A basic flight simulator tutorial



Foreword
Hardware
Software

The basic catastrophe: flying straight
Basic turning
Turning on the ground
So, two methods exist to turn in the air?

Engine control
Wings and speed
The flaps
The stall
The trim
What direction am I flying?

A realistic take off
Landing

How to fly when there is wind
How to take off when there is wind
How to land when there is wind
How to taxi when there is wind

The autopilot

Security

How to land the Cherokee Warrior II
How to take off and land the Piper J3 Cub
How to take off and land a jet
How to take off and land the P-51D Mustang
How to take off and land the B-52 Stratofortress

What then?
What is a flight simulator worth to learn flying?





Foreword


Aviation is about extremes:

This tutorial is based on the Cessna 172p, which is the default airplane on lots of flight simulators and a great airplane:





Possibly take a quick look at the following articles. You may feel the need to come back to them later. They contain answers to questions that can arise while reading this tutorial. The first ones show the airplane's main parts and controls:




Hardware


I assume you are using the regular mouse and keyboard of your computer. You need no joystick nor plastic pedals or control yoke to use the flight simulator. Such hardware would be more realistic (especially with force feedback). Yet I don't own any myself and I suppose most flight simulation candidates don't.

You need a "3D-accelerated graphics card" inside your computer and its proper drivers installed. Don't bother if you don't know what this is. Today most computers are sold with such a graphics card. Simply install the flight simulator software and start it to check you get a fluent display. If not, either an 3D-accelerated graphics card isn't installed or its drivers aren't properly installed. Get help.

Sound is not mandatory but it really helps. For example when landing you need to hear the wheels touch the runway. Sound is one of the direct neural connections that allow a pilot to become the airplane's brain.




Software


To know the trim position, use the HUD (h, H and I) or the I-shaped indicator on the schematic instrument panel (P).

The trim movement is very slow. Be patient.

Lots of modern airplanes have a remote control for the trim: a little switch on the yoke, that you can manipulate easily with your fingers. So you don't have to duck to roll the big wheel.




What direction am I flying?


Four basic methods exist to know what direction you are flying:






! During a real flight in a real airplane, you are supposed to cross-check all direction indicators once in a while.

Memorize the directions: North is 0°, East is 90°, South is 180° and West is 270°.




A realistic take off


By now I assume you are able to keep the airplane on the runway while taking off (rudder) and you're able to fly straight, descend peacefully, gain altitude steadily, make gentle turns (yoke)... No need you perform this all perfectly. Yet a basic and approximate control of the airplane has been acquired.

Rules during take off:
So, you need to take off and rise in the air at a steady speed of around 75 knots.

Problem: since the front wheel is slightly lifted and the flaps are one step deployed, the plane will rise from the ground already at 55 knots. That's well below the desired flight speed of 75 knots. What to do then? Answer: as soon the two rear wheels lift from the ground, push the yoke forwards a little. Keep the plane close above the ground. (The aim of this is: should a wind blow from the rear occur, the plane will fall from only a few feet hight.) (Please do not train to keep the plane exactly two feet above the ground. Doing so would be dangerous. Do allow the plane to rise slightly while it accelerates, but, simply put: do not favor this tendency.) So, keep it close above the ground while accelerating, till a speed of about 70 knots is reached. Then switch to the opposite mode: now you must pull on the yoke to prevent the plane from going above 75 knots. Force the plane to rise in the air, so it doesn't gain speed. Keep in control. If the speed goes below 75 knots, push a little on the yoke. If it rises above 75 knots, pull a little on the yoke. Till you reach 500 feet above the ground.

This is the procedure I use to take off. I assume you just started FlightGear; the airplane is at the start of the runway and the engine is turning at minimum power:









500 feet above the ground is the minimum flight altitude above open land. Above a city the minimum altitude is 1,000 feet.

If you take off from KSFO heading to the West, you have city areas in front of you and left of you. So, once you reach 500 feet above the ground, best turn to the right.
Don't forget to center the rudder. If the rudder is pushed to one side, this will brake the plane. It makes the plane move sideways through the air, with its flank aerobraking.

Don't forget to retract the flaps.

! During a real take off you must keep in touch with the control tower. You also have to constantly look in all directions to check no other airplane is coming in your direction.

An aviation classic is the ground effect. It's the fact a wing lifts better when close above to the ground. That too makes the wheels leave the ground at quite a low speed, a speed at which the airplane cannot really fly. While you are accelerating a few feet above the runway, you are in ground effect. If you know about it, ground effect is an advantage because it makes flying close above the ground more secure. The airplane behaves a tiny little bit like a hovercraft. If you are not aware of the ground effect, it can cause problems. For example it can make you think the airplane has enough speed to rise in the air, while it has not.

! During a real take off, if the engine halts below 500 feet, you are not allowed to turn and try to glide and land back on the runway. You only have enough height to try to turn and land back if you are above 500 feet when the engine halts.

! Before a real take off you have to go through check-lists. A checklists makes you verify, tune and tighten a list of items. You have to follow a long checklist before you enter the runway and a short checklist before you accelerate to take off.

