As Bobby works on a new type rating, the guys discuss SIDs & STARs this week on Behind The Prop!
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00:01
Behind the Prop Intro
Clear prop S73 Cherokee number two following.
00:04
Behind the Prop Intro
Twin traffic three mile final one trolley.
00:07
Behind the Prop Intro
Bravo makesford in Runway two five going four mile.
00:10
Nick Alan
This is behind the prop with United Flight Systems owner and licensed pilot Bobby Doss and his co host, major airline captain and designated pilot examiner Wally Mulhern. Now let's go behind the prop.
00:24
Bobby Doss
What's up, Wally?
00:26
Wally Mulhern
Hey, Bobby, how are you?
00:27
Bobby Doss
I am fantastic as always. This week we're gonna cover a few things. And as if you've been listening to the show for quite some time, you know that I had a type rating approaching somewhere in the beginning of the year. I am in my hotel room at the training center or near the training center working on this type rating. And I gotta tell you, Wally, my eyes are wide open on how hard learning a jet and all the systems really can be. I think I thought nine days of training for one plane was kind of crazy from afar. But every professional pilot I spoke with, when I said nine days, they all said that short. And I was like, yeah, that short. Nine days. That's a lot.
01:10
Wally Mulhern
That was my thought. I thought, wow, that's quick.
01:15
Bobby Doss
And really, it's eight days. You have an option for an extra day if you're struggling. So it's really only eight days. They gave us a ton of material. We were all supposed to come prepared. I thought I came prepared. I got to sit in the jet to play and practice. I had plenty of things in Flight Simulator. I thought I was prepared, but boy, did I come unprepared. And my eyes are wide open to how the school teaches our students. And we prepare our students because if the student doesn't come prepared, you just really don't. They don't know. And guess who we've been learning with all week in that room? The lowest common denominator. So there's five of us, lots of instruction, but we're all learning at the pace of the lowest common denominator.
02:04
Bobby Doss
And that sucks because I'm a little bit ahead of that. But we're kind of stuck in that lowest common denominator mode. And I have a lot of things that I think I was proficient in, like instrument flying, but there's a difference in flying instruments in a prop plane at 8,000ft and below and a jet at 18,000ft and above. And I think SIDS and stars are the things that are programmatically kicking my butt. If I would have came more prepared with my understanding and knowledge around SIDS and stars, and not just the knowledge. I mean, the book Work and reading the plate, that's one thing. It's actually the implementation of it and knowing how to incorporate everything that the airframe can help you use to interact with the environment.
02:53
Bobby Doss
The sids and stars, man, I would have been, I think the sim time would have been much more useful for me. And that's what we're going to talk today about is sids, stars and automation and tying those all together to make you a lot less stressful and a lot more enabled and ready to go. You know, my IFR flying was almost always hooks to Austin when my kids were in college. And I think you get complacent to the same old route, the same old altitudes, and it gets real easy because you don't have to think about it. It's clear. It's not clear. Am I in the clouds? Am I not in the clouds? Am I filing or not filing? But you pretty much know the runways, pretty much know the altitudes, you know the field elevations.
03:39
Bobby Doss
And I'm in an environment now where I'm flying in the mountains to airports. I've never been to some airports with six runways, left, center, right, many different angles that I'm not used to because I'm just used to north and south runways in Texas and Houston anyway. There's runways pointing all different crazy directions with other big jets on those runways. So it's been a ton of learning and fun, but I wanted to take this time to say, hey, sids and stars were not where they needed to be for Bobby Doss for this training. And I wanted to pass some of the things I've learned and tap your ears and your knowledge on how you do it in the real big world and hope everybody will learn a little bit something as well.
04:23
Bobby Doss
One of the crazy things, we didn't even get to prep on this one, but they talked to us one day and I've got a pretty good study buddy in my class and he said, you know what? I didn't know that. And he's a CFII who's also here to get his type rating to be a professional jet pilot. He said, they told me that there's a difference between on course and direct to and he didn't know that. And I said, you didn't know that? Kind of as a smart aleck. And I said, I didn't either. What's the difference? Please, please educate me. And he pulled up the automation stuff and there is a difference between on course and direct to. And I think we should all know that. And for me to get as far along in my 500 plus hours as I have.
