parameters
and make sure that nothing is going wrong. So, as we hit 10000 feet, there are a couple of
actions we need to perform within the flight deck. The first thing to do is to turn off all
the landing lights, so simply come up to the forward overhead panel and turn off both the
fixed and retractable landing lights. Additionally, if you had the logo or wing lights on
for departure, you would also turn them off now. Next up, at this point, we can also come
over to the seatbelt signs switch and turn it to auto, so that the aircraft will automatically
turn the seatbelt signs in the passenger cabins on or off depending on the phase of flight.
Next up, we’re simply going to wait to get to our next altitude checkpoint of 18000 feet.
Climb to 18000’
Alright, as we climb to 18000 feet, another action that you guys can perform which is a
good habit to keep in mind is to always keep this heading bug synced with the actual
track the aircraft is flying at all times. Currently, the aircraft is following the LNAV path,
which is allowing the onboard flight computers to direct the aircraft from waypoint to
waypoint on its programmed lateral route. Hence, this number doesn’t really matter too
much at the moment. However, in the event that ATC vectors us to fly in a particular
direction, which can happen relatively fast, you would quickly have to press this heading
select button and turn this knob to the specific heading ATC instructs you to fly to. Now
if you keep this display at any random number, the moment you press this heading select
button, the aircraft will immediately turn to that random direction. Hence, it's a good
habit to keep this number as well as the pink dotted heading line on the ND synced with
the current track of the aircraft, as that will prevent the aircraft from turning to a random
direction and will allow pilots to smoothly transition between the LNAV and manual
heading adjustment modes. Hope that makes sense.
Approaching 18000’
Alright, as we approach 18000 feet, we will again go ahead and increase the altitude on
our altitude display on this MCP all the way up to 35000 feet. So, since we know that
we’re getting to our transition altitude, we’re going to have to switch to the standard
altimeter setting of 29.92 inches of mercury or 1013 hectopascals. Now if you guys want
a detailed explanation of what an altimeter setting is, go ahead and watch the third
episode in this series, where I explain barometric pressure as well as altimeter setting in
detail. So, simply come down to this right knob on this EFIS panel and press on this
middle STD button, which will standardize the altimeter setting. Additionally, now that
we’re safely climbing to our cruising altitude, we no longer need to have the minimums
for the decision height for our departure runway at San Francisco, so simply come over to
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this knob on the left here and press this middle reset button, which will reset the 313 feet
decision height we had inputted previously. With that all done, let’s continue climbing to
35000 feet.
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I would be happy to oblige and make an episode like that for you. Anyways, with that
being said, let’s continue our climb to 35000 feet.
At 35000 feet
Alright ladies and gentlemen, we’ve now successfully reached our cruising altitude of
35000 feet. As you can see, the aircraft will now arrest it’s climb and will maintain this
altitude until we reach our top of descent point, following which we will begin our
descent towards Los Angeles. At this point, you will also notice on the upper display unit
that the speed bugs read Crz which stands for cruise, which means that the N1 speed of
our engines are being dictated by the cruise mode that was calculated by the on-board
flight management computers. Additionally, the speed mode on the FMA on this PFD
right here will now read FMC SPD instead of N1, thereby highlighting that the aircraft is
trying to maintain the specific speed programmed into the FMC for the cruise portion of
this flight. I must also mention at this point that the cruise phase of flight is probably the
most relaxed phase of flight. During this time, pilots would normally converse among
themselves and check the fuel-burn and estimated time enroute calculations provided by
the aircraft against their originally filed Operational Flight Plan. Additionally, in real life,
pilots would keep tuning different air traffic control frequencies as they move across
different sectors and centers, however, since we’re flying without ATC today, simply sit
in the flight deck and enjoy the views. Also, it is at this time during long flights when us
flight simmers can actually get off our seats and do some other work, household chores
and such as this phase of flight is even more uneventful in a sim environment than it is in
real life. With all that said, that concludes the climb and cruise phase of flight.