This is the checklist I follow when I take of the virtual Cessna 172p on FlightGear. It is very short compared to a real checklist. Anyway I know I can go into (moderate) trouble if I don't follow it. I had to build up the discipline to follow it carefully each time:



Landing


When I was a boy, I had a simple yet fairly good flight simulator on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer. I could do everything with it, except landing. I always crashed the plane, or reached the end of the runway before stopping. One day a real pilot saw me trying to land. He had never seen a flight simulator, but he had no problem to recognize each flight instrument and ground feature on the screen. He told me what to do. Decrease engine power, increase engine power, push the nose down, pull the nose up, turn a little left, turn a little right, get the flaps out... We made a perfect landing on the second attempt.

Just like for take off, landing is partly a procedure, partly rules you have to stick to. You have to adapt constantly.

Same basic rules apply as for take off, yet in reverse order:
(If you know what you are doing you are allowed to use a speed a little below 70 knots: 65 knots.)

Following rules are essential during the whole procedure of landing:
The reason why the yoke/elevator is used to tune the speed is this method allows for fast reactions and fine tuning. It is more important to tune the speed closely than the altitude.

If you are both a little too high and a little too slow, simply push the yoke a little and both problems will be solved together. No need to use the throttle. Use your mind...

You have to get aligned with the runway. That means your flight direction has to match the middle line of the runway (drawing (a) below). In order to arrive at this, don't aim at the start of the runway (b). Rather aim at a fictitious point well ahead of the runway (c). And begin to turn gently towards the runway well before you reach that fictitious point (d). Note the turns and bankings you make for these flight corrections are often very soft. You wouldn't even notice them on the turn coordinator. This is one example where you better rely on the outside horizon line than on the inside flight instruments.





Try to get aligned with the runway as soon as possible. Constantly apply the alignment procedure. The closer you come to the runway, the better the alignment should become. At tip: if you see that the two sides of the runway form an equal angle towards you, like / \ , this means you are above the middle line of the runway (supposing that middle line extends in front of the runway). So, if you see the runway neatly / \ and it is perfectly in front of you; in the middle of your flight direction; everything's fine. But if the runway is neatly / \ and it is situated to the right or to the left, this means you should have turned earlier to align. Now you sure are above the middle line extending from the runway, but you are flying in a wrong direction, away from that middle line and from the runway start...

My favorite landing procedure for the Cessna 172p is roughly this one:






Once the plane is halted or at very low speed, you can release the b key (if you used it) and add a little engine power to taxi to the parking or hangar.

To shut the engine down:
To set the parking brakes in, type B.

You must be mentally prepared to abort landing anytime. Whatever happens: an order from the control tower, a wrong speed or landing angle, a wrong alignment with the runway, a strong blow of wind, birds flying over the runway... retract the flaps to one, push the engine to maximum, center the trim and get back to high altitude. Then either you restart the landing procedure or you go for another airport. The pride of a pilot is to make only safe landings.

Don't try to find "the ideal distance" to start diving to the runway. The procedure above proposes you start diving when the white engine cover starts eating the runway edge (provided you fly at 70 knots with one flaps step) (the altitude doesn't matter). Best is you train to land while starting the dive earlier and while starting to dive later. You need to be trained to increase or decrease engine power according to what is needed. During a real landing, depending on the airplane's weight, the wind speed and other random things, the "ideal" moment to dive is unpredictable. As experience builds up, you will better feel the right moment.

If you want to make things simple for your first landing trainings, make use of the fact the runway at KSFO is very long. Wait a little more before you begin the dive: let the nose "eat up" the whole length of the leading part of the runway (let the successive pairs of white strips on the runway disappear below the airplane nose). Then lower the flaps to three steps and decrease the engine to minimum. Dive to keep the speed around 70 knots and try to keep aligned with the runway. You will end the dive quite far beyond the runway start and at a high vertical speed, but who cares. Make the final rounding. Keep aligned with the runway and try to fly close above it. Keep pulling more and more on the yoke/mouse, to keep the airplane flying. Yet avoid it rising in the air. Till the wheels touch the ground. Then just keep the airplane on the runway, using the rudder. Once the speed is below 40 knots, push the yoke/mouse and keep key b down to brake.

If you are a newbie, you probably won't succeed to apply the procedure perfectly. My advice: invent your own, more simple procedure. Then regularly come back to the procedure listed here and read it again, to get hints and ideas to better your procedure. Till you get it. Also best read other landing procedures. Send me a mail if you find interesting differences. Analyze your own procedure. If it implies to fly at very low speed, it is dangerous because a blow of wind from the rear will make the plane fall. A probable problem with your procedure is the plane needs a lot of runway length to land. If you look at the runway start you will see there are successive groups of white stripes. I land the Cessna 172 always well before the last group of stripes. If you are a real beginner, your procedure surely will make the plane tilt over or crash once in a while. The procedure listed here is safe. Train your procedure, again and again. The more you train it, the more you will become able to use the one listed here. That's the way I learned to land...

! In a real airplane, you must keep in touch with the control tower constantly while landing. You will be contacted by the control tower or you have to contact it in some key parts of the landing. If you don't contact the control tower just after landing, an emergency rescue team is immediately underway. If there is no good reason you didn't contact the tower, you will really be in trouble.

