PMDG 737 Msfs Tutorial
PMDG 737 Msfs Tutorial
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
PMDG 737
Tutorial Flight
Copyright © 2011-2022
PMDG Simulations
All Rights Reserved
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
This manual and all of its contents, pages, text and graphics are protected under
copyright law of the United States of America and international treaties.
Duplication of this manual is prohibited. Permission to conduct duplication of this
manual will not be sub-contracted, leased or given.
Microsoft, the Microsoft logo and Microsoft Flight Simulator are registered
trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation. Boeing, the Boeing name and certain
brand marks are the property of The Boeing Company. Some graphics contained
in this manual were taken directly from the simulator and altered in order to suit
duplication on a printed page. All images contained in this manual were used with
permission.
Produced under license from Boeing Management Company. Boeing 737, 737-
600, 737-700, 737-800, 737-900 & Boeing are among the trademarks owned by
Boeing.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
You should also be aware that you may not use this simulation software
for any training, pilot familiarization, recurrent training or operational
awareness training.
Please note that this version of the simulation may or may not accurately
represent the actual operation of many different aircraft systems and no
warranty is made to accuracy or correctness.
This simulation may not be used in any public or private display for which
users are charged admission, usage fees or other revenue generating
charges. Nor may the simulation be used in any manner which reflects
poorly on PMDG, PMDG Simulations, Boeing, Boeing’s employees,
suppliers or customers.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DISCLAIMER AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION ................................... 2
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE ...................................................................... 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS .............................................................................. 4
INTRODUCTION.......................................................................................... 6
OVERVIEW .................................................................................................. 7
SETTING UP MSFS WITH THE PMDG 737 .............................................. 8
Selecting the Aircraft ................................................................................. 8
Selecting the Departure Airport ................................................................... 8
Selecting the Arrival Airport ........................................................................ 8
Setting the Weather and Time.................................................................. 8
Entering the Flight Deck ........................................................................... 9
FUEL AND PAYLOAD SETUP ................................................................. 10
CDU Notation Convention ...................................................................... 11
Entering Data Into The Scratchpad ........................................................ 12
A Note On Weights ................................................................................. 13
FMC ROUTE SETUP................................................................................. 17
Position Initialization ............................................................................... 19
Route Entry ............................................................................................. 21
Departure Entry....................................................................................... 23
Enroute Entry .......................................................................................... 26
STAR and Approach Entry ..................................................................... 28
Route Activation ...................................................................................... 32
PERFORMANCE DATA AND VERTICAL PATH INITIALIZATION ....... 33
N1 LIMIT AND TAKEOFF REFERENCE DATA SETUP ........................ 36
FLIGHT DECK CONFIGURATION ........................................................... 41
MCP Setup.............................................................................................. 43
EFIS Setup.............................................................................................. 45
Overhead Setup...................................................................................... 48
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
IN THE AIR ................................................................................................ 50
Takeoff .................................................................................................... 50
Climb ....................................................................................................... 54
Cruise...................................................................................................... 56
Descent ................................................................................................... 60
Final Approach........................................................................................ 63
Landing ................................................................................................... 66
SHUTDOWN AND THROUGH FLIGHT PROCEDURES ....................... 67
After Landing Procedures ....................................................................... 67
Shutdown Procedures ............................................................................ 69
CHARTS ADDENDUM .............................................................................. 71
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the tutorial flight for the PMDG 737! You’ve purchased one of
the most advanced simulations of a commercial jetliner currently available
for the Microsoft Flight Simulator platform – now it’s time to learn to fly it.
Similar to past tutorials, the tutorial for the PMDG 737 begins with getting
you up in the air as quickly as possible, covering the basics.
We’re aware many simmers just want to load the airplane on the runway,
program a route and go fly – that’s what this tutorial is all about.
We’re not going to be following the exact normal procedures and flows
from the Flight Crew Operating Manual Vol. 1 (FCOM Vol.1) that a real
life crew would do. This is distilled down to the basic steps you’ll need to
take to ensure correct setup of the FMC and operation of the airplane in
flight. You’ll be able to have virtually any route programmed and be in the
air within about 5 minutes using these methods provided you start on the
runway with the engines running.
The actual procedures don’t take much time at all once you’re
comfortable with them and have them internalized.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
OVERVIEW
Our flight today takes us from KPDX - Portland, Oregon to KSFO – San
Francisco, California. This is a common route flown by the Boeing 737
and will take a little over an hour to fly.