Conclusion
Alright ladies and gentlemen, with that, we have successfully finished climbing to our
cruising altitude. In the next episode, we’ll be taking a look at the descent and approach
portion of our full flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Just like the previous
episode, I’ll be keeping this conclusion short as I want the transition from this episode to
the next to be as seamless as possible, so if you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to
perform a full stop-landing at the like button and the subscribe button and press the bell
icon for future notifications from this channel. Also, be sure to flyby the comments
section and let me know if there’s any questions you’d like me to answer for you. As
usual, thanks for flying by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome to the eighth episode in the
full flight portion of this Aircrafts Dissected Series, where we delve into every switch,
knob and display in the flight deck of the Zibo mod Boeing 737-800. So, in the previous
episode, we covered the climb and cruise phase of flight and in this episode, the main
highlights, as you can probably tell from the title and thumbnail of this video are going to
be taking a look at the initial descent planning and approach phases of flight. So without
further adieu, let’s jump into the flight deck and get started.
Reminders
Alright, so just as a reminder to all those of you who haven’t seen the flight planning
episode in this series, our arrival procedure into Los Angeles is going to be the SADDE8
STAR, or standard terminal arrival and our arrival runway is going to be 25L.
Additionally, our final parking gate is going to be gate 25 as seen at the beginning of the
flight planning episode in the series. Now the way I like to start planning our descent is to
plan backwards. What I mean by that is to first identify our parking gate, so our final
position at Los Angeles where we will set our parking brake and shut down our engines
and work our way back backwards. In the correct order, that means identifying where
we’re going to park, then identify the taxi route from the runway we’re going to land at
all the way to where we’re going to park, then understanding the final approach
procedure to the runway and finally looking at our overall standard terminal arrival
procedure into LA. So, let’s start with the first step and take a look at where Gate 25
actually is at Los Angeles International Airport.
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be able to capture the localizer for runway 25L at LA and help us perform an ILS
landing. Right next to it, we also have the final approach course for the runway 25L, in
this case 251 degrees, which we will be entering into our course selector knobs on the
MCP panel. Coming further right, we then have our Glideslope capture waypoint as well
as altitude. So, ideally, we should be capturing the glideslope- which is the vertical
segment of the ILS beacon, at around 1900 feet when we intercept this LIMMA
waypoint. Now this should automatically be set within our FMC as the software has
access to all of these constraints and regulations. Coming further right, normally, we
would find our minimum decision height for landing here- however, in this case, the chart
tells us to refer to the ILS minimums. Now the minimums on this particular chart can be
found all the way at the bottom right here. So, for a standard CAT 1 or category 1 ILS
approach towards runway 25L, our decision height will be 304’ baro or 200’ in radio.
Finally, coming further right, we have the airport elevation: 128 feet, so we’ll be dialing
that into our pressurization selector on the forward overhead panel. Coming underneath,
we have our missed approach procedure, which contains rules that govern what we would
do as pilots in-case of a go-around or an aborted landing sequence. Now we personally
only need the initial altitude we need to climb to as well as the heading to maintain while
performing a missed approach procedure. So, our initial altitude will be 2000 feet and we
will be following our runway heading of 251 degrees, both of which we will be entering
into the MCP panel when we are fully established on the localizer and glideslope for
runway 25L. The rest of the procedure simply dictates how to set yourself up for another
try at the approach but I’m really hoping we won’t have to perform a missed approach in
this “instructional” episode. Finally on this placard, we also have our transition altitude as
well as level, which are both 18000 feet, so we’ll be looking to switch to the local
altimeter setting at Los Angeles as we approach 18000 feet during our descent.
STAR Chart
So, the final chart we’re going to be looking at then is this overall STAR chart which
shows us our standard terminal arrival into Los Angeles. You might remember seeing this
chart from episode 7 in this series, but if you need a refresher, here we see the entire
descent and approach into KLAX. So, according to the SADDE8 arrival procedure, we
will be coming in through REYES and will then come to this Fillmore VOR which you
guys might remember as the FIM waypoint on our route from the previous episode. After
FIM, we’ll be heading to SYMON then to BAY ST and then will be turning left heading
070 degrees, at which point we will be parallel with the runway. We will then self-vector
ourselves and complete a right traffic pattern to land at runway 25L and KLAX. So,
that’s pretty much going to be our entire route from initial descent all the way to parking
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at gate 25 at LA. Now let’s jump back into the flight deck and start preparing the aircraft
for arrival.