Maybe you'd like to train landing without having to take off and circuit in order to head for the runway and land. Type the command line displayed below in a terminal window to start the simulator in flight and heading for the runway. The airplane is placed 6 miles ahead of the runway, at an altitude of 1000 feet and a speed of about 120 knots.

fgfs --offset-distance=6 --altitude=1000 --vc=120

Possibly add  --timeofday=noon --geometry=1024x768  parameters if you need daylight and a bigger window (choose anything you need instead of 1024x768 (I favor 1200x900 an my screen)). FlightGear command line parameters are listed in http://www.flightgear.org/Docs/InstallGuide/getstartch4.html#x9-330004.4

(Note the parameters above make the airplane have some trim tuned in. Yet you need another trim tuning during the horizontal steady flight towards the runway. See the chapter above, about the trim. If in doubt, just center the trim. On the Cessna 172p, a centered trim seems the right position.)

Once you are trained, you no longer need to do a long horizontal flight at 500 feet and 70 knots to get to the runway. Instead you can descend all the way from your flight altitude and at a higher speed. You should be able to get at 500 feet and 70 knots a short while before the final dive.

Landing at 65 knots instead of 70 knots allows to use a much shorter runway length. Yet to benefit from this you better train landing at 65 knots. It is quite different from landing at 70 knots.

The landing speed varies according to the load of the airplane. The more load of petrol, passengers and freight, the higher the optimal landing speed will be.




How to fly when there is wind


Think of a hot air balloon. Think of it as being in the middle of a gigantic cube of air. The cube of air may move at high speed compared to the ground, anyway the balloon itself is completely static in the middle of the cube. Whatever the wind speed, persons aboard a hot air balloon experience not the faintest blow of wind. (To pilot a hot air balloon you bring it at an altitude where the wind blows in a direction that more or less suits your needs.) The same way, an aircraft flies in the middle of a gigantic cube of air and only refers to that cube of air. The motion of the cube of air compared to the ground doesn't bother the aircraft.

You, the pilot, on the contrary, do bother for the speed of the surrounding air compared to the ground. It can make you drift to the left or to the right. It can make you arrive at your destination much later or much sooner than planed.

When the wind blows in the same direction as you fly, the speed of the wind adds itself to the airspeed of the plane. Hence you move faster compared to the ground. You will arrive earlier at your destination and have less time to enjoy the landscape. (It sometimes happens that a jet airliner flying with a strong wind from the rear, moves faster than the speed of sound compared to the ground. Though it doesn't brake the sound barrier.)

When the wind blows in the opposite direction you fly (towards the nose of the plane), the speed of the wind subtracts itself from the airspeed of the plane. Hence you move slower compared to the ground. You will arrive later at your destination and have more time to enjoy the landscape. (Some slow airplane flying against strong wind can even seem to fly backwards, because the speed of the wind is faster than the flight airspeed of the airplane.)

The two cases above are quite simple. More complex is when the wind blows towards the side of the airplane. Look at the pictures below.




How much to the left or to the right of the object must you head? At what angle? Serious pilots use tight geometry and trigonometry computations to get near exact and optimal angles. Yet I wouldn't fly a virtual Cessna 172p if I had to do such dry things. You need no computations at all to fly roughly straight. The trick is you must keep your eyes on the object you fly towards. You know you will head the plane in a direction to the left or to the right of the object, but you don't need to know the angle. Just keep your eyes on the object. Get aware you are drifting leftwards or rightwards. Then let your instinct slowly head the plane to the right or to the left to compensate the obvious drift. When you begin training this, you need to force your instinct a little bit and think of what you are doing. Very soon this will become automatic, just like when you learned to fly straight. You will no more keep the plane headed towards the object. You will rather keep it flying towards the object. The picture below shows a flight towards the top of the little mountain ahead. Wind blows from the right. I just look at he mountain top. And I let my hands head the plane to right of the mountain, without really thinking about it:





The faster the flight airspeed compared to the wind speed, the less the wind will influence.




How to take off when there is wind


Main recommendation to take off is you must find a way to accelerate facing the wind; with the wind blowing towards the nose of the airplane. Before most runways are build, statistics are made about the wind at that location. The runway orientation is chosen so it aligns with the wind most often. Lots of airports have two runways at different orientations because the wind sometimes blows in one of these directions and sometimes in the other direction. The location of an airport is often chosen because at that place the wind often has a stable direction and speed.

Take off with a faint wind blowing towards the rear of the airplane, say 1 knot, for sure is no problem. Yet above a few knots you can get into trouble. With a 10 knot wind blowing from the rear, the front wheel will rise at the usual 40 knots airspeed, but that makes 50 knots compared to the runway. What matters is the speed the front wheel roll over the runway, not the airspeed... If a problem occurs and you are still rolling at 60 knots on the runway, the consequences will be more dramatic. To end with, you will need much more runway length and have less opportunities to abort the landing.

