okay, so PMDG has finally released the 737-800 for Microsoft Flight Simulator. And we're going to do the walk-up from cold and dark to start the aircraft. We're on the ground at Stansted Airport on a lovely day, and yeah, we're going to go from cold and dark and set the aircraft up. I'm going to be following a printed checklist; the download link for it will be available in the notes of the video, and you can see the printed checklist here. It's in Google Drive, and you can see it notes the keyboard combinations to use to move around the cockpit as we do so. You can go and download that and you can follow it yourself out or you can follow the video, whichever way you prefer. I actually like to follow printed checklists because then I know what I've done, and that actually leads us into the first subject about the 737. If we go and jump inside, you can see I am already in a cold and dark state. This is not how the aircraft first.

appears when you launch it into the simulator, it will be running regardless if you have loaded it onto a gate. So what you will need to do is go into the FMC. Now, if you're already in a cold and dark state, this is a tip as well. In an aircraft that has no power connected at all, there's a bit of a hack built into the system where you can hold the menu button on the FMC, and it switches it on regardless. No, there's no batteries or anything involved here. So then we can go to the PMDG setup menu of the FMC, and this is where you can control the state of the aircraft. So all I did when I first came in was went to the panel state load option and chose cold and dark and executed it. Obviously, I don't have to do that again because I've already done it. So that's what got me into this cold and dark state, away from everything being ready and up and running. I actually prefer to start from a cold and dark.

state with all of the aircraft in flight sim because then i know what i've done in terms of configuring the aircraft. If the aircraft is already up and running, you don't know without going around and scanning everything what's been configured and what hasn't. So I actually like to start from cold and dark every time. So to make the aircraft load in a cold and dark state, you have to go into the startup state option and choose cold and dark, for example, and execute it. And that will make it appear here in the menu, and that means next time you come into the 737, it will be starting cold and dark regardless, okay? So it will remember that. From time to time, it's worth also pointing out before we go much further, you can configure different options on the aircraft just as a somebody buying an operator of the aircraft might specify a certain loadout. So you know all of them, a lot of the hardware in the cockpit can be changed. So for example, we don't have the um head-up display in this model of

the aircraft and the default liveries they give you with the aircraft when you install it actually reflects the real loadout of those aircraft. So they are not all the same as each other. So you may choose a, you know, a different carrier livery, but that may reflect a completely different set of hardware installed. So you can see here there are various blank plates around the place. They may get filled in depending on the loadout of the hardware. Okay, so anyway, I'm going to follow the printed checklist, and we'll see how we go. So this is very much a functional checklist just to get us through the immediate things we need to do to get the aircraft up and running. A lot of the checks and balances the real crew would do are missing. Okay, I'm also going to be using a Thrustmaster Airbus quadrant to control the throttles. And as you can see, a Thrustmaster quadrant looks nothing like a Boeing quadrant, and the axes are different, and you can't actually configure it to work properly. So we're not going to worry too much.

about that, I have got another video on YouTube showing how to configure that so it will work correctly. So yeah, feel free to go and search for Thrustmaster and 737 on my channel. Okay, let's get started then. Going through this checklist. On the checklist, I've got all the keyboard combinations to move us around the screens easily. So we're going to start with turning the batteries on. So we go Ctrl+6, which takes us to the overhead panel, and we turn the batteries on. So where are the batteries? They're under this lever here. So batteries on, we can close the lid on that straight away. We then go to the FMC, which is Ctrl+3 is the shortcut to take us straight to the FMC, and we connect to the ground power. So we go to the menu, we go to FS actions, we go to ground services, and we can select ground power request, and it says it's connecting. If we go and look outside, you will see the cart has appeared and the wire has now appeared. So unfortunately, it doesn't animate.

somebody wandering over and plugging it in, but you can't have everything, I guess. And that will say release once it's ready. So, in other words, we can toggle that we can actually release the ground power as well when we're ready, but we don't want to yet, okay? Control 6 takes us back overhead, and we can turn ground power to on now. So, here's the ground power switch, and we switch it on, and the aircraft switches over from using just the battery to using the ground power power supply. So then we can go straight overhead, we can turn the dome light on if we need to. We don't need to because we're in daylight, and we can turn on the inertial navigation system. So we turn both of these knobs to nav, and they'll stay on DC, and then go to align. Give it a few seconds. There it goes. You'll go to on DC and go to align. So there's a left and right initial navigation system. You get a lot of redundancy in airliners.