Top of Descent
Alright ladies and gentlemen, hope you guys enjoyed that little cinematic portion of the
flight. As you can see on the progress page, we’re approaching our top of descent point
pretty quickly, so let’s go ahead and first dial our altitude down to 18000 feet on the MCP
panel like so. This will tell the aircraft that it is now cleared to descend down to the
specified altitude after the top of descent point. Now one thing to note here is that the
descent process will start automatically when we hit the TOD point on our route, but if
ATC instructs you to start the descent earlier, simply come down to this FMC and press
this descent button. As you can see here, we have this option that says descend now. So
assuming you have a lower altitude selected on the MCP, you can simply press this
button and press execute to be able to start the descent. Let’s go ahead and do that here
since we’re almost at the top of descent point anyway. As you can see and probably hear,
the engines are now starting to spool down a little. Additionally, on the primary flight
display, we also see this little pink triangle appear on the vertical scale ID annunciator,
which is supposed to represent our ideal desired vertical path if we are to stick to the
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VNAV profile. Obviously, you’ll also see our altitude start to decrease at this point. Now
at this point, depending on the severity of the descent, you could turn the seatbelt signs
from the auto position to the ‘on’ position. In our case, let’s go ahead and do that now
just so we don’t forget it in the later phases of flight.
Descent Checklist
So ladies and gentlemen, with the descent started, let’s start running through the descent
procedure where the first item on our list is to turn off the center fuel pumps if we have
less than 1400kg of fuel within them. As you guys already know, we’re not really
carrying any fuel in the center pumps for such a short flight, so nothing to do there. Next
up, let’s go ahead and set up the pressurization panel by inputting our landing altitude. So
the airport elevation for LAX if you guys remember was 128 feet, so let’s enter 150 feet
into this land altitude display, as it only changes in increments of 50. Next up, let’s come
over to the forward panels and press this recall button to make sure we don’t have any
master caution alarms within the flight - and all looks good. Next up, we have to enter
our landing reference speeds into the CDU just like we did for the takeoff procedure. So
let’s come down here and go over to this Init Ref or initial reference page by pressing on
the corresponding button here. As you can see, the aircraft has already recognized that we
are in the descent phase of flight and has automatically brought us to the approach
reference page. On the top left here we have our gross landing weight and below it, we
have some specifications relating to the airport such as the length of the runway we’re
landing at as well as the localizer frequency and course over here, which is the same as
the one we obtained on the charts previously in the episode. So the first thing we’re going
to do on this page is to decide and select our landing flap position and consequently, the
approach speed as well. Now for a long runway such as KLAX, we could perform a 30
degree landing as the runway is very long and we’ll have ample time to stop even if our
approach speed might be higher. However, if you guys are practicing landings for the
first time in the airliner, I would highly recommend you guys to always pick flap 40
which is the highest flap position available. This is because controlling the aircraft at a
lower speed is always more easier than coming in at a faster speed with a lower flap
setting. So for the instructional purposes of this video, I’ll go ahead and select flap 40 for
our arrival as well. To do this simply line select this flap 40 option over here and as you
can see, that copies it to our scratchpad. We then simply go ahead and paste that into this
Flap/Spd window right here. With that done, it's time to set our decision height, which as
you might remember was 303 feet baro or 200 feet radio. Now since we set our decision
height in baro as we were departing, let’s input it on the radio this time. So simply go up
to the EFIS panel and move the larger Minimums knob to the radio position and turn this
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knob all the way to 200 feet on this PFD. Now we should expect a minimum callout
when we are 200 feet above the ground during our landing to establish visual contact
with the runway or perform a go-around. With that done, it’s time to set our Navaids for
arrival which basically constitutes our localizer nav frequency and course. So simply
come down to the central pedestal and enter the localizer frequency for runway 25L we
obtained earlier in this nav frequency selector which is 109.90. Doing this on both sides
is a good habit as that will allow you to perform an autoland procedure if you need it later
on. With the frequency entered, we’ll also go to the MCP and enter our approach course
of 251 degrees into both the course selector knobs like so. Finally, we’ll go ahead and set
the autobrake setting we will be using for our landing today. So as soon on the taxi chart
previously in the episode, the runway is extremely long and we’ll want to stop as late as
possible to get onto the Lima Taxiway so I think we can go for autobrake 1. So, with that
all done, let’s continue our descent to 18000 feet and I’ll see you guys then.