We’ll be taking off from Runway 10L and joining the MINNE Five
(MINNE5) departure. We’ll then follow a short series of airway waypoints
until we join the BDEGA3 arrival and the ILS for Runway 28R into San
Francisco.
There are no saved flights for this tutorial because we want to show you
how to do it from scratch.
We won’t be using any wind in the simulator for this flight as doing so
requires FMC CDU entries on various pages to get accurate predictions.
If you have not read the Introduction Manual, please make sure you do so
before proceeding.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Entering the Flight Deck
• Press CLOSE to go back to the WORLD MAP.
• On the WORLD MAP, press the FLY button.
• Once the loading is complete, press the FLY NOW button.
NOTE: Unlike the default aircraft or other addons you may be used to, the
PMDG 737 does not load fuel or payload via the Fuel and Payload
dialogue in the MSFS interface. We have created out own custom fuel
and payload systems inside the FMC that intelligently loads and unloads
fuel and payload according to the actual weight and balance practices
used by 737NG operators. You’ll always load fuel and payload via this
system, and never by default MSFS methods. We’ll see this system in use
in a minute!
You will be placed inside the PMDG 737 flight deck on Runway 10L at
Portland International.
Our first order of business is to set up the aircraft’s fuel and payload for
the flight. As was mentioned in the Introduction Manual, our philosophy
with the PMDG 737 is to minimize the use of MSFS menus as much as
possible. This not only keeps the experience more immersive and
seamless, but also keeps certain traffic and scenery addons that rely on
the sim not being paused from constantly reloading due to the menus
being accessed.
We’ve expanded its functionality for the MSFS environment to allow you
to handle many other functions such as fuel and payload, cockpit
equipment and display options, pushback, ground crew connections, and
a few other items.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Pan and zoom the view down to the captain’s FMC CDU, or alternatively
you can press left CTRL (control) + 3 on your keyboard, which will take
you to the captain’s FMC view.
The space at the bottom of the CDU screen is called the scratchpad. This
is where data that is entered on the keypad will appear. The act of moving
information from the scratchpad to a data field on the screen is called “line
selecting” and is accomplished by pushing the LSK next to the field you
want the scratchpad data to go into.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Entering Data Into The Scratchpad
You can click each individual key on the CDU with your mouse pointer to
enter data into the scratchpad.
NOTE: At this time Direct Entry Mode is not working. It will be enabled in
a future update. In this mode you will be able to enter data into the CDU
scratchpad with your keyboard.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
A Note On Weights
This tutorial is written using imperial weight units (pounds). Kilograms are
included in parentheses after the imperial units if you prefer to use those
units instead. Note that these equivalents are approximate and may
include rounding errors.
• If you would like to use metric units, the option can be changed in
the FMC by pressing MENU > PMDG SETUP (LSK 4R) >
AIRCRAFT (LSK 1L) > DISPLAYS (LSK 2L). Press PREV PAGE
once to get to Page 9/9, where the option is located at LSK 3L.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• On the MENU page we have added two prompts on the lower
right – PMDG SETUP at LSK 4R and FS ACTIONS at LSK 5R.
FS ACTIONS is the one that we need to change the fuel and
payload. Go ahead and press LSK 5R to go to the FS ACTIONS
menu.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Press LSK 1L to select the FUEL page.
The fuel page is our custom way of loading and unloading fuel from the
PMDG 737. The prompts on the left side allow you to set a fuel load by
units of mass, percentage, or by presets.
• For this flight, press the <SET 1/3 prompt at LSK 5L.
This is a short flight, and we won’t need much fuel for it. Flying with too
much fuel for your trip will just weigh the airplane down and hurt both
climb and descent performance.
For the future, if you want a good idea of how much fuel to load, enter
your route and then check the PROG page fuel prediction for the
destination airport. Subtract your currently loaded fuel from the amount
that it predicts at the destination and add 5500lbs (2495kg) for
alternate/hold and so on for a decent estimate. Use more if you have a
long distance alternate, or other extenuating circumstances. You’ll see the
fuel weight total at LSK 1L change to approximately 15,000lbs (6895kg).
Also notice that the fuel load has been automatically distributed properly
into the two wing tanks.
For Simulator Use Only DO NOT DUPLICATE JULY 2022
0.00.16 PMDG 737
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
The rule on the 737 (and most other airplanes) is that the wing tanks get
filled first and then the center tank.