okay now we can turn this knob here hdgsts which will give us how many minutes until the inertial navigation system has aligned. It takes a few moments to appear so we're not going to worry too much about that. Excuse me okay next we go control 6. And we turn the emergency lights to armed and we close the lid on that. We turn the window heats to on so these are the heaters that prevent windows from freezing up and the probe heats to on so these on the if we look outside on the outside of a 737 there are numerous probes. If they are not heated they can freeze up and they're measuring air pressure and if they are not heated they could freeze up at altitude and then you lose your measurement of altitude and airspeed which would be a disaster. Okay control three takes us back down to the fmc and we're going to prepare our flight plan so we can press the menu button to get back to the start and we go to fmc. You can see it says at the moment nav.

data is out of date. That's because I don't have another graph subscription so we're not going to worry about that and we clear that. It's now asking us to enter the irs position. So in other words, the aircraft for inertial navigation wants us to tell it where it is in the world. So we go to pause init at the bottom right and you can see there's a set irs position field, which is what it's asking us for, and there's a series of boxes. That means that's a mandatory field we have to fill in to get the irs position. We can go to the next page. Notice we're on page one of three. We go to the next page and we get the readout from the gps systems on the aircraft. So we can pick one of those up by clicking the soft key next to it, and that has appeared now at the bottom of the screen. So this is important. This bottom line doubles up as both a message line for the system to tell us things and

what's called a scratch pad, so it's somewhere we can key things in. So you can see I can type in there as well. Yeah, so if I press the clear button, I can then remove each character I've just typed. So we clicked on a value, and that put it into the scratch pad. Let me go previous page, and then we can just select the field where we want to key what we have put in the scratch pad, and that makes the set irs vanish. We now set our reference airport, so we are at standstill. So that's egss. We're not going to bother with the gate. So a fields with hyphens are optional, so you don't have to fill them in. So then you can see at the bottom right now, it's already saying root. So generally when you're working through the 737 flight management computer, it prompts you at the bottom right with the next thing to do during the very first few steps. So we go to root, and we can say origin, and you can see it's already got egss in the scratch pad.

so we can then this is because we set it as our as our irs reference position. So it already knows oh we're we are at stansted so we can just click next to origin and it fills it in. So then we can fill in where we are flying to. So i've got a free program called little nerf map running alongside the simulator and i've sketched in a flight plan. I've got numerous videos on my channel about little nerf map. It's free. It's fantastic. And if you want in a navigation program that will help you make flight plans and help you understand the world you are flying through, go download it. It's fantastic. Okay, so we're going to fly to birmingham, which is just across from the uk. We're out stands did near london gonna fly over to birmingham. So eg bb is the icao code for birmingham. So echo golf bravo bravo. Let me just pause the video a second. Okay, i'm back again just had to answer the door. That's the perils of recording.

youtube videos at home in a busy house. Anyway, so where did we get to? We have just programmed in the destination ICAO code, which is Birmingham. Okay, you can give yourself a flight number if you want. It really doesn't matter, but if you're working this up from an operational flight plan that you might download from somewhere like SimBrief, then obviously you can look all of this up. Something that does become important later is to fill in the runway we are departing from Stansted on. So let's have a look. We are going to be departing on runway 22, and this is dependent on the wind usually. So we're going to type in 2-2. If it was a right or left runway, it'd be 2 2 R or 2 2 L. So runway 22. Okay, notice here isn't asking for anything else at this point, although we can go next page, and if we were flying airways, which we are not today, we could program them straight in at this point.

but we're just going to be flying a standard instrument departure and a waypoint and an ils. So there's a lot of people will hang you out to dry on the internet about the correct way to use the flight management computer. There is no correct way. Let's say that right now immediately. So that is a lot of functionality in a flight management computer. So we can go, for example, straight from here to the departure arrival section. And we can say we are going to depart stansted on a given runway, which is already selected. And we can choose our standard instrument departure. So these things can be done in any order. The important thing is that you've done all of it by the time you get ready to taxi. Okay. So we are going to be using the uta v1r standard instrument departure route. So acid is basically just a sequence of pre-programmed waypoints that are known to air traffic control. So the uta v1r. So you can see it's not on the list, but we can go next page and we can go find.