The main way to know the wind direction and speed is to go to the control tower or ask the control tower by radio. A necessary and complementary tool are the windsocks at both ends of the runway. They show the wind direction and speed. The longer and the stiffer the windsock, the more wind there is. The windsock on the picture below shows an airspeed of 5 knots:





So, you have to choose a runway start that allows you to take off with the airplane facing the wind. In real life you are not always allowed to do this. Either there is no runway aligned with the wind or the control tower tells you to use another runway. Then you have to take off under crosswind; the wind blowing towards a side of the airplane.

Basically, you can use the exact same procedure as listed above for a take off when there is no crosswind. Yet you have to be aware of several important facts listed below. To train this, start FlightGear with the parameter  --wind=0@10  which implies a wind of 10 knots blowing from the North (direction 0). If you take off from the usual San Francisco KSFO airport heading to the West, this makes the wind blow from the right.






Why do you keep the yoke to the right and the rudder pedals to the left once the airplane rises in the air? This can seem odd. It's quite logical that way the airplane will fly straight. The ailerons and the rudder compensate each other and the airplane turns neither to the right, neither to the left. But again, why do this, why not simply let the yoke/ailerons and the rudder centered? The airplane will fly straight too and be far less braked. The reason why we do this is the ailerons keep the airplane banked to the right; towards the direction the wind is blowing from. Hence, the huge force on the wings, that keeps the airplane in the air, that huge force is now slightly directed to the right. In normal circumstances this would make the airplane move slowly sideways to the right, at 10 knots speed... Currently, it compensates for the 10 knots wind and keeps the airplane above the runway. So despite the wind, the airplane stays headed towards the runway end and stays above the runway middle. Everything's fine (except for the braking).

To me, 10 knots wind is a maximum to take off the Cessna 172p safely.




How to land when there is wind


You land the Cessna 172p under crosswind the same way you take off:
Under high crosswind, hence with a strong rudder angle, the plane brakes a lot. This implies two things:
Landing that way is quite comfortable, despite the crosswind. You just have to be a bit more careful with the rudder once the airplane rolls over the runway. And best keep the ailerons as if turning towards the wind.

Note such a landing, with a steady crosswind, is unrealistic. In the real world the wind varies quickly. You get sudden increases and gusts of wind. The control tower just tells you by radio the maximum speed of the gusts. You have to adapt constantly during the landing, to react to the turbulences and gusts.

As for the take off, 10 knots wind seems a maximum to me. (Should you ever have to land under heavy wind, say 25 knots or more, and there is no runway aligned with the wind, maybe best don't land on the runway. Or don't try to align with the runway. Align exactly with the wind and make use of the fact you need less ground length to stop. When the plane is going to stop keep the rudder pushed. Don't try to taxi. Simply push the parking brakes in, push the trim and get help to latch the airplane to the ground. In fun mode, landing the Cessna 172p under 70 knots wind is great. You simply let it descent to the ground vertically. This is quite unrealistic because at such a wind speed there are tremendous turbulences close to the ground.)

The technique described here is the slip landing. Another crosswind landing technique is the crab landing.




How to taxi when there is wind


Under 10 knots wind the Cessna 172p seems not to need particular precautions when taxiing. Yet any sudden increase in wind speed can tilt it and tumble it over. So best apply the recommendations whenever there is wind.

To train taxiing on the ground when there is wind, ask for a strong wind like 20 knots. Such a wind can tilt the plane and blow it away tumbling any moment. One single error during taxiing and the plane is lost.

Main rule is you must push the yoke towards the wind. This deserves some physical explanation:
Accept the plane nose can be tilted and the tail pushed against the ground. Keep cool. This can be impressive yet there is nothing dangerous with it. Go on using the brakes, rudder and engine to move the airplane.

If you want to move towards the wind, you will need more engine power. When the wind blows from the rear you may need no engine power at all. Always keep the engine power to the minimum needed.

Especially when turning, move very slowly. Make little changes at a time. Take your time and closely survey the yoke angle. Constantly keep it pushed towards the wind. Constantly try to reduce the engine power. Keep in mind using the brakes too firmly may shortly tilt the plane at an angle that allows the wind to tilt it and blow it away.




The autopilot

An autopilot is not an "intelligent" pilot. It just takes over simple and wearing parts of your work as a pilot. You still are the sole real pilot aboard and have to keep aware of everything. Be prepared to shut the autopilot down. During take off and landing, relying on the autopilot would be suicidal, because you have to keep an immediate control on every function of the airplane. (Dumb autopilot systems are reported to cause less accidents than smart ones with artificial intelligence inside.)

The autopilot is that little rack to the right of the yoke:





Switch it on by pressing its AP button (standard mouse mode). The autopilot then controls the roll. It keeps the wings level with the horizon. This is displayed in the picture below by the "ROL" marking. To switch the autopilot down press again on AP.





If you press the HDG button the autopilot will try to keep the plane flying towards the direction tuned on the directional gyro by the red marking (see the chapter about direction). "HDG" stands for "heading". Press again on the HDG button to get back to roll control mode (or AP to switch the autopilot down).





The buttons ALT, UP and DN are used to tell the autopilot either to control the vertical speed (VS) or the altitude (ALT).