The PAYLOAD page is used to load passengers and cargo. The prompts
on the right side are quick-load presets and on the left side you can type
and line select the exact number of first and coach class passengers,
along with the weight in the fore and aft cargo compartments.
• For this flight, type 50 into the scratchpad and then line select it to
LSK 3R to set the load level to 50%.
You may have noticed that there are real-time weight and balance
readouts at the upper right of the screen on both the FUEL and
PAYLOAD pages. The fields are Gross Weight (GW), the Maximum
Takeoff-Weight (MTOW), the Zero Fuel Weight (ZFW), and the Center of
Gravity (CG). Using these you can see at a glance if your weight and
balance are within the allowable limits. The fields will turn yellow to warn
you if they get out of limits.
JULY 2022 DO NOT DUPLICATE For Simulator Use Only
PMDG 737 0.00.17
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
MINNE5.FAMUK.Q3.FOWND.MLBEC.BDEGA3
This may look confusing if you’re not familiar with how to read and decode
flightplans, but it’s actually pretty simple.
In this case, we’re going to follow the MINNE Five (MINNE5) SID to the
FAMUK waypoint – FAMUK acts as the interchange onto the Q3 airway.
We follow Q3 until the fix FOWND. From FOWND, we proceed direct
(noted on the flight plan with a double dot after FOWND) to another fix
called MLBEC, which is also the first waypoint of the BDEGA3 STAR into
San Francisco. You can see the actual charts for the SID and STAR
attached at the end of this document.
The key concept to understand here is that there are additional waypoints
along SIDs, airways, and STARs that are not explicitly written out in the
coded flightplan you saw above.
Keeping with the highway analogy, these are equivalent to the exits and
interchanges in towns or cities that you pass by along your drive but don’t
actually use. The neat thing about the way the FMC works is that those
extra waypoints get automatically entered in when you use the DEP ARR
and ROUTE pages to enter SIDs, airways, and STARs.
Note that you may see routes written in slightly different formats such as:
or
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Let’s move on now to initializing the FMC lateral route on the CDU. The
basic sequence we’ll be following to accomplish this is:
1. Position Initialization
2. Airport entry
3. Departure entry
4. Enroute entry
5. STAR and Approach entry
6. Route activation
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Position Initialization
• Press MENU, which will take us back to the root menu.
• Press LSK 1L, the <FMC prompt.
We’re now on the IDENT page.
The IDENT page doesn’t contain any fields for entry, but it does provide
you with some valuable information such as your engine thrust rating (in
this case 24,000lbs of thrust per engine), the currently installed navigation
database and its valid dates, and the FMC software version, known as
the Op Program.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Press LSK 6R to move on to the POS INIT page.
The POS INIT page is used at the beginning of each flight to align the
inertial reference system (IRS) gyros. When loading from Free Flight as
we’ve done in this tutorial, the IRS is already aligned, so we do not have
any actions on this page.
After the inclusion of GPS on the flight deck, the REF AIRPORT and
GATE fields have become antiquated. Entering KPDX on LSK 2L,
however, would bring up reference coordinates to be used to set an initial
position if the GPS were INOP.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Route Entry
• Press LSK 6R to select the RTE page.
The RTE page is the primary location for entering the route portion of your
flight plan.
• Enter KPDX and line select it into LSK 1L, the ORIGIN field.
You’ll see the location of the center of the airport appear on the
Navigation Display (ND).
• Type KSFO into the scratchpad and line select it up with LSK 1R,
the DEST field.
• Type PFO1107 into the scratchpad and line select it with LSK 2R,
the FLT NO field.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• We could enter the runway now on the RTE page, but we’re
going to do that on the DEP ARR page instead to demonstrate
another feature.
The completed RTE page should looks like this:
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Departure Entry
• Press the DEP ARR button to get the DEP ARR INDEX page.
The DEP ARR INDEX page contains a series of prompts that take you to
the departure and arrival procedure selection pages for the two airports
you entered into the RTE page ORIGIN and DEST fields. The reason you
have both departure and arrival prompts for the origin airport is to account
for a return to the airport after takeoff due to an emergency. Having easy
access to the arrival page for the origin airport allows you to select an
arrival and/or an approach quickly and easily.