it uta v1r. So we've got the runway and the standard instrument departure. That is our departure instruction and we can then go to route and activate what we've just done and execute. Okay, so if we go previous page again here, we can see we're back on the root page. If we go to departure arrivals, we can set up our arrival into Birmingham as well. So we go to the arrival page and coming into Birmingham, we're not going to use a standard approach route. We're just going to use the ILS for runway 33. Okay, so ILS for 33. We don't have to choose a star or standard approach groups and we can say execute. So what that will have done, if we go and look in the legs page, is pre-programmed all of those waypoints. So there's the Utava standard instrument departure. If we go next page, you will then see a discontinuity and then you will see the ILS approach into Birmingham. So on the 737, it typically wants you to put something in between.

if we had been programming routes, uh, sorry, yeah, corridors, and things to fly, then you might not get a discontinuity. But if you're just putting in an arrival and a departure, sorry, departure and arrival, then you will get a discontinuity. So, okay, we're going to put a waypoint in the middle of our route. So, the Daventry VOR, which is DTY. So, when we put in a DTY into the scratch pad, we can then select the then option here, and it inserts it into our flight plan. Notice it says this is the modified route name. We haven't actually finalized it. Now, to get rid of this discontinuity, we can select the waypoint beneath it, and then select the blank entrance above, and it will pull the rest of the flight plan up, yeah, and remove the discontinuity. So, all of the changes are highlighted, and we can just execute them. And then we can carry on looking through the pages. We haven't got any more, so that is the end of the flight plan, and we've done it. The thing we haven't done yet, so we've

set the route up. We haven't set up any performance parameters for the aircraft, so you've got init ref over here. So we can put in gross weight, zero fuel weight, reserves, cost index. Now the 737 helps you an awful lot with this. We can select the soft key next to zero fuel weight, and it will work it out for us and tell us 138.3, which is calculated therefore the gross weight because it knows how much fuel is in the aircraft already. Yeah, so before you got started, this is worth pointing out actually. You can't set the fuel through this dialogue with the 737. It will ignore it. Yeah, you have to go in via the fs options. So if you go to the menu key, you go to fs actions, I think it is, and you've got fuel here, and this will load the aircraft. Yeah, so you can fill in how much fuel you want. I'm not going to get into that today, but you can also set your payload so you can set passengers and all that kind of

thing and it will do the loadout and the that will influence your balance of the aircraft. So, I'm going to leave everything as is at the moment. But yeah, that's worth knowing if you go into fs actions in the main menu key that lets you set out your payload and your fuel, opening and closing the doors and all that, all that kind of thing. And it's really good. Okay, but we're doing startup today, we're not worrying about loading passengers. Okay, so let's go back to that init ref page. So, we've put in our zero fuel weight, which automatically calculated the gross weight. We can then put in the amount of reserves. So, this is in thousands of pounds and it's how much reserve fuel we want over and above, you know, the amount of fuel for the journey. So, we'll just put one for one thousand pounds and cost index. Cost index is actually a formula and it governs how aggressively the aircraft can climb or accelerate. So, a lower number means you are basically being more efficient in your

use of fuel, and typically, the operational flight plan will set what the cost index is for that airline and that route, so it can be anywhere from zero up to 200-300. Typically, you only ever see numbers around the 20 to 50 range, so we'll put in 50. You've got another mandatory field at the top right, the cruise altitude, so we're going to go for 10,000 feet just for this example flight, so 10,000. You've got a transition altitude here, which you could set. If you're flying in the US, it's always going to be 18,000 feet. If you're flying in Europe, it could be wildly different wherever you're flying, so if you've got charts, it will be on them, so it's worth looking up. So we've put in our basics, and we can execute that. The next page of the performance is the N1 limit, so this is your climb details. By default, it just goes, you know, how you want to climb out.

have got a d-rate option so or several d-rate options, so you could actually um not run the aircraft as aggressively as you might, and again that might be on your operational flight plan. We can leave it alone and leave it on the default. We go to the takeoff page. This is where we set the flap setting for takeoff, so we will go for five degrees of flaps, and that tells us the rotate speeds for the aircraft that will be called out by the co-pilot as we accelerate down the runway, so we can transfer those calculated speeds into the actual callout speeds that he will use. We've also got center of gravity here, and it will pre-calculate it for you, so if we just click it once, it puts it in the scratch pad. So based on your loadout of the aircraft, that's where the center of gravity is along its length, and that gives you a trim setting. So what the trim setting is for is for us to pre-program the elevator trim. So this is the elevator trim wheel, and we can spin it.

