4: First-Flight

4: First-Flight

Opening Aircraft

Launch X-Plane on your computer. An airplane will open which will be the default airplane the first time you launch X-Plane (this is the Boeing 747) or the last aircraft that was loaded in X-Plane. Lets start in something more simple, like the Cessna 172 SP. To open this aircraft, go to the Aircraft > Open Aircraft window. Here, on the top of the window that just opened, you will see the name of the folder that your current aircraft is located in. To the right of this is a little up/down symbol. Click on it. Now a list of the folder hierarchy is displayed below that starts with your X-Plane main folder and goes down to the folder that your aircraft is in. The second line should show Aircraft. We want to look inside your aircraft folder to get to the General Aviation folder so click on Aircraft. Now click on General Aviation. Finally, in here you will see the folder that contains the Cessna 172SP. Click on it to open.

Every aircraft file - which is what we need to click on to open the airplane - is denoted by an '.acf' extension. Inside your Cessna 172SP folder you will see the aircraft file called Cessna 172.acf. Click it once to open the file. In a few moments the screen will go black and shortly thereafter you will be sitting in the cockpit of a new Cessna Skyhawk 172.

Position Aircraft at Your Airport of Choice (Optional)

You can relocate the aircraft anywhere on Earth by clicking on Location > Select Global Airport. When you do this a listing of all the airports in the X-Plane data base (currently more than 32,000) will come up. This represents practically every airport on the planet.

Note: if you locate your aircraft to an area that does not have any scenery installed you will then find yourself sitting on the airport which is hovering above the ocean down bellow. We refer to this as Water World and it is covered in detail in Appendix C: Water Everywhere.

In this screen you will find two areas. On the left is a listing of all the airport names, arranged by city. This format (and these names) are the official standard for that local area - the FAA for US airports. You can enter either the city name in the data entry block on the left or the airport ID in the data entry block on the right. Also, you can use the up and down arrows to move through the full list. When you find the airport you like click on it once to highlight it with the grey box around it and than click the button that says "Go to this Airport."

Airport IDs explained

Every airport on Earth has a unique identifier that is used to refer to that field in flight plans, instrument approach plates, and GPS navigators. In the United States, the airport identifiers are comprised of three digits, which can be letters only or letters and numbers. Sounds easy, right? But wait

VOR's, a type of navigation radio, also use the same identification system and, in some cases, the very same identifier. A VOR located on a field, for example, will have the same identifier as the field itself. To prevent confusion, a 'k' is added before the identifier for the airport if that identifier contains only letters. All VOR identifiers are letters only, so any airport identifier that has any numbers in the ID stays as is.

Here are some examples:- 3CK stays as 3CK since it has a number in it.- OJC becomes KOJC for the airport because its identifier is letters only.- The VOR on the field is also called just OJC with no K to denote that it's a VOR.- AMW becomes KAMW for the airport. There's no VOR on this field so theres no other identifier for this airport.

Set Weather/Real Time Weather

X-Plane has excellent weather simulation compared to other flight simulators. Go to Environment > Set Weather. Choose the left-most tab (Atmosphere) and take a look at the various things you can set. You can set cloud types and top and base levels for three different layers.

Quick Tune Buttons

So that's all obvious, but now look down a bit: There are buttons labeled "Cat-III", etc. What do they mean?

Well, these are "Quick-Set" buttons, and pressing them will quickly set some general weather for you.

Cat-III sets the weather up for a Category-III ILS approach. These are extremely low instrument conditions, basically zero ceiling and visibility.

Cat-II sets the weather up for a Category-II ILS approach with terribly poor ceiling and visibility.

Cat-I sets the weather up for a Category-I ILS approach with poor ceiling and visibility.

N-Prec sets the weather for a non-precision approach... 3-mile visibility and 400 foot ceiling.

MVFR sets the weather marginal VFR flying conditions... about four miles visibility and a 1,500 foot ceiling.

VFR sets the weather to good visual flight rules conditions. That is; clear, sunny skies.

CAVOK sets the weather to clear and visibility OK. Typically pilots refer to this as "CAVU - Clear and Visibility Unlimited"

Now lets look at the sliders.