From here on you maybe better study the document used by the author of the autopilot system in FlightGear: https://www3.bendixking.com/servlet/
com.honeywell.aes.utility.PDFDownLoadServlet?FileName=/
TechPubs/repository/006-18034-0000_2.pdf




Security

Security is first of all a matter of common sense. Avoid to land with the landing gear retracted. Fill the reservoirs before take off and don't let them get empty in flight. This may seem funny recommendations, the fact remains I made several landings on the aircraft belly when I started using the flight simulator. I got angry on myself and now it nevermore happens that I forget such a simple and essential thing. In real life you are not allowed to land airplanes on the belly in order to get angry on yourself. I suppose it is a part of the role of the monitors to make you feel the angriness *before* your first solo landing. I suppose they don't let somebody fly on his own till they feel the angriness is rooted deeply enough in him. People who cannot cope with this are not meant to become pilots.

There are many more vital details than the landing gear and the fuel. That's why checklists exist. There are checklists for all kinds of normal or emergency situations. There are long checklists and short checklists. This link provides checklists for the Cessna 172p and for other airplanes: http://www.freechecklists.net . Those checklists refer to much more levers, buttons and triggers than talked about in this tutorial. There is nothing complicated in those checklists provided you learned what all those little things are. For example one item is you have to verify the seats backs are upright.

You have to learn to cope with stress. Wherever I get access to computers I try to install FlightGear. To me the computer industry should focus solely on building computers for FlightGear. Secondary tools like browsers, mailers, spreadsheets and the like, should be regarded as optional sub-functions of FlightGear. Once the installation is finished, I make a demo flight. Strangely, most people simply don't care about what I am doing. They just go on talking, asking questions, requesting my attention... What's more I'm often not in the most adequate position toward the screen, the keyboard and the mouse. It becomes almost impossible to fly correctly, especially to land. Basically there are two possible attitudes. The first one is I get silently angry on the disturbing persons, I stop the demo and I consider it's their fault if I cannot succeed my flight. The second attitude is I breath deeply and calmly, I find ways to go on managing the burdens and the problems, I don't get angry on anybody, I claim nothing to be responsible for anything, I renounce to make a perfect demo flight and I focus on making a mediocre yet secure landing. The advantage of the first attitude is that you feel comfortable about your superiority on FlightGear-unaware persons. The disadvantage of the second attitude is that you have to endure the humiliation of an ugly landing and the people around going on talking and requesting your attention. The advantage of the second attitude is that in real life, on a real airplane, it allows you to stay alive.

Communication is a basis for security. That means communication with the technicians, with the control tower, with your copilot, with the passengers and especially with yourself. You have to constantly gather data about the traffic, the meteorology and the state of mind of your passengers. You have to constantly inform the control tower and obey the instructions it sends you in return. You have to keep your passengers in an acceptable mood and at the same time you have to obtain they let you focus on your tasks when this is necessary. Lots of airline accidents occured because of a lack of communication between the pilot and other crew members. That has been called "the Superman syndrome". Once the problems start, the pilot focuses on his way to solve the situation. Either the copilot does not understand what the pilot is doing or he becomes aware of a danger the pilot did not realize. This results in contradictory commands sent to the airplane controls, shouting, up to fist fighting... till the final crash of the airplane. An important part of the training for modern pilots is to learn to communicate with the other crew members under high stress. They learn to go on communicating and how to do that a short and efficient way. (I was once told this anecdote: a monitor and a trainee were performing landings. The trainee was a strong guy with muscles like truck tires. At one moment the landing path appeared to be wrong. The monitor asked the trainee to release the commands so he could take them over. There is nothing wrong with failing a landing. Monitors themselves sometimes fail a landing, abort and restart a new landing. But the trainee panicked and crispated his hands on the yoke. The monitor could do nothing. The consequence was a damaged landing gear.)

There is no room for luck in real aviation. When you train to become a pilot, almost every possible situation is put into practice at least once. For example a monitor makes you take off with a heavily loaded airplane and suddenly shuts the engine down. You have to train to fly and land with a random airplane control or indicator out of order. FlightGear allows to reproduce some of these trainings. You can request flight instrument failures using FlightGears' menus or command options. A really bad instrument failure means the instrument still seems to operate correctly. Yet it doesn't, and what it does or displays endangers you. While training you can decide to no more use a given instrument or control. For example you can glue a sticker on your screen to hide away an instrument. Best is you ask a friend to configure a failure without you knowing what he did. This heavy training and the numerous precautions and rules are the reason why so few accidents occur. In most cases, even a severe problem does not lead to an accident. Accidents are often due to the unlucky addition of several different problems.