with the mouse, we need to get it to 5.12. So, based on the loadout of the aircraft, if we move this trim wheel, you can see this little marker moving as we do it. If we move it to about 5.12, what it means is the elevators will be in equilibrium as we accelerate along the runway. So, the nose will not start to lift or not start to push itself into the floor as we accelerate. It basically means the airplane will be flying by the time it reaches takeoff speed, you know, but at zero altitude without us having to impart any pitch into it to make it do that, okay? So, let's go back control, what was it, control three to go back to the FMC. And we're basically done at that point. We've got the takeoff refs in, we've done the legs, we've removed discontinuities, we've set the departure and arrival information. It's worth pointing out as well, you wouldn't necessarily on a longer flight set the arrival data at all, you would do it.

while you're in cruise on board so when you're on approach, you would be talking to air traffic control because you may have very different approach information based, you know, than your flight plan depending on what's going on on the day. The wind may have changed, there may be weather, there may be other traffic in the way, so the approach air traffic control might redirect you. So you wouldn't typically set the arrival, which is why we saw early on that we didn't have to choose an arrival to actually set our active route. Okay, so we've now done the flight plan. Next thing to do is go to the MCP. This is the master control panel for the autopilot, so it's this panel right the way across the top of the cockpit. So this is where we can set our takeoff parameters for the aircraft just to get things up and running. So we know we're taking off from one way to two, so I happen to know that is 222 degrees, so we can go and set that on the heading. So the idea of doing this is we

pre-configure everything so we don't have a shock when the autopilot kicks in. Of it going off in a different direction, we're going to set it to everything we're anticipating we will need before we switch it on. So we're going to change the speed because this has an auto throttle. I'm going to change it to 220 knots or 225, not even 220. We will go for the climate. So when we turn auto throttle on and go for speed mode, it will climb out at the speed we have dictated. Because we've switched everything else on, we can go and configure some other bits and pieces. So we could set vertical speed mode, for example. We could go for the altitude and set that, but we're not going to. We'll wait until we're flying. Typically, when you turn the autopilot on, vertical speed will match your vertical speed at the time you switch it on, if that makes any sense. We can switch on LNAV mode already though, or we should be able to, unless now they've stopped us from doing that.

that's interesting. Let's see if it will let us do it once we've got flight directors on. Oh yep, it does. So, as soon as we have flight directors on, then we can choose LNAUT mode. We should be able to do vertical speed as well. Then, if that's the case, yes, we can. And we can dictate that we want to climb out at 2500 feet a minute, for example. Don't be surprised if that resets itself when we engage autopilot to match our vertical speed at the time. Okay, so why did flight directors have an impact on us being able to set up the autopilot mode? So, lateral navigation, by the way, means the aircraft will follow the plan we have chosen, but we are not going to use VNAV, which would choose the altitudes we have chosen. We're going to fly out manually just so I show you some of the options. Um, so yeah, why did the flight directors make a difference? There's actually two parts to the autopilot system on the big jets.

flight director, and then there's the autopilot. Oh, don't worry about that buzz, that's just my controllers having a fit. There's a problem in the USB controllers on multiple PCs with flight sim, where the USB ports reset every so often, and you'll see all the controllers throw themselves all over the place. Anyway, sorry, getting back to the flight directors. Yes, so the flight directors actually read the flight plan and figure out what the aircraft needs to do to go in that direction. The autopilot makes the aircraft follow what the flight director wants to do. Okay, so when you have the flight directors on, you will see when we're in flight, you will see a crosshair appear on the attitude indicator, which you can follow yourself. If we turn them back off, you should see some of the symbology appear and disappear, so you can see there's some markers have appeared, they'll center up once we're in traveling, but we won't worry about it at the moment. So that's the master control panel, all we're doing.