The visibility slider is pretty obvious... nothing new there.

The precipitation slider sets the type of condition: Rain, hail, or snow depending on the temperature around the airplane, and the temperature in the clouds where the precip was formed.

The icing slider is pretty clear with one exception: It sets a probability that you will encounter icing conditions. Ice can form on the craft when the aircraft skin temperature is between about -15 and 0 degrees Celsius. For this to happen, you have to be in visible moisture (clouds, fog, rain), at a temperature somewhat below -15 and 0 degrees ambient. Now, why does the ambient temperature have to be BELOW -15 to 0 degrees to have the AIRCRAFT SKIN TEMPERATURE is to be -15 to 0 degrees? Because the aircraft itself is always somewhat WARMER than ambient due simply to the compression of air on the aircraft. At the speed light planes travel, effect may only be 5 or 10 degrees, but it does exist! Go to the Settings > DATA OUTPUT screen and output the ATMOSPHERE:AIRCRAFT line number to see the LEADING EDGE TEMPERATURE (l.e. temp)... THAT is the value that should be between -15 and 0 C for ice to form! Once you are in visible moisture (clouds or rain) in freezing conditions, ice MAY form on the plane and you can control the probability of that happening here. When ice forms on the aircraft in X-Plane, a number of things happen: The weight of the plane increases as you start carrying all that water, the drag on the airplane increases as the ice ruins the airfoil-shape of your wing, thus adding lots of drag, and the lift from your wings decreases as the airfoil-shape of your wing is ruined by the ice building up on it.

As well, if you have a propeller, the ice buildup on the propeller blades will decrease the thrust from the prop because it will mess up the shape of the airfoil of your propeller. Also, the ice will get into the air inlet for the engine and begin to starve the engine of air, reducing engine power and also engine cooling.

Additionally, the ice will form a coating on the aircraft including the windshield, limiting the forward visibility. Before long your visibility thorough the front windscreen will resemble the view you would see if you were inside an ice cube, which you are. All of these things happen to real aircraft when they are carrying a load of ice and so all of this is of course simulated in X-Plane.

The thunderstorms slider. Drag this slider to the right to increase the propensity for convective activity and look at the weather radar map on the lower-right of the window to see where the cells are forming. Flying into them results in heavy precip and extreme turbulence. The turbulence is great enough that in reality, airplanes can fly into thunderstorms in one piece and come out in many smaller pieces.

Taking helicopters into these icing and thunderstorm situations is pretty cool because their very high wing-loading on their rotor and free-teetering rotor causes them to have a pretty smooth ride in turbulence, but they are still not indestructible, and they are subject to icing on their blades just like an airplane.

Wind and Turbulence slider: This slider auto-sets all the sliders in the center of the screen that control the wind and turbulence. Drag this slider down to the left and HOLD IT THERE FOR A FEW MOMENTS to set all of the wind and turbulence to zero if you'd like a smooth flight. You do have to DRAG AND HOLD the "Wind and Turbulence" slider to the left to do this though.

The turbulence in X-Plane is simulated very realistically. To see how incredible the turbulence in X-Plane is, drag the "Wind and Turbulence" slider up to a pretty high setting and then close the "Set Weather" window. Now hit "Shift \" (the "|" key) to go to an external view. Now hit the "/" key twice to see the wind vectors. The green arrows you see are the actual wind vectors acting on the airplane. Each of those vectors represents a wind speed and direction in the flow field around the pane, and that flow field will interact with each of the elements of each of the wings (and propellers!) of the plane. You may occasionally see little green lines sprout out of the top surface of the wings; these lines show the lift vector for each segment of the wing.

Of course, when the aircraft is flying the lift vectors will be very prominent but even with the airplane just sitting stationary at the end of the runway, the wing can indeed be producing some measurable lift. The air may be blowing UP on part of the left wing and DOWN on part of the right wing, causing the craft to roll to the right. Or maybe up on the wings and down on the tail, causing a pitch-up. Or, as actually happens in real life all the time, multiples of these situations all at once.