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done, as approaching 18000 feet also means that we’re pretty close to our transition level,
let’s go ahead and press this standard button on the altitude selector as mentioned before
to switch to the manually selected barometric pressure setting. As you can see on the
bottom right of the PFD, the selected altimeter setting is shown here, so we’re looking
good for a safe approach into Los Angeles.
Conclusion
So ladies and gentlemen, that’s that for the descent planning and initial approach
procedure into LA. In the next episode, I’m going to be at the helm of the ship and will
be live commentating the entire final approach, which encompasses our descent from
around 15000 feet all the way down to the ground at runway 25L. Just like the previous
episode, I’ll be keeping this conclusion short as I want the transition from this episode to
the next to be as seamless as possible, so if you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to
perform a full stop-landing at the like button and the subscribe button and press the bell
icon for future notifications from this channel. Also, be sure to flyby the comments
section and let me know if there’s any questions you’d like me to answer for you. As
usual, thanks for flying by!
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome to what is probably one of
the most anticipated videos in this Zibo 737 Aircraft Dissected series which is of course,
the landing. So, in the previous episode, we covered the descent planning and initial
approach phase of flight and in this episode, the main highlights, as you can probably tell
from the title and thumbnail of this video are going to be taking a look at the entire
descent and landing phases of phases of flight. So without further adieu, let’s jump into
the flight deck and pick up where we left off...
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LOC button on the MCP panel in order to capture this localizer - following which the
directional component of the aircraft will completely be handled by the localizer. As for
the other hollow diamond on the right of the artificial horizon here, that will come alive a
little further in the approach as we continue descending to our glideslope capture altitude
of 1900’. If you remember from the previous episode, we are supposed to intercept the
glideslope component at 1900’ when we get to the LIMMA waypoint. So when the
glideslope diamond gets filled in pink, we will wait for the diamond to start coming down
on the SCALE ID annunciator, following which we will retract flaps all the way to 15
degrees and also extend the landing gear. As the glideslope diamond continues to come
down, we will eventually go ahead and press the approach button on the MCP which will
fully establish us on the localizer as well as the glideslope for an ILS landing into
Runway 25L. So just as a recap, as we continue our turn, the hollow localizer diamond at
the bottom will become fully pink, following which we will press the VOR LOC button
to intercept the localizer. Then, once we’re aligned with the center line, as we continue to
descend, eventually the glideslope diamond will also fill up, so we’ll take flap 15 and
gear down when the diamond begins to come down and will also arm the approach mode
on the MCP. Capiche? Alright, let’s go ahead and resume the simulation.
PAPI Lights
Alright ladies and gentlemen, as we make our final turn and get onto short final for
runway 25L, I also want to introduce a new indication to look out for, which are the PAPI
lights. For those of you who don’t know, PAPI in aviation is not the Spanish word for
dad, but instead stands for Precision Approach Path Indicator, which are a set of 4 lights
which shine either a red or white light depending on the angle at which you view them
during your descent. Normally, these PAPI lights are used to stay on the correct glidepath
during the approach towards the runway. As you can see on screen right now, if you see 2
red lights and 2 white lights, that means that you’re on the perfect glide path and will be
landing in the touchdown zone of the runway. If you have more red lights than white
lights, for example 3 red lights and 1 white light, that is an indication that you’re too low
and must maintain your altitude and speed to be able to rejoin the glide path. Similarly, if
you have more white lights than red lights, that is an indication that you’re too high, so
you need to reduce your speed and lose some altitude to be able to again rejoin the glide
path. As the saying goes, “red on red, you’re dead”- meaning you’re too low. “White on
white, check your height” - meaning of course that you’re too high. Finally, you also
have “red on white, you’re alright”- meaning that you’re on the right glide path for the
approach. Alright so I hope that made sense to you, so be sure to look out for those PAPI
lights in the distance. I will mention them in the live commentary but again, just wanted
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to explain some theory and give you guys a heads-up as to what to look out for during
this phase of flight. So, let’s get back to this sim!