here is setting up the aircraft. I mean, you could set the course as well to match the runway direction. We're not going to bother, okay. We also need to set the barometric pressure of the um, the altitude or altimeter. So, you will see here that we've got an altitude and a barometric pressure appears on the primary flight display. It's controlled by these knobs up here. There's a secondary one as well here for the backup backup attitude indicator, which also has the altitude on it. As we change the barometric pressure, you can see the height changing above sea level. So, you tune this given a readout from the tower to make your reading of altitude, which uses air pressure, accurate for the airfield. So, we can shortcut this by pressing b, and you can see it just gently moved when I pressed b. So, the barometric pressure outside at the moment is 29.92 inches. You can change the reading between inches and hectopascals by rolling the knob here. So, if we move this to hector

Pascals. You will see this has changed to hpa and the rate has changed to 1014 or the reading. Sorry. So it's literally the same deal as the difference between centigrade and Fahrenheit. It's just two different scales that are commonly used throughout the world. You tend to see hectopascals in Europe and inches in the US. Okay. So we'll leave that as is. We'll press b again and it goes back to 2992. So that's that done. Next we can go to overhead panel and we can start to get ready for flight. So we want to turn on the seat belt signs to tell everybody to go sit down because we're going to be putting the engines on soon. So seat belt signs are here in the middle and we'll put it to auto. Your damper. We switch to on. Cabin pressure. We set to our cruise altitude. It's already at 10,000 feet is over here. We set the aft fuel pump number one to on. The reason we do this is this pump will be

used for the auxiliary power unit, and you can see the low-pressure indicator has now gone out. We can now switch the APU to start. So, APU is here. APU is the auxiliary power unit. It's a small jet engine in the tail. So, we move it to the on position, and then we hold it on the start position, and it comes back on its own. And you will see this exhaust gas temperature start to rise when it kicks in. So, give it a few seconds. There we go. We get a low oil pressure warning, and then this needle will start to move, and it will move around to about seven and then move back to four on its own. So, there it goes. If we go and look outside, look in the rear of the aircraft, you can see heat pouring out of the back. That's the exit for the auxiliary power unit. So, that's this small jet engine, and it's used to provide not only power but also compressed air to spin up the jet engines. So, we wait for that needle. It's falling back at the moment. Look back towards

four so let's zoom in a little bit so we can see it. When it's ready, the light will come on in the middle of the bus transfer. There we go. So that light means we can now switch power generation for the aircraft away from ground power to the auxiliary power unit. So we flick down the two middle switches. Now you heard a slight blip there in the fans or any aircraft. So we are now using power from the auxiliary power unit, not from the ground power. Okay, so we've done the bus transfer to the APU. We can turn the anti-collision lights on while we're at this. So we're basically... This indicates usually anti-collision lights to on means to the ground crews or any aircraft we're about to turn the engines on. So be careful. Notice in the cold and dark state, the position lights were set on steady. That would basically mean as soon as we have any sort of power on the aircraft, then the position lights would have come on outside, which would have told ground crews around the plane there are crew on board. They're.

doing things okay at this point, we need to go and disconnect the ground power. So we go back down to the flight management computer, we go to the menu button, we go to FS actions, ground services, and we release the ground power. So this will remove the truck we saw. You can see that the wire has already gone. You'll probably see this door closed. There it goes, and it will say disconnecting. That will change in a moment to connect, I guess. There we go, request sorry. So the ground power is now no longer connected. Another thing we can do at this point is make sure we have the wheel brakes on, which I do. Also, the parking brakes, and I can remove the chocks as well. And removing the chocks is a trigger in the simulator to close the doors and for the trucks to move away from the aircraft, for it in any of the stairs or anything like that. So they're going to get out of the way because they know we're about to start the engines. Okay, overhead, what do we need to do to

get the engines up and running. We need to turn on all of the fuel pumps. If you have fuel in your center tanks, you will need to switch on the center fuel pumps as well. If you don't have fuel in the center tank, you won't need it. Okay, we turn on the apu bleed to on a publish over here. And the apu bleed basically takes air pressure away from the apu and provides it to the engines so we can spin them up. If we were not on a parking spot, which we are today, we would do push back at this point. And then you would start your engines. During pushback, your communication with the pushback tug would tell you, you know you're free now to start your engines. But we don't. We're not doing pushback so we can start our engines while we're sat here. Okay, so how do we go about starting the engines? We'll go to the normal pilot's position because it's the easiest way to describe this. We are going to go and switch the right engine.