The picture below shows the artificial horizon indicator. I hardly never use it. I fly looking at the real horizon. Anyway the artificial horizon saved me more than once on the simulator. When you penetrate by mistake in a cloud or a bank of mist, you suddenly get a white outside. There is no more way to keep the plane flying level, except by using the artificial horizon. You may argue this is due to the lack of feedback own to the simulator. You're (dead) wrong. The same problem occurs on a real airplane. Quite many of the (very few) accidents in little airplanes like the Cessna 172 or the PA-28 happen that way. It is prohibited for a pilot with no IFR license to enter a cloud. Some do it anyway. Or they get caught in a rise of mist the control tower didn't warn for. The airplane banks and in two minutes time it goes flying upside down. The pilot is unaware of this. Even worse: some instruments seem to get mad, with no obvious reason. A crash is unavoidable. I learned the reflex to focus on the artificial horizon, the altimeter and the directional gyro. When this happens the plane is often already severely banked. I keep calm and I use the instruments to maintain the plane in a sound flight. It will oscillate a lot but serious problems will be avoided. Either I will wait till I get out of the cloud or I will gain or loose altitude to get out of the cloud layer. I strongly advice you train this using the simulator. Best is you make a complete IFR training.





One thing you have to train for your security is landing on very short distances. Some flight incidents, like an engine failure or a sudden change in the weather, can force you to land on the first strip of flat land you encounter.

The HUD allows to fly and land more easily, with less stress. It also allows to optimize what you are doing and this is good for security. For example it allows to touch the ground very close after the beginning of the runway. That way you have the whole length of the runway to brake. (A HUD is available for every aircraft on FlightGear, even the 1903 Wright Flyer. In real life, few little civil airplanes contain a HUD. It is too expensive and too recent.)

There are some strong differences between a flight simulator with minimalistic control hardware and a real airplane. The fact the mouse exerts no counterforce, the fact you don't feel the vibrations and forces inside the airplane... On one hand, some aspects of flying are made easier on the simulator. On the other hand, a real airplane constantly gives all sorts of valuable feedback you don't get with a simulator. One thing is common to the simulator and the real airplane: while landing you'd wish you had four arms and two more brains.

FlightGear contains bugs. Consider those problems as a training for real aircrafts. Problems on real aircrafts are not the same. But there are problems. When FlightGear suddenly puts you in a critical situation due to a bug, consider this as a training. Try to solve the situation fast and efficiently while keeping calm. It's not a bug, it's a feature!

The handbooks of airplanes contain procedures and checklists for emergency situations. It sometimes happens that the adequate reaction to a problem is exactly the opposite for two different airplanes. That's one reason airline pilots are not allowed to fly different airplanes at the same time. If they choose to go flying another type of airliner, there are imposed to stop flying for a lengthy period, during which they will practice the other type of airplane on simulators. The wide range of aircrafts available under FlightGear allows you to experiment with this.




How to land the Cherokee Warrior II


To write this chapter I just gathered some data about the Cherokee Warrior II and I made experiments with FlightGear. Don't consider this as a tutorial but merely as hints to toy with the virtual Cherokee Warrior II.

On Linux you get the Cherokee Warrior II (or PA-28) with the  --aircraft=pa28-161  command line parameter. The Cherokee Warrior II has some advantages upon the Cessna 172p. Thanks to its low wings it is far less sensitive to crosswind. Fully extended flaps are more braking and allow to land on a much shorter distance.

Take off is the same as for the Cessna 172p (in FlightGear. In real life their take off checklists are not exactly the same).

You have to get used to some minor differences of the Cherokee Warrior II for the landing:
In real life, an advantage of the Cessna 172p upon the Cherokee Warrior II is the fuel reservoirs of the Cessna are located in the wings close above the center of the plane and higher than the engine. What's more an automatic system switches between the reservoirs. That makes you almost don't have to bother for the way the fuel gets to the engine in flight. On the contrary, on the Cherokee Warrior II the reservoirs are located separately, on both wings and lower than the engine. That means you have to constantly switch between the two reservoirs in flight. Should one reservoir become much lighter than the other, this would destabilize the airplane. The fact the reservoirs are lower than the engine means you have to control the fuel pumps and the backup fuel pumps.

Some links:



How to take off and land the Piper J3 Cub


Use the  --aircraft=j3cub  parameter to get the Piper J3 Cub on Linux.

The Piper J3 Cub is a very different airplane from the Cessna 172p and the Cherokee Warrior II. The Cessna 172p and the Cherokee Warrior II are front wheel airplanes while the Piper J3 Cub is a tail wheel airplane. Stall speed seems to be a little below 40 mph (the Piper Cub's airspeed indicator is in mph) (remember the HUD expresses speed in knots, not mph). I guess an appropriate speed to rise in the air is about 60 mph. Normal flight speed seems about 80 mph.

It is a simpler aircraft, as it has no flaps and few instruments. This doesn't mean it is easier or safer to fly. While you will find the "three points" take off and landing to be quite easy in FlightGear, the "two points" take off and landing need serious training. You need to master these procedures (and many others) to fly the Piper Cub securely. Worst that can happen is you get confident in the airplane without having been trained to the numerous possibilities of things going bad. Then you simply won't be able to prevent things to go bad. (And, again: you're reading a tutorial written by somebody who has no pilot license and who never even flew a Piper Cub as a passenger.)

This is what I believe to be the "three points" take off. It is quite simple to perform in FlightGear, but: a friend who is a pilot told me he learned this procedures much later than the "two points", because in the real world the wind makes the three points procedure difficult. It can be performed in FlightGear without using the rudder, which of course is not realistic:
Meanwhile make a 180° turn to go for the landing. Fly a long time, till the runway is a good distance behind you, then make another 180° turn to head for the runway.

