Instruments & Avionics

Inside the cockpit

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An Unusual Source of useful Information

Whenever you purchase a new aircraft or scenery package, search for a review of it. 
Why? You have already bought it so why would you need a review?
The reason is quite astonishing… 

There is often far more useful information about the add-on in one of those reviews than there is in the official manual that the author supplies. Particularly in the case of airport payware. When a good manual is provided, reviews often supplement it with an abundance of information presented in a readily understandable format.
Those good people who write reviews must have some sort of magic power – they obviously don’t need any sleep! I am constantly astonished at how much work goes into one of these reviews. 

Don’t miss out.

The biggest X-Plane review site is found at X-PlaneReviews

Another good one is X-Plained

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The Altitude gauge has gone crazy!

Of course, a real pilot would never make this mistake, but sometimes someone in a hurry to get airborne might get tripped up.

Consider the following three screenshots:

Alimeter-1.jpg
Alimeter-2.jpg

The Altitude guage has gone crazy!

The screenshots are all taken at KFSO. But since KFSO is close to sea level, and some parts of the runway are actually with a few feet of sea level, the altimeter is reading correctly in only one of these screenshots. The screenshots were all taken at the same location.

What happened? The answer is simple – you, the pilot forgot to click the altitude knob before take off. This could become a “little tricky” if you only bothered to look at the gauge when in flight…
Remember, X-Plane is not a game, it is a remarkably realistic flight simulator!

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Saving a Flight does not save the entered Flightplan

When you have populated the FMS [Flight Management System] from your flight planner, always save the flight plan from within your FMS. The saved flight plan is saved as new file in …X-Plane 12\Output\FMS plans folder called XXXXYYYY.fms where XXXX is usually the departure ICAO code and the YYYY the arrival  ICAO code.

Question: Why should this be necessary?
Answer: If we ever want to quit the flight and then resume it, saving the flight situation will NOT save the FMS information when flying a default X-Plane aircraft. (Third-party aircraft may be different and often have special systems to do this, however.) 

So, if we have this file and then load the saved flight, it is easy to restore the Flight Plan into the FMS. From there, we can load the flight plan back into the ATC window by importing it from the FMS by clicking the button: image.jpeg