Flight Sim Navigation Tutorial #2 Finding Runways and Making Perfect Landings with ILS by Michael Flaminio This is the second in a four part series about navigating within general aviation flight simulators. These instructions are intended to provide only a basic understanding of flight navigation to help gamers use flight sims. In this tutorial we will be using radios to navigate and land our plane using the instrument landing system. Using ILS, you will be able to first find your runway, then use the ILS glide slope to bring your plane in on a precision approach for a perfect landing. I recomend before continuing with this tutorial, your run through the article on using Charts and Maps. ILS is prettystraightforward. You have two indicators, one representing your heading and another your altitude. Following these two lines in, you'll touch down perfectly at the beginning of the runway. The vertical yellow line moves left to right, with center being on target, while the horizontal line moves up and down, with again center being on target. Depending on what system you're using, the output may look different. Our examples will be using the VOR/ILS instrument as show here. The vertical line is in the center with a notched horizontal line. The notched line is constant and represents to what degree the vertical line is deflecting. On the sides of the instrument we see two yellow bars with their own notched vertical lines. These are the altitude indicators. When you're coming down for a landing, you will want both the vertical and horizontal ILS indicators to be centered. To make these lines align, you need to fly the plane in the direction you wish the ILS indicators to move. From the VOR/ILS instrument graphic here, we can see that we are slightly right and above where we want to be. To correct this, we will fly a little left and a little higher. Once the lines center, we will level out and flight straight, or make any other changes as needed. The goal to keeping on target is to use small course changes and anticipate the needles to keep them centered. Radio Flying When navigating with radios, pilots use a navigation radio station and draw 360 degrees around it. When heading away or towards the radio station, pilots can change directions accordingly. Using instrument approach, we will be tuning our radios to the airport's approach frequencies and then we will set a course to approach that frequency in anyway that we wish. In our example, our airport has a runway running approximately east to west or 90 and 270 degrees. Runways are named according to the directions they are pointing, minus the last number. For example, a runway pointing to 90 degrees will be runway 9 and another pointing 112 degrees will be rounded to runway number 11. It's also probably worth noting that many airports have runways running in parallel. These are indicated by left and right names. For example when you approached an airport you'll see two runways both at the same radial. They will both have the same numbers, but left and right of each other. We'll see this in our example with 28L and 28R. For our tutorial example, the runway we'll be using is pointing approximately east/west at 96 and 276 degrees. This would make our runways numbers 10 and 28. Lets say we want to land on runway 28 from our landing plate provided. Now that we've picked a runway, we need to tune our radios to the correct localizer frequency, also found on the landing plate chart. Airports supporting ILS will have a published localizer frequency for ILS-equipped runways. Looking at the runway plate, we see our runway has a frequency of 110.1 MHz. We now want to tune that radio in our navigation radio. The second part of setting up our radios is to align our VOR/ILS gauge. There are two knobs usually found on the VOR gauge. One controls your desired heading bug/indicator on the right, and the second is the omni bearing selector or OBS on the left. The OBS indicator is a device to help guide you using navigation radios. Looking back at the VOR/ILS indicator, remember the vertical yellow line. This line represent your X-axis for navigation as you fly. As an example of how this works, if you want to head 90 degrees/east of your tuned nav signal, you would set your OBS to 90 degrees. You would then maneuver until the vertical yellow VOR/ILS line is centered to the horizontal line. When this happens, this means you are heading directly 90 degrees away/toward the navigation station. We'll get into this in greater detail in part three of the navigation tutorial. In our tutorial example we're using the X-Plane Cessna. Note that in this particular aircraft, the VOR/ILS gauge is set to use the nav 2 radio. If you have two nav radios and you're in doubt about which one to tune for ILS, just tune them both. Also make sure that you have made the frequency active by switching to the right active position. (Not all planes will have a standby and active radio positions.) Now that we're situated on our instruments, lets go flying. Here's a graphic to describe what everything is - Red — Nav 2 radio. Notice that the VOR/ILS indicator is labeled N2. - Yellow — VOR/ILS vertical and horizontal indicators for heading and altitude. - Blue - VOR/ILS computer (if available). Tells distance, speed and ETA to signal. - Green - OBS Knob Test Run Here's a step-by-step example for a test run. 1 - Jump into your favorite plane, the smaller the better. Our example is using the X-Plane Cessna. The Cessna is like the wedge club in golf — it's the easiest to start out on. 2 - Go to Lansing Capital City Airport (LAN) and set your plane to take off on runway 28L. In X-Plane, do this by selecting Location/Take off/Lansing Capital City Airport/Runway 28L. 3 - Go into the Weather Atmostphere settings and turn off real-time weather if it's on. Then make it a pleasant day with unlimited visibility and no wind. Also set up the time to be the middle of the day. 4 - Inside the cockpit, you should have a heading of approximately 276 degrees. Turn the OBS knob to match your heading and/or 276 degrees. 