Landing Tips
Alright ladies and gentlemen, we’re now on final approach and I’ll take this time to give
you guys a few rough tips regarding landing. I’ll try to keep this section short, as I want
to make a full-fledged comprehensive landing technique video on the 737-800 later down
the line. This little segment is just to show what to do and what not to do while
performing a standard ILS landing in the Zibo 737. First things first, now that we are
established on the localizer and glideslope and also have a visual reference to the runway,
we’ll be disconnecting the autopilot as well as the autothrottle and manually fly the
aircraft down to the ground. During this process, keep a close eye on the PAPI lights
while descending. As you get to below 300 feet or so, you want to generally start
ignoring the PAPI lights and completely focus your attention on the touchdown zone
which are these piano tile markings on the runway you’re seeing right now. Aircraft will
usually touch down right in front of these piano tiles and a good way to know the
touchdown zone is to look at the black skid marks on the runway. As you continue your
descent and pass the runway threshold, it’s important that you switch your focus from the
piano tiles to the opposite end of the runway, as you’re going to want a better frame of
reference in front of you to gently flare the aircraft a bit. For those of you who don’t
know, flaring is the process of slowly pitching the aircraft's nose up right before
touchdown so that it lands on it’s main landing gear first. As you begin to descend below
100 feet, the ground proximity warning system within the plane will begin counting down
your altitude in lower increments of 10 feet starting from 50 feet; so 50, 40, 30, 20 and so
on. So at 30 feet, you should completely retract the thrust levers and gently begin the
flare up to around 2.5 to 5 degrees on the artificial horizon. Again, like most things, this
is normally a feeling you need to have as a pilot to have a smooth, yet firm touchdown,
and will normally come with practice. As soon as we touch down, we’ll go ahead and
deploy the reverse thrust, so you’ll hear the engine spooling back up at idle reverse thrust
to allow us to slow down in conjunction with the autobrake and the wing spoilers. And
that should be enough for you guys to get a brief picture of what to look out for during
the landing sequence. Let’s switch back to live commentary and actually watch the
landing now.
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Conclusion
So ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of this Aircrafts Dissected episode,
covering the final descent and landing into KLAX. Now, though it may seem like the end
of this series, there’s still one more episode left to go, where we cover the after landing
procedure and taxi back to the gate to disembark the passengers and officially conclude
the flight. Again, just like the previous episode, I’ll be keeping this conclusion short as I
want the transition from this episode to the next to be as seamless as possible, so if you
guys enjoyed this video, make sure to perform a full stop-landing at the like button and
the subscribe button and press the bell icon for future notifications from this channel.
Also, be sure to flyby the comments section and let me know if there’s any questions
you’d like me to answer for you. As usual, thanks for flying by!
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Before Taxi
- APU bus light comes on when the engine generators are selected.
- Go back to DC and AC panel and select TR1 on DC knob and Gen 1 on AC knob
(NOT IN CHECKLIST) - So important to see if engines are indeed providing
decent electrical power to confirm proper operation of engine electrical generators.
- Comment on the isolation valve, saying that switching it to auto instead of on is
better, so that the aircraft can handle all of the parameters itself. APU is switched
off.
- Verification of ground equipment comes quite late in the checklist. Make sure to
track the position of the ground staff when they provide the hand signals and once
done - can either have post recording or a little text box on screen to suggest that
ground equipment is clear.
- Set flaps (give some nice wing views)
- After Flt. Ctrl. Check - make sure to give a brief understanding of why the LDU is
left blank.
- On the EFIS control panel, set data on both sides, set terrain on the first officer's
side. Give a brief note about switching the TCAS system to TA/RA based on the
airport and ATC instructions (in our case, we’ll turn it on while entering the
runway).
Taxi
- Make sure to say initial thrust should be a tad high, but then adjust it based on
ground speed. Provide a brief overview of taxi speeds on the ground at most
airports.
- Provide a note of turning the position lights to strobe and steady when crossing a
runway (IMPORTANT)
- While taxiing parallel to the 28 runways, turn on the autothrottle. Make sure to
check the arm indication on the FMA and also make sure that the autothrottle does
indeed come on.