Only after you think about the fact that the flow field is continuous and variable, covers the entire aircraft for any scenario that can be simulated, and that all different parts of each airfoil surface see different relative directions and speeds does it become apparent how much math is going on in the background within X-Plane. Use the arrows keys and +/- keys to move around and zoom out. See how the wind vectors are changing kind of slowly? Thats because you are not moving through new air velocity regions at all, but are instead sitting there motionless, waiting for new regions of air to come blowing over you.

Start your plane moving with throttle, and you will notice that the changes in air vector become more and more rapid as you race though the different regions of air velocity more and more quickly. This effect results in large, slow, wallowing displacements of the aircraft due to turbulence when flying at only 50 knots in a Cessna, but sudden, sharp, JOLTS of turbulence when going 400 knots in an airliner. This, of course, is what happens in the real world.

Microburst Probability: A Microburst is a rapid downward movement of a column of air. This downward-moving column of air smacks the ground and then spreads out in every direction like pouring water out of a cup onto the ground, OK - think of a really large cup, like a five gallon bucket. If this column of air hits the ground in front of you, then you will get a big headwind from the air spreading out as it hits the ground.

If you are taking off or landing, then you will see your indicated airspeed suddenly come UP as you fly into this sudden headwind. Many pilots, at this point, will pull back the power to try to slow down > Bad move. This sudden headwind will end momentarily, or worse yet turn into a tailwind as you fly to the other side of the microburst. Then what happens? Well, you are out of airspeed because you have slowed your plane, and then the wind suddenly alters to come from behind, traveling in the same direction you are. Now your airspeed is greatly reduced which reduces your lift and you will likely have to work pretty hard to avoid crashing. So, if you turn on microbursts in X-Plane, or encounter one in reality, be prepared to go to FULL POWER if your speed suddenly comes up, so that you can build enough speed, and momentum, to carry you through the drop in indicated airspeed you are about to encounter.

The bottom slider is the rate of change, which you can set at will, of course.

On the very bottom left you can set your temperature and barometric pressure (air pressure) within X-Plane, both conditions that will take effect at the closest airport. Keep in mind that the 'standard atmosphere' is 59 F (19 C) and 29.92" mercury (1013 millibars).

The middle column of this window should be self-explanatory: You get three wind layers. Set the wind in each layer and X-Plane will use these and interpolate between the layers.

Enter the thermal coverage, climb rate, and maximum altitude in the upper-right. This is where you enter the thermal characteristics for glider-flying. As well as thermals, X-Plane also runs air up and down the terrain as wind blows into mountains, just like the effects that real glider pilots have to keep in mind and try to take advantage of. Set the wind at 30 knots or better at a right-angle to a mountain range and run along the upwind side of the mountain range in a glider and you should be able to stay aloft on the climbing air if you stay pretty low. Drift to the downwind side of the mountain, though, and an unstoppable descent is assured!

Setting the runway conditions is fun. Set the temperature to below freezing, add some precipitation, and then set the runway conditions to wet or icy, and then select patchy from the popup menu at right. This will now set the friction of the runway to be just fine for the dry sections, but near-zero for the icy parts of the runway. Get your plane going to about 90 knots and then put on full brakes... you will see that the plane is encountering icy and clear areas of pavement at random intervals, often with some wheels being on icy sections, some on dry, causing the plane to pull left and right as each wheel encounters different runway conditions, just as happens in real life.

Below the Runway Conditions we see the "Real Weather" section. This is some pretty interesting stuff: By checking the "Periodically Download real-weather" box, X-Plane will grab actual weather conditions from the internet that are current to within one hour, and apply that weather in the simulator as you fly. X-Plane will scan the thousands of airports that report weather and apply the weather from the nearest weather-reporting-airport to your flight in the sim. Of course you need internet access to use this option, but once the weather is downloaded (it is downloaded to a file called "Metar.rwx") you can keep using it forever without connecting to the net again, though of course, the weather will, in that case, be out of date. It is still nice to have, though, because the Metar.rwx file still includes a global snapshot of the weather across the planet, so will still give weather that varies as you fly from one place to another, since X-Plane will always find the nearest reported weather to our current location and use that to set the weather that you are flying in.