to grd. Use the ignition for the right engine, and we look down, and you can see the n2 number is increasing for the right engine. When it gets to 20, we move the starter lever forwards, which introduces fuel to the engine. So when it's coming up towards 20 on n2, which is the gas turbine speed that was the compressed air spinning it up, as soon as we use the starter lever, then the engine is actually ignited, fuel is introduced, and you can see the gas temperature is increasing, and the n1, the turbofan speed is increasing on that switch overhead that will go back to off all on its own, and that is your signal to start the other engine. So we just wait for the engine to stabilize. You can actually hear that happening outside, actually go and look, you see the right engine is spinning, left engine is still static, and it's gone back to off. So we can now go to grd on the left engine. We can use the left ignition. There's two ignition systems. They tend to iterate between them just to

reduce wear and tear, but you can use either. So again, we're coming up towards 20 on the n2 so we can introduce fuel with the starter switch. I'm just looking at this, actually. I haven't got the parking brake on. And to get the parking brake on, we have to hold the brakes on. There we go. I'm just wary that as soon as you introduce the engines, the aircraft does have a small amount of positive thrust. So I just noticed that I didn't have the parking brake on. I'd forgotten that the Airbus quadrant doesn't work well with the parking brake. So I've removed it for the moment. So I'll just operate it within the cockpit. Okay. So you heard that click there. That was the GRD switch for the engine start switch for engine number one going back to off all on its own. So once you have done that, we can go back overhead. The engines are now running. They can generate electricity. Okay. So if we go and look on this bus transfer panel, we can now switch over.

power generation to the engines, which means we no longer need the auxiliary power unit. So the engines of the aircraft is kind of like bootstrapping itself or pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. Now the engines are running, we no longer need the APU. So we can turn off the APU bleed, and we can turn off the APU. We now turn the hydraulic pumps to on so that above over here so that provides our power to the control surfaces. We can turn the packs to auto so this is the air conditioning for the cabin. You can see that also and the um not just air conditioning the air pressure of the cabin. So you can see the duct pressure dropped as we did that. In other words, we're taking away from the available air pressure in the system to pressurize the cabin. Taxi lights to on so down here we've got the taxi lights they can go to on. We go back to the cockpit we set the flaps to takeoff position so if we just move the camera over there I'll move my

flap lever, and we want to get to five degrees of flap, which I need to go there. And again, it doesn't line up with the detents on the Airbus quadrant, so you have to kind of leave to get five degrees flaps. You have to leave it halfway between, which is a bit annoying but not a big problem. Okay, so we are now ready to taxi. So we can come back off that parking brake if it will let us. We hold the brakes, and we can come off, and we can gently increase the throttles, and the world outside should start to move. And it's moving, so I'm only going to take this out as far as taking off today. I'm not going to do the full flight, and we're going to use a max power takeoff. I'm going to use the throttles manually during the takeoff just to show you something about the aircraft, really, that you can go above 100 on the engines. I'm just going to go through the sequence of operations of accelerating along the runway.

rotating, climbing out, engaging the autopilot, and that'll be the end of the video for today because there is so much to these aircraft to learn, and trying to fit it all in one video would be madness. So we're just gently taxiing it to runway 2-2 at Stansted. We're not going to be using air traffic control or anything like that. Again, this is purely a functional video to explain things along the way. You will notice this aircraft was identical in terms of its startup procedure to the 737-600 and 700. The differences are to do with weight and balance and the angle, your alpha angle that you can get away with because obviously it's bigger and heavier. So the speeds you would arrange for takeoff and approach are faster. So you just need to be mindful of those things, but it really doesn't make much difference to be honest. So we're rolled onto the runway, quick check around everything, but make sure we're ready to go. We can see the EFIS display here has got

a 20-mile range, which is fine. We could put it down to 10 miles so we can see it. Okay, so I'm going to push the throttles all the way forwards. Just gently push them right the way through forwards, and you can see if I push them all the way forwards, the engines will go beyond 100. And that's what I wanted to show you. Why I didn't want to do a pre-programmed takeoff with takeoff thrust setting or anything like that or N1. So we're getting the call-outs from the co-pilot. Notice how fast we have to be traveling to rotate in the 800 V10 positive recline. Okay, so gear up, and we will do this with the control in the cockpit on the auto speed. Is he gonna let it happen? Let's go for autopilot. There we go. So now the aircraft is basically climbing out, and we'll go for LNF mode. It had switched off for some reason. So we've got LNF mode. We're going to set that vertical speed.