This is my favorite three points landing:
Now, about what seems the "two points" take off. It more ressembles that of a "normal" airplane yet with some big differences on the yoke:
Then this should ressemble the "two points" landing:
This is a third landing procedure. It involves the fact the Piper J3 Cub is a very lightweight airplane and it has a not too catastrophic behavior during a stall. No idea if this is allowed, anyway it is a standard procedure for the Flying Flea, another legendary aircraft, which has the property to not stall at all:


How to take off and land a jet


Take off on a jet is easy but you must have fast reflexes. My favorite toy jet on FlightGear is the A-4 Skyhawk. You get it with the  --aircraft=a4-uiuc  parameter on Linux, provided it is installed.

This is my "calm" procedure to take off:


The "nervous" take off procedure is the same but you push in full engine power. The plane takes off quickly and you need to settle a very steep climb angle to keep 200 knots. Best retract the landing gear immediately.

You don't land a jet the same way you land a little propeller airplane. My toy way to land the toy A-4, inspired by some texts I found on the Web, is this:




Let's explain this. The two horizontal lines labeled "0" show the horizon line. Rather they show where the horizon would be if the Earth was flat. When your eyes aim at those "0" lines, you are looking horizontally. Look at the dotted red lines labeled "-10". A feature on the ground situated there is situated 10° below the ideal horizon. In other words: when you look to objects "hidden" by the lines labeled "0", you have to lower your eyes of 10° to look at objects "hidden" by the dotted lines labeled "-10". This implies, and it is very important, that a person in a rowboat, "hidden" by the dotted lines labeled "-10", has to rise his eyes up 10° to look at your plane. He sees you 10° above the horizon. In the picture above, the start of the runway is situated at 64% of the way towards the red "-10" dotted lines. That means you have to lower your eyes of 6.4° to look at the runway start. This also means that if you start now to descent towards the runway start, the descent path will be of 6.4° (too steep). So, the HUD allows to measure precisely the angle of the descent path. On a jet plane you need an angle of 2.5° (up to 3°), that is 25% of -10° (up to 30%).



The HUD in a real jet contains a symbol to show towards what the airplane is moving. It is shown in the picture below. When you are flying at constant altitude, that symbol is on the ideal horizon line. Once you dive towards the runway start, you simply have to place that symbol on the runway start. This is quite an easy and precise way to aim at the runway start. (The diamond in the center of the FlightGear HUD sometimes can help but it does not have the same purpose. It shows towards what the airplane nose is pointing. For example is you descent towards the ground at low speed, the symbol would be somewhere on the ground while the FlightGear diamond will be up in the sky.) (By the way, the HUD on the virtual B-52 on FlightGear has that symbol. It is great to use while landing.)





Also, a real HUD shows a dotted line at -2.5° to help find the correct descend path. Simply keep that dotted line too on the runway start.

In a real jet you don't look at the airspeed indicator to land. Rather you look at a tool on the HUD or at the set of three lamps shown below. When the upper  v  is on, this means the speed is too slow. When the lower  ^  is on, the speed is too fast. The center  o  means the speed is OK. This indicator exists in FlightGear. On FlightGear version 0.9.8 it seems to have wrong speeds tuned in so I didn't use it. On FlightGear version 0.9.9 it seems OK. This indicator does not rely on the speed itself. Rather it relies on the AOA. That is the Angle Of Attack, the angle at which the wings are pitched up against the relative airstream. There is a close link between the AOA and the speed. I suppose the advantage of the AOA indicator is that the optimal AOA does not depend on the plane load. While the speed does. By tuning the correct AOA, always the same for every landing, you get the optimal speed whatever the plane load. (The A-4 on FlightGear has also an AOA indicator but I don't understand its output.)





The Cessna 172 and the A-4 Skyhawk are two extremes. Most other airplanes are in-between these two extremes. If you trained them both (and one or two tail wheel airplanes), you should be able to find out how to take off and land most other airplanes.

160 knots seems an appropriate landing speed for the F-16 Falcon. Also you need to throttle down the engine to minimum just before the plane should touch the runway. Otherwise it will hover over the runway. Don't bother for the flaps. It seems they are deployed automatically with the landing gear. (Read the chapter about the stall).

140 up to 150 knots and all 8 flaps steps deployed seem appropriate to land the virtual Boeing 737. But don't trust me especially on that one. I just made a few experiments and didn't search for serious data. The landing speed varies a lot depending on the plane load, I suppose 140 knots is for a plane with no load. The Boeing 737 seems to like a gentle rounding before the wheels touch the runway. Start the rounding early.

In the take off procedure for the Cessna 172 and the A-4 Skyhawk I recommend you pull the yoke/mouse/elevator to 1/2 the total way, from the start on. This seems to be a bad practice on the Pilatus PC-7. Keep the elevator neutral. Let the plane accelerate and wait till the speed gets over 100 knots. Then pull calmly on the yoke. During landing, deploy full flaps once you start plunging to the runway but don't decrease the engine throttle. Decrease it only when the hovering above the runway starts. 100 knots seems a good landing speed.