5 - Tune 110.1, the Lansing's localizer station, into the appropriate navigation radio. The VOR/ILS vertical line should become aligned centered. You should also see a reading in your navigation computer, if you have one. 6 - Take another look at the landing plate to verify your information. You'll also want to look at the Airport Diagram to get a feel for the airport so nothing surprises you when you're coming in, such as 28R sitting out to the right of your runway. Of particular interest is the runway elevation, which here is 852 feet above sea level. ILS will guide you in so you touch down at 852 feet, where the altimeter will put you into the ground at 0. Remember the plane crash scene in Die Hard 2? Those guys didn't remember to look at their Airport Diagram before landing. 7 - Lets try a run. If you're using X-Plane, go into the Location menu, then ILS Final, then Lansing Capital City Airport, then runway 28L. This should put you about 10 miles out of Lansing on course for runway 28L. If you're not using X-Plane, take off and circle around to fly yourself out to about 15 miles east of runway 28L. You can also place yourself in most sims with a map tool. Feel free to place yourself out further if you need more time to get lined up. 8 - You now have three things to control. You have to keep your heading aligned with the vertical VOR/ILS indicator, you have to keep your altitude aligned with the horizontal ILS altitude indicator, and you'll also have to manage your air speed. The Cessna can go pretty slow and still stay in the air. I'd recommend around 90 knots or so as you get closer to the airport. You'll notice that as you get closer to the airport, the VOR/ILS gauge will become more sensitive. Remember, the goal is to use small course changes and anticipate the needles and make them center. 9 - When you pass the outer marker, you'll here a beeping and see a flashing light on the instrument panel. This means you are about 3 miles or so from the runway, according to our landing plate. This is usually a good time to make sure the gear is down (if it isn't already) and start to slow down for landing. Every runway has a different approach, our example for Lansing's 28L recommends we be flying at 2100 feet at the outer marker. If you've managed your altitude well, you'll be right on target. 10 - As you come up to the runway, trust your ILS instruments. Remember that the runway sits at 852 feet above sea level. As you fly over the start of the runway, lower or kill the throttle and glide on in. As you near the ground, you'll want to pull up slightly so that the horizon outside is level if the bottom of the cockpit window. Doing this bleeds off excess speed as you glide down. Try to touch down around 50 knots or so. If you want, you can use flaps to bring you down to a feathery 30 knots. If you followed the ILS down well, you'll have more than plenty of runway to touch down. That should do it. If you made it, congratulations! Don't kid yourself — your neighbors probably couldn't do this. Give it a couple more tries and then go on to the next lesion Extreme Instrument Now that you've mastered landing your plane with instruments, lets test you nerves. Get yourself again set up for ILS landing to runway 28L. Now pause the simulator, go into the weather settings. This time, lets make things a little foggy. Go into the weather settings and set visibility to 1 mile and maybe give us some overcast clouds and rain. Now continue on with your ILS approach. It will be pretty hard to see much of anything. In fact, you won't even see the runway until you're practically on top of it. If you're truly comfortable with ILS, you'll fly your plane solely on your VOR/ILS indicator. Don't even bother looking out the window. (Not a good idea in real planes!) When I did this, I first spotted runway lights at 1.2 miles out. No need to worry though, I was already lined up and ready to go. If you can this without making your passengers sick, you've got this stuff nailed. Homework Keep landing your plane until you're comfortable making good landings. Try taking off, circling back and coming in from different distances and directions. If you're really bold, try some bigger planes and nastier weather. Landing with 1/2 mile visibility at night in the rain is lots of fun. The goal of practicing is to become familiar with reading the OBS navigation in the VOR/ILS. You'll soon be using this instrument to do some serious navigating. Next time, we'll expand on the VOR/ILS instrument to navigate from place to place. We'll fly from Detroit Metro to Lansing and make a perfect landing on 28L using only our maps, radios and wits.