At LSK 6L and 6R, you have two prompts that allow you access to any
airport’s departure or arrival page. You can type the ICAO identifier of the
airport in question into the scratchpad and then line select it to the DEP or
ARR prompt. This can be useful in the event of an enroute diversion.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Press LSK 1L to get to the KPDX DEPARTURES page.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
path of the SID appear on the ND with dashed blue lines connecting
them. The blue color of the line means that the route has not yet been
activated.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Enroute Entry
• Press LSK 6R to get back to the RTE page. We’re going back to
it because the RTE page is where enroute airways are entered.
• Press the NEXT PAGE button to get to RTE Page 2.
RTE Page 2 and further are where you actually enter the route
information. The VIA and TO columns on the left and right sides of the
screen refer back to the earlier highway analogy. The right side TO
column is where you’re going and the left side VIA column is how you’re
getting there. You can see right now that we have one line that was
already filled in automatically by our SID selection – we’re going to
FAMUK VIA the MINNE5 SID procedure.
NOTE: If you were to just enter a single waypoint into the TO column,
you’d see DIRECT automatically appear in the VIA column, letting you
know that there’s no specified VIA routing, it’s just a direct line from the
previous TO column waypoint.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
It is worth noting that the PMDG 737 RTE page functionality almost
exactly mirrors the real life one. You can actually enter just about anything
into the VIA column including directly typing the names of SIDs, STARs
and approaches as well as airways and it will take them. The TO column
will take uncommon entries such as airport ICAO codes, ILS identifiers,
and runways too.
• Enter Q3 into the scratchpad and line select it into LSK 2L, the
VIA column’s next empty line down.
The fact that it “takes” the airway designation lets you know that Q3 is a
valid airway that you can get onto at FAMUK. If it wasn’t you’d see
INVALID ENTRY in the scratchpad after trying to line select it in.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
STAR and Approach Entry
• Press DEP ARR, and then press LSK 2R to get to the KSFO
ARRIVALS page.
• Press NEXT PAGE twice and you’ll see that the runways are
there at the bottom of Page 3. You would normally only select a
runway alone if you were doing a visual approach or otherwise
not using one of the instrument approaches listed.
• Press PREV PAGE twice to return to Page 1 and then select the
BDEGA3 STAR located at LSK 2L.
• After selecting the BDEGA3, select the MLBEC transition at LSK
4L. This will link the “core” part of the STAR back through the
transition at MLBEC, which is where our enroute segment ends.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
The page now gets updated to show the approaches at the top with the
other STARs no longer showing.
The completed KSFO ARRIVALS page should now look like this:
We now need to verify all of our selections on the LEGS page to be sure
the flight plan looks as it should.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Press the LEGS button.
The LEGS page is a list of every waypoint in the entire flightplan - this is
where you can actually see all the other waypoints that are part of the
SID, STAR, and airways that weren’t explicitly written out in the coded
flightplan we learned about earlier. The LEGS page is also the primary
location in the FMC for modifying the route.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Page 4/5 is where the approach segment begins. Note that there is a leg
labeled VECTOR. This means that an approach controller will vector you
between BRIXX and CEPIN to establish you on the approach. Many sim
pilots will remove this by selecting CEPIN and line selecting it over the
VECTOR entry. This is incorrect and should be avoided. The FMC will
now show 'NO DES PATH AFTER BRIXX' in the scratchpad, and will
continue to show it whenever a value is not being entered into
scratchpad.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Route Activation
• Press LSK 6R, the ACTIVATE> prompt.
We’re now telling the FMC that we want to commit to the route and
activate it. You’ll notice that the light on the EXEC button is now
illuminated.
NOTE: We have numerous blank entries on the right side of the LEGS
page. There should be altitude and speed predictions here, but those
won’t appear until we initialize our aircraft performance data in the next
step. The entries that are already filled in are restrictions that were either
part of the coded procedures, or manually entered by the crew.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
We’ve implemented a shortcut on the PERF INIT page that doesn’t exist
in the real FMC to assist you in entering the weights. Clicking on the LSK
next to the zero fuel weight (ZFW) field will place the current correct value
into the scratchpad. This saves you from having to go look at the FS
ACTIONS FUEL or PAYLOAD pages to get the value.
• Enter 4.0 and line select it into the RESERVES field at LSK 4L.