Just below this option is a "Periodically scan real-weather" check box. If you download the real weather once per hour, but then fly out of the area you started in, and do not scan the weather file (that was previously downloaded) then the weather that you experience at the new airport may be different than what the real weather download contained. Here's an example to help make this more clear: You're about to take off from Ames, Iowa (KAMW), and download the real weather. You have this weather (clear sky and 15 mile visibility) loaded onto your machine and off you go.You're flying a Citation Jet and it only takes 40 minutes to get to the Johnson County Executive Airport in Kansas City (KOJC). As you approach the area you note that X-Plane is still showing clear sky and 15 miles, although you know from watching the weather channel that KC is actually going through low IFR conditions, with thunderstorms and significant turbulence. X-Plane will not change the weather as you fly along unless you have already checked the "scan real weather" checkbox.

Using the keyboard / Keyboard Shortcuts

X-Plane has been designed so that it is both extremely flexible but also easily usable. Thus, most of the keys on the keyboard do something. To see what keys do what functions, simply go to the "Joystick and Equipment" screen, "Keys" tab, look at the keys assigned to the various functions. You can simply click on any of the key fields and enter any key you want to control any function, and select any function for any key as well by clicking on the little box beside each key command.

NOTE: It is not necessary to try and remember all of the keyboard shortcuts. Instead, keep in mind that many of them are shown in the menus when you're flying. For example, go to the View menu and you will see that each view is listed on the left and the keyboard shortcut is shown on the right, within a set of brackets. Thus, the forward view has a [w] next to it on the right side of that line in the View menu.

Using the Mouse Instead of a Joystick

As alluded to earlier, it is possible to fly with only a mouse for flight control but this is both cumbersome and unrealistic (since real airplanes all have a stick or yoke). If flying with the mouse, then you will definitely want to consider using the keyboard short cuts (see preceding section) to control the engine(s), flaps, gear, radio frequencies, and views. Here's how to fly with the mouse.

Any time that Roll and Pitch axis have not been selected by you in the Settings >Joystick and Equipment screen, X-Plane assumes that you intend to fly with the mouse. In this case, a small white plus sign will show up on your screen, typically located at the approximate center of your screen. Note that it may be difficult to see at times as parts of the aircraft may blend in with it while using one of the external views.

If you see only the cross and there is no white box around it that indicates that your hand is not on the stick. By this I mean you are free to move the mouse anywhere you like and there will be no impact on the fight control surfaces. To grab the stick - and provide the ability to control the aircraft - click the mouse button in the vicinity of the little white cross and a white box will be visible. Don't hold the mouse button down, just click once to turn the box on (i.e., to grab the stick) and again to turn the box off (to release the stick). When the box is visible, this indicates that your hand is on the stick and any movements you make with the mouse within the box will position the flight controls accordingly. Again, it is not necessary to hold down the mouse button down, only to move it within the confines of the white box. The little cross signifies the center of the control range over which you can deflect the control surfaces. Thus, if you locate the mouse directly below the cross you will be commanding some up elevator (causing the plane to climb) and not imposing any roll commands (which should keep the aircraft from changing its bank). Likewise, if you keep the mouse lined up exactly with the cross, but deflect it to the right a bit, the plane should bank to the right without altering its pitch, thereby maintaining a level flight attitude.

Here are a few key points to remember:

- Grab and let go of the stick by clicking the mouse button approximately on the white plus. This will turn on and extinguish the white box.

- Move the mouse right and left, up and down within the confines of the box to move the flight controls. Moving the mouse to the right edge of the box means that you are moving the aircraft control stick all the way to the right and the ailerons will be fully deflected at that point, causing the aircraft to bank right at its maximum rate.

- Let go of the stick before you take the mouse down to the panel to change a radio frequency, for example, or the flight controls will be deflected fully and cause the plane to gyrate out of control.

- You can fly with the mouse from most viewpoints.