For the Cessna 310 too you better leave the elevator neutral during the acceleration on the runway. The plane will raise its nose by its own provided you deployed one flaps step. (If you keep the yoke pulled from the start on, the nose will rise sooner and you will get yawful yaw problems.)

(Some virtual airplanes, like some big airliners or fast aircraft, need faster physical computations. Then add the  --model-hz=480  parameter to the command line. If the plane is difficult to control during landings, try this.)

The angle at which you land a Cessna 172p is far steeper than the narrow 2.5° for a jet. Nevertheless you are allowed to land the Cessna at a narrow angle too. (Provided the terrain around the runway allows for this, of course.) If you have passengers who have ears problems with the variation of air pressure...




How to take off and land the P-51D Mustang


At low and medium altitude the P-51 Mustang wasn't better than the Spitfire and the Messerschmitts. The big difference was at high altitude. The P-51 kept efficient and maneuverable while enemy fighters were just capable to hang in the air. This was an advantage at medium altitude too because the P-51 was able to plunge towards enemy airplanes from high altitude. Another key difference was the P-51 is very streamlined. Hence it was capable to fly much further than the Spitfire. These two differences let the P-51 Mustang fulfill its purpose: escort Allied bombers all the way to their targets in Germany. This allowed the bombings to be much more efficient and contributed to the defeat of the Nazis.

To get the The P-51D Mustang in Linux use the  --aircraft=p51d  command line parameter.

This my best procedure to take off the P-51D Mustang in FlightGear:
To land:
Keep in mind this is not the genuine P-51D handbook.




How to take off and land the B-52 Stratofortress

The B-52F bomber implemented in FlightGear is a success. It is one of my favorite airplanes. I'm sorry it was conceived to terrify me. One single B-52 bomber can wipe out every main town of my country and rise a nightmare of sicknesses and children malformation for centuries. All B-52 bombers united can wipe out mankind and almost every kinds of plants and animals on Earth.

The differences between the virtual B-52F bomber and the Cessna 172p are these:
This is my procedure to take off the virtual B-52F:
To land, the B-52F's HUD offers that great airplane-shaped symbol I talked about in the chapter about jets. So you just have to put that symbol on the airplane threshold (a few pixels further seems optimal) and keep the runway start 2.5° below the ideal horizon line. 130 up to 140 knots seems a good landing speed. (Instead of the speed you can make use of the AOA indicator displayed on the schematic instrument panel (P). Simply keep the AOA at 3°. I must confess I prefer to tune the speed rather than the AOA.) If the plane gets to the runway at 130 up to 140 knots, simply "let it smash" on the runway. Otherwise, if the speed is higher, make a rounding and a short hover. The brakes seem to be very effective (b). They allow to stop the B-52F on roughly the same short runway length as the Cessna 172p.

Replays of the flights are a delight. They allow to check the plane body left the runway and landed back parallel with it. One of the points of view is situated inside the B-52F rear turret, which allows you to be your own passenger and to compare what you see with what you experienced as a passenger in airliners. The key K allows to visualize the airplane trajectory.
April 27
To cause an accident with the B-52 do this:



What then?


Once you master the content of this tutorial, you can claim to have a basic understanding of what steering an airplane is about. You still lack key knowledge and virtual training, like these:
You probably will learn to deal with a retractable landing gear system and with variable pitch propellers.

Go to the FlightGear documentation page for more tutorials and reference pages: http://www.flightgear.org/docs.html

These are great tutorials to learn further:



What is a flight simulator worth to learn flying?


If you learned to fly virtually (say with this tutorial) and learned to navigate virtually (with another tutorial), you sure got a clearer idea of what piloting is about. You still won't be admitted at the steer of a real airplane. If you now go for a pilot license, I guess the most obvious obstacles will be these:
On the other hand, piloting a real airplane is supposed to be easier than a virtual airplane on a home computer. A real airplane gives you much more feedback, through vibrations and noises and through force feedback from the controls. You can instantly "feel" how the plane is behaving. Also you get a panoramic view, while FlightGear offers you only a narrow front view during tense moments.

The pertinence of flight simulators has been much discussed. Military pilots spend more time in simulators than in real airplanes, which asserts the quality of those simulators. But what is a static simulator worth, running on a home computer with just a keyboard and a mouse? Worst of them are those video games that look like a flight simulator but don't reflect much of the behavior of a real airplane. Most horrible is their "inversed yoke" that makes you pull on the mouse or joystick to dive. Somewhat better are commercial simulators that emulate a plane a simplified way. Their purpose is to make things easy, to please the customer. They often have very realistic decors and simple keyboard inputs. One of the main qualities of FlightGear is it tries to reproduce as best as possible the physical behavior of a real airplane. This sometimes makes things quite frustrating but it is one of the few simulators that try to be honest with you.

If you train for real airplanes in a real aeroclub, you may perform some parts of the trainings on a home computer. If the software was not imposed to you by your instructors, always ask them to validate the software you will use, for each training. They know how to fly. I don't.



I wish to thank:



Eric Brasseur  -  September 30 2005  till  October 15 2007        [ Homepage | eric.brasseur@gmail.com ]