now notice, I said when we engage vertical speed, it would go for whatever the aircraft's doing at the time. So, I am no longer controlling the throttles, they're controlling themselves to do 220 knots, or it should be. It can't actually get to what we're asking, which is interesting. So, flaps up, have we got a problem with throttles? Yeah, I'm just asking for more than it can do. There we go. So, this is a really instructional thing about the 800. Look, you can't throw it around the sky like you can the other aircraft. I've had to go for a much slower climb out on the based on the default loadout that PMDG gave you. Obviously, if I had an empty aircraft, it would have been a lot lighter. So, it's something that's really a very good first observation about the 800 in flight. Although it's the same to configure, you really do have to be mindful that it is not the fastest thing, the most powerful, the lightest aircraft. So, you're going to have to be a bit more

gentle about climbing out and about asking it to do things. Notice it will only go to 92 percent on the throttles. Typically, if we were to turn off the auto throttle, we could absolutely gun it and it would accelerate hard, but then we have run the risk of destroying the engines. You can see the aircraft is following the flight plan and typically look. We're only looking for above three thousand feet. We're looking for four thousand feet at Utah. We're already at six, so we are climbing much more steeply than we needed to. So those are the kinds of things that you will need to bear in mind flying the 737 800. It's nothing to do with the actual configuration. It's the same as the others. Your considerations are around its weight and its performance because of that weight and size. It is bigger. [Music] It looks very pretty, doesn't it? Okay, so I said I wasn't going to do the whole flight, and I'm not going to. So we're going to leave it there, and hopefully you enjoyed that, and we'll

have another look at some full flights in the 737-800 in time, and we'll leave it there for today. So, oh, last thing we need to look at once you have lifted the undercarriage on the 737, and again, this is why the Airbus quadrant doesn't work well with it, is you need to move the landing gear back to off. Yeah, something else we didn't do. Again, this is because I was doing the functional start before anyone hangs me out to dry. We didn't turn on the TCAS system. Yeah, so now we have. If you wanted to see how that operates on the screen, you can press TFC up here, and you can see range rings all of a sudden, and you can see a warning circle around the aircraft. If anything were to fly within that circle, the TCAS would go off and start telling us there's either there's an aircraft above or below us, basically. And you can configure that on the TCAS. Again, I'm not going to get into that today. It's a whole nother subject.

obviously you've got radios down here for vor navigation, but again we're not going to do the full flight. As far as ils, it's quite nice to watch the aircraft navigating though and flying itself, so it's holding 220 knots. We could go for 250. So obviously you can see in response to changing the speed with auto throttles, the throttles went forwards on their own, so it will hold 250 knots. But we've gone through 10,000 feet already, so we could, you know, go for 300 knots, 400 knots if we wanted to. Okay, so I'm going to leave it there. I promise this time we can lift the yoke back up by clicking on the panel, so it's not in our way, but that's basically the 737-800. As I said, the thing to be mindful of with it is it's bigger and heavier, but has the same size wings as the other models. So you could see I couldn't maintain a 2500 feet per minute climb with the default loadout the aircraft.

has you can see altitude just flashing there because we are nearing our target altitude. Okay, so I'm going to leave it there. The aircraft's making its turn towards the destination. Obviously, we could change the zoom on the aefis display and see that one final trick. Although I said we were going to leave it there, one final trick you might want to know about if you've not seen the 737 before. If you move the mode for the display to plan mode, you will see that it is centered on a given waypoint. If you go to the legs page, you can see ctr, and you can see a step button. So we can now step through the phases of the flight. So if we zoom this in, you can have a look at your flight plan in detail by stepping through it, which is quite useful. And if you keep stepping, it will just go back to the next waypoint that you haven't reached yet, and then thread through the rest of the flight plan. Okay, so I'm going to leave it there. I promise there's just so much to talk about.

it's kind of wanting to share the knowledge is quite kind of an addictive thing. I guess, but there you go. So, we're going to leave it there. Plane is flying along quite happily 10,000 feet towards its destination, and I'll see you again soon.

Beginners guide to starting the PMDG Boeing 737-800 from cold and dark in Microsoft Flight Simulator

Beginners guide to starting the PMDG Boeing 737-800 from cold and dark in Microsoft Flight Simulator

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