Before Takeoff
- Everything from this point up until the takeoff and climb portion of the flight will
be live commentated to be able to describe the various experiences. So just a brief
bit of post com to let you guys know what is going to happen in the next few
minutes as the takeoff sequence does indeed happen quite quickly. As soon as we
get on the runway, assuming we get our clearance for takeoff, we’ll advance the
thrust levers to 40% N1. which you will see on the Upper display unit. Again, I’ll
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be using the red boxes to highlight everything to the best of my abilities. Then, we
push the TOGA button. Now I won’t be pressing it in the sim, as I have that button
mapped to my throttle quadrant in real life that I use alongside my sidestick to
control the aircraft. So when I push that, a couple of things will happen, you will
see the N1 rise up to the N1 bug we had set in the FMC programming video. Then
we will begin to pick up speed on the runway. The Zibo has a very helpful first
officer in the flight deck with you, who will make various announcements
throughout the takeoff phase. So at 80 knots, the first officer will say 80 knots
where we will cross check it on our PFD. Then the FO will callout V1 and rotate
immediately after that since in our case, our V1 and rotate speeds are the same at
142 knots. So at this point, we’ll gently lift up the nose of the aircraft to about 15
degrees pitch on the PFD. Don’t jerk the stick back all the way, be very smooth
with it and gently bring it up to 15 degrees. As we’re doing that the first officer
will again make a callout, this time saying positive rate, meaning that we are
successfully climbing at a good, positive rate, so it’s safe to retract the gear. So
when he says that, simply press the G button on your keyboard or whatever button
you may have mapped to your real joystick. In my case, I again have a gear button
mapped to my joystick, so I’ll retract the gear. Then the first officer will make
various altitude callouts, calling 400 feet and then 1000 feet. We will constantly
monitor the PFD speed strip and make sure that we are retracting the flaps at the
right time. The plan is to hand fly the aircraft till about 3000 feet and then increase
the altitude on the MCP and let the autopilot do the rest.
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- Comment on the next milestone for the flight being the transition altitude which is
18000 feet. At this point also go over to the Nd and comment about the green arc
that appears signifying that that is the point we will be reaching the specific
altitude that has been set in the MCP. So when we reach 17000 feet we will
increase that altitude on the MCP to our final cruising altitude, which is 35000
feet, so the FMC can use the waypoints we programmed into it to get us to 35000
feet at the right time.
- Reaching Trans. Altitude, set all the altimers to standard pressure. Also here,
mention 737Simpilot’s point about being able to set synchronized barometric
pressure settings.
- While in the climb, make sure to say that the pilots at this time will cross reference
their fuel burn using their flight plan and see if that is indeed the amount of fuel
they are actually burning.
- While climbing also introduces the T/C indication to show the top of the climb
point. Show how you can cross reference that with the FMC legs page and see if
the altitude is indeed matching.
- Also introduce the viewers at this time to the progress page, where pilots can track
their progress and given that certain controlled variables are maintained, they can
check what time they will be arriving at certain waypoints as well as the final
destination.
Cruise
- Make sure to come back to the progress page and check when the top of descent is.
You can check the distance in nautical miles and the time when we get there in
zulu time. Additionally, you also see the amount of fuel we’ll have on board when
we get there.
- Make sure to reset the minimums as we’re taken off successfully and reached
cruising altitude, so we don’t have to think about going back to San Francisco. On
the FMA make sure that the autothrottle speed mode is FMC speed and that the
upper display unit reads crz which stands for cruise speed for the engines.
- There’s no checklist, so it’s pretty chill.
Descent Planning
- So start with descent planning around 80 nautical miles away. Point out the T/D
position on the ND which is the top of descent mark. So, ideally, according to the
aircraft’s calculated flight path, that is when we’re supposed to start descending to
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maintain the exact vertical profile to be able to get to Los Angeles while following
all speed and altitude constraints.
- Mention a note about ATC here and about how we programmed our arrival into
Los Angeles during the FMC programming video. Say how that’s only for
instructional purposes. In real life, pilots wouldn’t program the arrival in until
reaching to about 10-20 minutes away from top of descent, where they can ask the
approach controllers what arrival is currently in progress and what runway they
should be expecting to land at. This is because on long flights, by the time you get
to the arrival airport, weather conditions might have changed, and they may prefer
a different runway which requires a different arrival procedure. In this case, we’re
going to go ahead with our already programmed arrival which was the SADDE8
arrival and our arrival runway was going to runway 25L.
- Assuming that ATC then clears us to descend via the START at our discretion, we
will then start programming a few values into different systems within the flight to
be able to prepare for arrival.