This entry is purely advisory, it doesn’t affect anything within the fuel
system. If the aircraft starts using fuel below this value, you will get a
scratchpad message that says USING RSV FUEL. If the destination fuel
is predicted to be below 2000lbs, regardless of reserves, you will see an
INSUFFICIENT FUEL message appear in the CDU scratchpad.
• Enter 80 and line select it into the COST INDEX field at LSK 5L.
Cost Index is a measure of how much the FMC values fuel economy vs.
the overall speed of the flight. Lower values correlate with lower operating
cost at the expense of slower airspeeds and vice versa.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Cost Index varies in real life operations (it’s calculated by dispatch based
on the exact conditions of the flight and the airline’s policy). Many airlines
operate within a set range, while others use set values.
Transition altitude is the altitude during the climb at which the FMC starts
using standard calibrated flight levels (altimeter set to 29.92 inHg or 1013
HPa) instead of the actual QNH pressure altitude above sea level. The
FMC defaults to 18000 feet, which is standard in the United States, and is
what we will be using today, so leave the entry as it is.
• Finally, enter 350 and line select it into the CRZ ALT field at LSK
1R.
This sets the cruise altitude for the flight. FL350 is standard for this short
route in real life. You can enter it as 350, FL350, or 35000 – all will work.
After entering the cruise altitude, you’ll often see the route on the ND
change subtly as curves appear that represent the predicted turn
performance of the airplane. Without the performance fully initialized, the
FMC can’t calculate these and you’ll see straight line segments between
waypoints.
Here’s what the PERF INIT page should look like after you’re done:
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Press the EXEC button to execute the performance data
initialization.
• Press the LEGS button. You should now see the predicted
altitudes and speeds at any waypoint that doesn’t have preset
restrictions. If you see these predictions, you now have a valid
vertical path initialized and will be able to activate the VNAV
autopilot mode after takeoff.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
The N1 LIMIT page controls the thrust rating of the engines for takeoff
and the initial climb.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Press LSK 4L to select the TO-2 fixed derate mode.
What we’re doing here is effectively turning our 24K engines into 20K
engines for the takeoff sequence. This fixed derate is always the same
regardless of conditions.
• Type 40 into the scratchpad and line select it into LSK 1L to enter
an additional assumed temperature of 40C on top of the fixed
derate.
Assumed temperature is a more complicated concept than the fixed
derate, but the basic idea is as follows:
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
The completed N1 REF PAGE should now look like this:
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Press LSK 6R to go to the TAKEOFF REF page.
The TAKEOFF REF page contains several required entries for calculating
the aircraft’s performance during the takeoff.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
You will notice the flight plan route shift slightly when you enter the V
speeds – the PMDG 737 FMC actually accounts for that small difference
resulting from the exact speed you lift off at.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Set the takeoff trim on the pedestal to the left of the throttles to
the value seen in LSK 3L from a few steps earlier (4.81 in this
case). You can do this by using the electric trim switches on your
joystick, their equivalent keypresses or by actually physically
rotating the wheel with your mouse while the cursor is positioned
over top of it. Simply eyeballing the value nearer to the 6 mark is
sufficient.
The PMDG 737 manual trim motion is going to seem very slow if you’re
used to most other addons. We have exactly recreated the real life trim
rates by bypassing the normal MSFS trim functions, and yes, they are this
slow in the real airplane. This is a huge aid while handflying as you now
have extremely precise control over the trim’s range of motion and should
be able to trim out control forces perfectly in almost any situation.
However, trim speeds will vary depending on the configuration the
airplane is in.
For Simulator Use Only DO NOT DUPLICATE JULY 2022
0.00.42 PMDG 737
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Set the FLAPS to 5. You can do this by pressing F7 three times
or by selecting flaps down on the physical flap lever in the VC.
RTO stands for Rejected Take Off and will automatically apply
maximum braking in the event the throttles are retarded to idle
while at or above 90 knots during the takeoff roll.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
MCP Setup
We need to configure a few more items on the autopilot Mode Control
Panel (MCP):
• Pan up and set the MCP SPEED knob to match the V2 speed,
which should be around 127 knots (V2+20), depending on your
exact weight. Set it to whatever the TAKEOFF REF page shows.
• Set the MCP HEADING knob to the runway heading, which is
101 degrees at KPDX 10L.
• Set the MCP ALTITUDE knob to 12000. The initial altitude –
assigned by ATC – is usually a lot lower, but we will use 12000 to
give us a little more time to get the plane off the ground, and
stable.
