VNAV and Aermacchi Flight Director?

1st Official Post

    Thanks for displacing the non active Flight Director needles on the Aermacchi attitude director indicator, it is much more readable. The Flight Director push buttons/indicators do light up but the FD needles do not show, is there a separate setting?

    I tried the Oakland 12 ILS and the normal brightness PAPIS look really good now, thanks again, an enormous improvement.

    Edited once, last by Overloaded (September 2, 2016 at 4:37 PM).

    If it does not have an autopilot then the pilots flew manually with optional guidance from the flight director. Does the Aerofly FS 2 Aermacchi not have the ability to fly manually with the flight director in a normal operating mode? Can a "FD" mode take the place of the "A"? Having the flight director working in a false autopilot mode seems strange.
    If the flight director needs to be left permanently visible for manual flying FD operation, the visual impact in PCs will be more tolerable than with the small mobile devices. Photos of real 339 cockpits show the FD needles visible with the plane 'cold'.

    Questioned the working of VNAV and the Aermacchi FD. "I can get LNAV and can get localiser and glide slope needles in the Aermacchi but no luck with VNAV or the Aermacchi Flight Director." I suppose VNAV is an upgrade of the A320 autopilot but with the current state of FS 2 development it only does Altitude capture and hold, there seems no way to incorporate levels into a route. As Jan has said the FD seems a sort of bodge job, "working" only with a fake autopilot.

    Sorry if I was not clear, I was on about two features, Aermacchi FD and separately VNAV. My language knowledge is awful and I should have made the points in two sentences for forum members with a non-English native tongue, saying 'can get' twice was meant to signify that the items were not linked. My English language school qualification is fairly modest :-). Anyway big plane VNAV is Airbus 320 altitude capture and hold? The Boeings were straightforward.

    You are mixing up different systems. LNAV and VNAV are FMC functions and alt capt and hold are autopilot functions.
    To be even more precise the terms LNAV and VNAV don't exist at Airbus. (Hurts any real Airbus pilot if you use these).
    ALT and HDG can be managed or selected.

    The operation of the Aerofly autopilot and the Aerofly navigation feature in FS 2 is relevant to getting about in this sim'. The recent update including "LNAV/VNAV" did not specify anything about how this sim's VNAV feature was supposed to work and what fraction of a real world FMC/CDU's operation it tried to implement.
    There was a mention in the steam forum that "VNAV" in a SIM' Boeing might set up a descent gradient. I found no mention of what this new SIM' update did (or did not do) for Airbuses.
    A single click over the SIM' cockpit CDU and a look at the SIM' route menu showed that no speed/level assignments to a route leg was possible. I realised that VNAV for a sim' Boeing seems to offer little if anything. I am not familiar with Airbuses so I just hoped that some 'VNAV' (in Airbus speak) function was available in that platform other than just rate of climb/descent with level capture or hold.
    With the seemingly deliberate IPACS policy of removing manual nav-aid selection from the big sim' jets, setting up a VOR/DME approach with an Airbus autopilot manual descent angle is not possible, due to the Aerofly route automatic ILS selection. Is a descent angle selection available somehow?
    The communication from IPACS could easily be improved, a little would be a massive increase over almost none. What is the fanfared VNAV in FS 2!

    Just a quick reply here: We will of course add the manual nav-aid functionality back in again. We have removed it for now as the VNAV and LNAV feature is an extremely complex beast to implement properly and a manual nav-aid would have increased this difficulty even further.

    As Aerofly FS 2 is currently undergoing continues changes with respect to the navigation features and overall system depth, its sometimes difficult to communicate all the changes and shortcomings, we apologize for this.

    We haven't found a good way yet where we can consistently publish news that everybody reads. Its already difficult as we maintain this forum as well as the steam forum.

    Thank you for the welcome news about restoring manual nav-aid tuning, it was an unpleasant deletion and the news fixes a mildly distressing position.

    Is Aero' VNAV the vertical component of an Aerofly navigation-feature 3D route as displayed by the magenta flight guide? It seems to generate a cruise altitude automatically which the flight guides follow up or down to any SINGLE user defined level, selected via the autopilot control. I'm Sorry if I seemed over-critical, I had expected "VNAV" to be much more and confused myself searching for an actual progammable flight management capability.
    It is a sort of VNAV but not as Boeing know it!

    • Official Post

    Well in the Airbus the autopilot will only target the altitude that you put in the window. Only if you have the route in a managed mode (indicated by the dot) then a push on the altitude knob starts a managed ("vnav") climb or descent.
    If you pull the altitude knob then the autopilot will always start a climb or descent to the selected target.

    The magenta diamond on the primary flight display comes from the near by instrument landing system (ILS). The real world Airbus also has a magenta circle and magenta rectangle to indicate vertical deviations on the flight plan and non-precision approach, but those are not implemented yet.

    As far as I know, not a Boeing expert, the Boeing autopilot does not simply bring you up to any altitude entered in the FMS, you also need to either flight-level your way up there or select the altitude and then press VNAV. If you are on cruise level and then put in a lower altitude, then press VNAV, the Boeing will start its descent at calculated top of descent and follow the VNAV PATH down until reaching the selected altitude. Correct me if I am wrong here please!

    Cheers,
    Jan