Controlling Instruments and Avionics with the Mouse

When you are sitting inside the cockpit the mouse can be used to control the aircraft, as your hand would be used to manipulate the instruments, switches, and other controls. To do this, just grab the knob as you would in real life and actuate it. For the landing gear, for example, reach up with the mouse, and drag the gear lever to the other position from which it is resting. Of course, you can only do this if the airplane you happen to be flying is equipped with retractable landing gear. Keep in mind you could also hit the 'g' key (see Keyboard Short Cuts, two sections above) or you could assign the gear function to a button on your joystick (See Button Assignment, Chapter 3, page ___________). As you can see, there are many different ways to actuate controls.

Similarly, you can control radio frequencies, turn the ignition key through its various positions and actuate switches and levers with the mouse. Many of these controls can also be done with a keyboard shortcut as discussed above. To see the areas on which you can click in the cockpit, enable the Show Mouse Click Regions option in the Aircraft > Show Mouse Click Regions menu. This will draw little yellow boxes around the areas of the instrument panel that can be manipulated with the mouse.

Note on Radio Tuning

Avionics in most airplanes utilize twin concentric knobs that allow the pilot to tune the radio. For example there will typically be a larger knob on the surface of the radio and a smaller knob that sticks out from the large one. The first knob controls the integer portion of the frequency and the smaller knob will control the decimal portion. For example, lets say you wanted to tune your COM1 radio (the Communications number 1 radio) to 128.00 MHz. To do this in the real aircraft, you'd turn the big, lower knob until 128 was visible in the window and you'd turn the small, upper knob until 00 was visible. X-Plane is set up the same way. When you hover the mouse in the vicinity of one of the radio tuning knobs, you will find that you have two counter-clockwise arrows on the left of the knob and two clockwise arrows on the right. The arrows closest to the knob are physically smaller than the others and these adjust the decimal. The outside set of arrows is larger and adjusts the integer.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Demo Flight

Lets start with an example flight. X-Plane offers the capability to allow the aircraft to be flown by artificial intelligence (AI). You can set the AI system up to take the aircraft off and fly around. These functions are available in the About > AI flies aircraft menu. Go ahead and select AI flies your Aircraft and let the computer fly for you. You should experiment with the different views to become familiar with them and also practice raising and lowering the aircraft's landing gear and flaps and such. This would also be a fine time to practice tuning radios and to spend time becoming familiar with the various cockpits.

When you are ready to fly by ourself, turn off the AI flies your Aircraft function and open the airplane again as this is the easiest way to get it back on the ground. Note that the aircraft will open sitting at the airport that was closest to the location at which the previous aircraft was flying.

Flying yourself, with the mouse, Joystick, or Yoke

OK, that was quite a lot of preliminary work but now your X-Plane software is installed, set up to match the capabilities of your computer, your monitor and joystick settings have been perfected and you've become familiar with how to interact with the aircraft. Now it's time to go out and fly. You should be sitting on the end of the runway in the Cessna 172 or other aircraft of your choice. Slowly advance the throttle and then release the brakes when you get to about the half-throttle point. Continue to advance the throttle and be ready to feed in some right yaw (right rudder or twist on your joystick, if applicable) as you began accelerate. This is normal in single engine aircraft and X-Plane demonstrates this behavior as well.

Don't worry if it takes a few tries to learn how to keep the aircraft on the runway, the Cessna can take off in the grass just fine. If your airplane turns off into the grass as its accelerating, just keep on going. Normally the pilot will rotate (that is, apply some back elevator, but pulling back on the yoke or stick) at about 60 to 65 knots in the Cessna 172. Once the aircraft leaves the ground feed in a bit of forward stick to momentarily level off to allow the airplane to build speed. Once you get to 80 knots or so then again pull back gently on the stick and resume your climb.

Before you concern yourself with navigation or attempting to fly around the pattern or to come in for a landing first just enjoy yourself. Many of these other topics are covered in Chapter 6: Navigation, Autopilots and Flying on Instruments.

Note that if you have a mishap and crash the airplane hard enough X-Plane will automatically open a new airplane for you and put you on the end of the closest runway, which may be a grass strip! If you crash but the impact is only hard enough to bend the airplane up but not necessarily to kill the occupants than your aircraft will just sit there and smoke. If this happens than you will need to go to Aircraft > Open Aircraft and open a new airplane to get things fixed. If only it was so easy in the real world!