- STAR chart- Note the landing altitude, in this case 128 feet. Also note transition
level which is 18000 feet, which will be our initial descent altitude, just like we
had an initial climb altitude, where we climbed up in different steps, from 3000
feet up to 10000 feet up to 18000 and eventually up to 35000, we’ll do the same
on the way down. With ATC, they will instruct you to descend to certain altitudes
and turn in various directions, but in this case, without ATC, this is a logical way
to descend to the arrival airport in segments.
- Look at arrival charts,
- Set 18000’ in the altitude panel.
- Plan for arrival runway, our final gate as well
- Get arrival ATIS information (specifically altimeter)
Descent Actual
- Note pink triangles appearing on scale ID annunciators to highlight the overall
descent profile vertically and laterally. Clearly show that the descent has started.
FMC will point out certain things you need to do to help it in flying the aircraft, in
this case, it says ‘drag required’. So we can extend the speedbrakes a tad bit to
allow the aircraft to slow down and maintain its vertical profile as best as possible.
- Set seatbelt sign to on for the descent.
- Constantly make sure that the scale ID triangles are in line with the aircraft’s wing
and fuselage indicator.
- Set landing altitude
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Introduction
What’s going on guys, FlyBy Simulations here and welcome to the final episode in the
full-flight portion of this aircraft’s dissected series. So, in the penultimate episode, we
took a detailed look at the final descent and landing procedure and in this episode, the
main highlights, as you can probably tell from the title and thumbnail of this video are
going to be taking a look at the after landing procedure as well as taxi to the parking gate.
So without wasting any more of your time, let’s jump into the flight deck and get started!
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keep the position lights on for now. Next up, turn the engine start switches from the
continuous position to the auto position. Coming down to the forward panels, we can go
ahead and turn off the weather radar on the left side as well as the terrain map on the right
side. We can also turn off the data modes on the ND at this time. Finally on the forward
panel, we can go ahead and turn the autobrake position to the off position and observe
that the light goes away. Next up, we’ll go ahead and retract the flaps all the way to the
‘up’ position. Next up, depending on instructions from ATC, we would set the TCAS to
the appropriate mode. In this case, let’s assume ATC instructs us to switch the TCAS to
Standby, so simply move the knob to the standby position. And that’s that for the
immediate after-landing procedure, so let’s start our taxi to the gate. Again, I’ll include a
live schematic of the taxi route as we continue so you can see how we eventually get to
gate 25 towards the northern complex of KLAX.
Shutdown Procedure
Alright ladies and gentlemen, hopefully you were able to follow along with the taxi
procedure to gate 25. So, now that we’re parked at the gate, let’s start the shutdown
procedure to be able to safely shut down the engines and disembark the passengers and
cargo. So first things first, let’s go ahead and set the parking brake. Then let’s come back
up to the forward overhead panel, and make sure that the APU is ready to supply power
on the bus transfer and electrical source selector panel. Since the two lights are
illuminated, flick both the switches down and observe the power switch to both sides of
the aircraft. Once electrical power has been established, simply come back behind the
throttle quadrant and move both the engine start levers to to the ‘cutoff’ position. Next
up, let’s go up to the forward overhead panel and switch the seatbelts signs off to allow
the passengers to disembark. Since the engines have been turned off, let’s turn off the
anti-collision light to allow ground personnel to safely approach the aircraft. With that
done, let’s go back up to the forward overhead panel and turn off all the fuel pumps. As
for the cabin utility and IFE/pass seat switches, let’s leave them both on, as that’s the
default setting. Coming to the anti-icing panel, make sure both the wing and engine
anti-ice switches are in the ‘off position’. Coming further underneath to the hydraulic
panel, we can leave the engine hydraulic pumps on but we’ll be turning off the electrical
hydraulic pumps. Next up, we’ll come to the air conditioning panel and leave the
recirculation fans as well as the packs to ‘auto’. Coming underneath, we’ll leave the
engine bleed switches on and turn on the APU bleed switch as well to get air supply from
the APU. Exterior lights have already been taken care of, so we’ll come over to the MCP
and turn off both the flight director switches. With that all done, we have successfully
brought the aircraft to what’s known as a ‘Turnaround stage’. Pilots would normally
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bring the aircraft to this stage after each flight right before they turn the aircraft around
for another departure. So, if you were planning to take this aircraft back from La to San
Francisco, you could start entering the departure information and restart the entire
procedure like we did at San Francisco at this point.
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