• Turn the captain’s and first officer’s FLIGHT DIRECTOR (FD)
switches to their ON/UP settings. This allows the autopilot’s
modes to arm and engage. You’ll see a green FD annunciation
on the PFD just above the artificial horizon when the switches are
on.
It is very important that BOTH flight director switches be on – you’ll find
many functions such as the takeoff/go-around (TO/GA) mode will not
work if one of the FDs is left off.
NOTE: The green “MA” light above the captain’s FD switch as well – this
indicates that the captain’s side FD is currently the master FD. Normally,
the first FD switch to be turned on is the master, but it can change
depending on which autopilot you select in CMD as well.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
NOTE: There are conditions where LNAV will not arm on the ground.
Most notably, if the first leg’s course is more than 5 degrees away from
the runway heading, it will not arm on the ground.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
EFIS Setup
The Electronic Flight Instrument System (EFIS, pronounced “ee-fiss” with
the stress on the first syllable) is the name of the system that comprises
the PFD and ND display units and the controls that the crew uses to
interact with them.
TA/RA sets the TCAS system to provide you with both Traffic Advisory
(TA) and Resolution Advisory (RA) messages. TAs simply alert you to the
presence of traffic, whereas RAs give you commands to follow during a
conflict to provide separation.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Set the map display to 10nm by turning the EFIS control panel
RANGE knob to the left if it’s not already set. Turn the traffic
display on by clicking the TFC push button that’s on the face of
this same knob.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Press the ENG button above the upper engine display unit (DU)
twice to display the compact secondary engine indications. The
compact display is used at takeoff to avoid making the pilots look
down at the lower DU.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Press the DATA button that’s located just below the EFIS range
selector. This adds labels below each waypoint on the ND that
show you any entered crossing altitudes as well as the predicted
time you will pass over them.
Overhead Setup
There’s only a few things that need to be set here near the front of the
panel:
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Here’s what the overhead should look like when done:
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
IN THE AIR
It’s a good idea to read the takeoff section below once before you do
anything. A lot of things are going to happen very quickly once we get the
airplane rolling.
Takeoff
• Release the parking brake by pressing the key on your keyboard
that you have set up for it, by clicking the physical parking brake
lever in the VC, or by tapping the brake button on your joystick.
• Smoothly advance the thrust levers to 40% N1. The engines will
take some time to spool – the CFM56-7B “bites” around 50% N1
and will accelerate very quickly after that point, but it takes a
while to get from idle to 40%.
• Once stabilized at 40%, engage TO/GA mode – there are several
ways to do this:
o Press the keyboard shortcut – CTRL+SHIFT+G by
default or your custom joystick button.
o Left click the hidden clickspot located on the screw to the
lower left of the MCP, just below and to the left of the
COURSE knob.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
o Click the actual TOGA button on the thrust levers.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
attempting to reject the takeoff. If you abort after V1, you run
the risk of overrunning the end of the runway during the
abort.
• When you reach VR, smoothly rotate at around 2 to 3
degrees per second toward a goal of 15 degrees nose up
after liftoff. Be careful not to rotate too quickly – the 737-700
is a long aircraft and prone to tail strikes at high rates of
rotation.
• Once airborne, raise the landing gear with the G key, by
clicking on the gear handle, or via a custom keypress you’ve
set.
• Follow the flight director’s command bars to maintain V2+20
knots, but do not “chase” the bars – smoothly maneuver to
follow them. At 50 feet, LNAV will engage and turn green at
the top of the FMA roll mode field.
• Passing 400 feet (look at the radio altimeter readout at the
bottom of the PFD) press CMD A on the right side of the
MCP to engage the autopilot.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Take your hands off the controls, the autopilot is now flying. This actually
is very important – deflecting the controls past a certain amount of force
while the AP is engaged will cause it to disconnect or drop into control
wheel steering (CWS) mode, which we don’t want! The AP CMD will also
fail to engage if the controls are not centered when CMD is pushed.
• Set the landing gear to the middle OFF position by left clicking
the handle once while the down arrow is visible.
This depressurizes the landing gear hydraulics. This is important because
there are potential consequences to leaving the system pressurized in the
event that there’s a leak, an overheat, etc.
• Turn the AUTO BRAKE knob to the right to set it to the OFF
position.
• Select the LEGS page on the captain’s CDU.
