How to implement altitude changes in flight plan to autopilot/FMC?

[CLE_GrummanTiger]

For the most part, I've more or less figured out a good chunk of autopilot, mostly the G3000 in the TBM-930. There's still a couple of things that are eluding me, particularly altitude changes as indicated in my flight plan exported from Little NavMap (what a wonderful program, I actually donated a small amount this morning). I plugged in the flight plan as the FMC source into the G3000 and after reaching safe altitude, I engage it and it does the job wonderfully. The only hitch that I find is I'm having to set the altitude manually in autopilot to reach my desired altitude, despite engaging VNAV (which is what I thought it does). I thought the G3000 would "see" the altitude as listed in the flight plan and climb accordingly to it. Is this something I need to do manually and pay attention to my flight plan and ascend/descend as needed? Maybe it's something out of Little NavMap? (I don't think so because the altitude values are present in the Flight Plan button in the MFD.)

 

I want to emulate real life flying and follow the route as calculated by Little NavMap and want to see if the ILS will capture my plane as I planned for it via STAR and approach procedure in Little NavMap (and yes, made sure I'm hitting the 3-degree glidescope).

 

The other, lesser important thing, is the FLC button. I assume this acts the same as altitude hold and VS, only it maintains the airspeed as closely as possible while reaching desired altitude? This would obviously make it more efficient than simply telling the autopilot to ascend/descend X fpm and compensating with the throttle.

 

While I understood the fundamentals of flying before, I never knew how deep this rabbit hole goes! Geez Louise, no wonder pilots have to put in hundreds and thousands of hours into training! I'm learning little things like what a pitot is, and bleed, and inertial separator.

[neilends]

I still haven't figured out how to use VNAV so I won't try to answer that question. Instead I wanted to comment on my perspective as a new, real-life student pilot and a long-time simmer, since realism is usually the goal of most of us who love this game (you included, as you've said).

 

From a realism perspective, what I am learning is that the autopilot should not be heavily relied upon. Real pilots, certainly GA pilots, first learn how to actually just fly the plane. While the simmer in you might want to figure out how to program your autopilot so that everything lines up with the ILS approach automatically from start to finish, I think a real pilot (at least a new one, which I am) will be much more focused on keeping the autopilot turned off and learning how to manually fly the plane to the correct waypoints, altitudes, and positions to lock in that ILS.

 

Hopefully a more experienced pilot will chime in here on whether my sense on this is correct.

 

Regarding FLC: I use FLC heavily when using autopilot in the sim. It works exactly as you've described. Once you hit the FLC button, you can move the desired airspeed up or down and then just sit back and let the plane climb/descend according to that pre-selected speed. This vastly reduces the odds of a stall or overspeed when relying on autopilot to do a climb or descend for you.

[jparnold]

I have never tried using VNAV either however a quick search of the internet turned up the following which someone replied to saying that VNAV was never implemented into General Aviation aircraft (dated Aug last year so not sure if this has changed with updates since).

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/tbm-930-vnav/184011

BTW how are threads created at the flightsimulator.com forum?

[CLE_GrummanTiger]

You’re right, I was reading up on it yesterday and found out that VNAV is mostly nonfunctional in the sim, for now anyway.

 

Did read, however, that the fine folks at Working Title implemented it in their CJ4 mod.

 

As I’m busy learning the ins and outs of the TBM, I’ll just have to plug in the FLC data as I fly as a workaround. I’m sure one day either Asobo or a third party will get VNAV to work.