• Set the EFIS range selector to a larger range such as 20nm or
40nm for the departure and climb. Once we get near cruise, a
setting of 80nm or even 160nm can be used to see more of the
route.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Climb
• At 1500 feet above ground level, the aircraft will reduce to climb
thrust and begin accelerating to 250 knots. This is called
“acceleration height” and can be modified on the FMC TAKEOFF
REF page 2 before departure if so desired.
• Flap retraction on a normal flaps 5 takeoff and climbout is
accomplished as follows after reaching acceleration height:
o At acceleration altitude select flaps 1.
o Passing the “1” marker on the PFD speedtape, select
flaps up.
The idea here is that the aircraft is expected to be accelerating rapidly, so
there’s no need to wait until passing the exact maneuvering speed (which
is what the numbers represent) to raise the flaps past the currently
indicated point. It’s expected that by the time the flaps finish retracting
you’re already at or above maneuvering speed for that setting.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Passing 15000, you’ll notice the CLB 1 annunciation on the upper
engine DU change to read just CLB. This is the end of our climb
derate – the engines now have their full climb power rating
available for use as the air thins up higher. Note that this
transition actually happens gradually, so you may have noticed
the N1 slowly increasing through the climb to this point.
• Passing 18000, press the STD button in the center of the BARO
knob to set Standard pressure (29.92/1013). After pressing STD,
you’ll see STD in green (depending on how quickly you do this,
you may or may not see the altimeter setting in yellow, reminding
you to set STD).
• A few miles after passing FAMUK, we’ll reach our top-of-climb
point at FL350, which is indicated by a green circle with the
letters T/C next to it. The green altitude range arc that you see on
the ND is the continuously calculated point at which you will
reach the altitude currently in the MCP window. This can be very
useful in both climbs and descents for seeing if you’ll be able to
make restrictions.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Cruise
We’re now crossing over into Northern California at our cruise altitude of
FL350. Unfortunately, we don’t have much time to admire the scenery as
we’re already quickly approaching our top-of-descent point on this short
flight and we need to prepare for the descent and approach.
• Next, set the course on both captain and first officer side to 284.
JULY 2022 DO NOT DUPLICATE For Simulator Use Only
PMDG 737 0.00.57
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
We will also set up the Head-up Guidance System (HGS) with our
approach information to aid our approach.
In the event you wanted to do a normal CAT I-style ILS approach where
you don’t autoland, you would just tune one radio to the ILS frequency.
When you engage one or both autopilots in this case, you’ll see SINGLE
CH annunciated on the PFD in amber, letting you know that you do not
have dual autopilot redundancy and can’t perform an autoland. In this
case you’d disconnect the AP at the decision height and land manually.
NOTE: The HGS is not on by default, but can be enabled on the CDU /
MENU / PMDG SETUP / AIRCRAFT / EQUIPMENT / pg11
'INSTRUMENTS'
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Finally, we have a bit of math to take care of. Looking at the INIT REF
page of the CDU, we have VREF speeds that we can use to set up our
approach. Flap 30 is normal, so we will use that, but selecting the speed
this early will give us an inaccurate speed by the time we’re on approach.
We can get a closer number by looking at the PROG page.
• Click the PROG button to bring up the PROG page and look for
the fuel value on the destination line. Currently, for me, this is 7.8,
which means that the FMC is predicting that I will arrive at KSFO
with 7800 pounds of fuel.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
We’re coming up on a green circle with T/D written next to it just before
the JONNE waypoint. T/D is our top-of-descent point. One minute before
top of descent, the airplane will slow from ECON cruise speed to ECON
descent speed. This may not always happen with higher cruise altitudes
because the two speeds are often the same, but in this case it’s going to
slow to around 280 knots.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Descent
• The vertical path deviation indicator will appear on the right side
of the ND as you pass the T/D point. The diamond shows you
how high or below the FMC calculated VNAV path you are. Don’t
worry about the RNP and ANP numbers - we’ll address those in a
later tutorial.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
The transition level for the descent is the same as the transition altitude
from our climb: FL180. Press the STD when passing through transition
level to re-set local pressure.
• Press LEGS, where we’ll stay for the rest of the approach so that
we can see the various crossing altitudes and monitor them.
• You’ll notice now going back to the PFD that we have the ILS
frequency and course visible on the left side indented above the
artificial horizon and the LNAV/VNAV navigation performance
scale (NPS) annunciation.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Set Flap 1 at this point, as well.
During the deceleration segment, the FMC commands a shallower path
angle to allow the airplane to slow down.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Final Approach
• Switch to heading mode (HDG SEL on the MCP), and turn on a
downwind leg – heading 100 – approximately 5nm past BRIXX.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• As you turn onto the localizer, reduce speed to 160 and then set
flaps 15.
• Just prior to following the glideslope down, arm the spoilers (Shift
+ /), and put the gear down.
NOTE: When you lower the landing gear, the engines will spool up to
approach idle, higher than they were prior to the gear coming down. This
is to account for the extra drag.
When G/S engages (check the FMA), you will see most of the MCP mode
button lights blank out – this is letting you know that you are now
committed to the approach mode. The only way to get out of it now is by
executing a go around or by cycling the flight directors off and back on.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
We’ll need to manually move the MCP SPEED knob down to 141 knots,
which will be our final approach speed. The reason it’s 141 and not the
136 shown on the APPROACH REF page is because you always add at
least 5 knots extra to your VREF in a no wind situation. Boeing states that
5 knots is always sufficient if using the autothrottle.
The PMDG 737 correctly predicts speeds for the approach phase. Its
target is Flaps 15 maneuvering speed (which is technically the Flaps 40
VREF speed +20 knots) at roughly the published normal glideslope
intercept point. The fact that the FMC will essentially get you to this point
automatically is a huge help in getting stabilized correctly on the
approach, particularly in cases where you can use LNAV and VNAV all
the way to the approach.
NOTE: At the time of release the HGS display will appear skewed to the
left, about where left PAPI would be. This will be fixed in a future update.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
There isn’t much to do now until we touch down, so enjoy the view while
looking through the first fully collimated, fully conformal HGS system ever
developed for an MSFS airliner. Watch closely – at 300 feet you’ll see
guide lines appear projected onto the sides of the physical runway that
help you know where to look for the lights if you were landing in actual
Instrument Meteorological Conditions (IMC). At 89 feet you’ll hear a
“Minimums” GPWS callout. If we were in actual IMC, we’d need to go
around if we didn’t have the runway in sight by this altitude.
Landing
• As the airplane flares and touches down, quickly press and hold
F2 to engage the thrust reversers. Keep them activated until
you’re at around 80 knots or so, then press F1 to begin stowing
them.
• Disengage the autopilot by pressing Z or your joystick AP
disconnect key twice.
• Brake manually below 80 knots, which will disengage the
autobrakes.
• Turn off at Taxiway T and hold between Runway 28L and 28R.
• Raise the HGS by clicking on the left cockpit window support
again.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Start the APU by left clicking twice on the switch at the front of
the overhead.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Set the overhead PROBE HEAT switches to AUTO.
NOTE: You will get a master caution for ANTI-ICE when doing this. This
is normal and you can clear it by pushing on the master caution button.
• Turn off the LANDING LIGHTS, turn on the TAXI LIGHT, and set
the POSITION lights switch to STEADY.
• Set the AUTO BRAKE knob to OFF.
• Select FLAPS UP.
The APU should be ready to go by now.
• Select the APU GENs to ON so that the APU light goes out and
the GEN BUS lights illuminate.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
Cross Runway 28L and continue to Terminal 2. If your scenery is detailed
enough to show the gates, taxi to and park at Gate 58B. Make sure to
turn off the taxi lights before turning toward the gate to avoid blinding the
ground crew.
Shutdown Procedures
• Set the parking brake by clicking on the parking brake lever on
the pedestal, or by hitting CTRL+. (Period key).
• On the pedestal, move both engine start levers to the cutoff
position.
• Turn the fasten seatbelts switch to the off position.
• Turn the red anti-collision beacon off.
• Turn all of the fuel pump switches off.
• Leave the engine hydraulic pump switches on, and set the
electric demand pump switches to off.
• Set the pneumatic isolation valve to open, and set the APU bleed
air switch to on.
• Turn both flight director switches to off to reset the AFSD and
clear any modes that may still be present on the FMA.
• Set the transponder to standby.
• Set the IRS selectors to off.
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
• Press MENU, FS ACTIONS> GROUND SERVICES> and set the
CHOCKS with LSK 6R.
• Once the chocks are in position, release the parking brake.
After running the last checklist, the overhead should look like this:
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
CHARTS ADDENDUM
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
TUTORIAL FLIGHT
TUTORIAL FLIGHT