05:07
Bobby Doss
It's kind of shocking that I didn't know what those two differences were, but we'll talk about those as well and many other things that maybe I wasn't as smart as I should have been along the way. One of the big learnings was that SIDS and stars in this world, faster airplanes, very populated airports, lots of congestion. The real goal is to keep the flow of traffic going and to reduce the amount of chatter on the radio. If they had to give vectors to every plane at Houston Intercontinental, it would be a nightmare. Can you imagine what would happen to the flow? Normally, how far apart are the planes on final? Is it six miles?
05:49
Wally Mulhern
It's it can be less than six. I mean sometimes five and sometimes it's less than that.
05:57
Bobby Doss
So I'm not sure.
05:58
Wally Mulhern
What it's supposed to be, but sometimes it is less than that.
06:02
Bobby Doss
The amount of conversations that would be on those radios would be ridiculous if they didn't have all that traffic coming in from all around the world in a more organized fashion, which is really the purpose of the star. But we're going to start with SIDS today and I think again, living in Houston, Texas, flying from a few airports with no terrain and really no towers or buildings to speak of. The obstacle clearance is not something I think about on a regular basis. You fly other places. Tell us about some of the obstacles you avoid every week.
06:40
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, well, you know, Colorado is the big one and you know, we do a lot of, I do a lot of flying out of Denver and west of Denver is we got the Rocky Mountains and even Honolulu taking off. Honolulu, you've got Waikiki beach, you got the hotels. You, Diamond Head, that's straight ahead. So you know, you take off Runway eight right in Honolulu and it's a right turn heading 155 out over the water. So you do have you know, and then you get into the really tricky places like Eagle, Colorado. If you, if you pull up the ILS approach to Eagle, Colorado, I think most of us expect that minimums, ILS approach or a half mile visibility, usually 200 and a half. Right. And so we kind of make that assumption. But if you look at the ILS to the.
07:39
Wally Mulhern
I think it's Runway 25, I believe in eagle. The, the visibility minimum is two miles. And the reason is because guess how far away the mountain on the west side of the airport is. It's, it's two Miles. So on the missed approach, if you have to go missed, you need to be able to see that mountain because you got to turn left and go fly through this valley. And so Eagle is at my airline that actually is considered basically a special airport. The first time you go in there, you have to go in with a check pilot and everything. It's actually like a special certification to go into an airport like that.
08:28
Bobby Doss
Wow. And I recently just finished my instrument proficiency check to try and be as instrument proficient as I could before I got here. And one of the first questions that the instructor asked me is what are instrument procedures departures providing you? What is the, what is the obstacle avoidance? And you know, I probably knew these defaults when I took my checkride with you many years ago. But it's probably something that slips away when you fly a prop plane on a 7,000 foot Runway. You're probably not too terrible in a flat city with no obstacles. You're probably not worried about it. And I hadn't thought about it in a long time, but she taught me pretty quick that it is that you have to be 35ft AGL at the end of the Runway.
09:11
Bobby Doss
I'm probably 800ft at the end of the Runway most days in my plane. But 35ft AGL, you have to be able to climb to 400ft before making any of your turns, including the vectors from atc. And then you have to have a climb gradient of at least 200ft per minute, which even the slowest, weakest plane out there can probably do 200ft in Houston, but maybe not in Colorado. Right. So we have to be aware of those things as defaults based on the approach, the airport that we're at and what we're going to be departing to before we make any big turns or changes. And that's just something I didn't, I haven't thought about in a long time. But it's something that I think is important to think about when you're departing these airports that maybe you're not familiar with.
10:03
Bobby Doss
And then understanding what type of a SID you're on. There's three types of sids. I think the most common that we are using are RNAV departures. That's really the second one. It's kind of pre planned routes and we'll come back to that one. The first one is a radar departure which is kind of intended to be. You get a little bit of information to get started on, but you're going to be vectored by ATC and there's this word in all of these sids, that is thence. I haven't heard the word thence in a long time. I don't even ever remember reading it when I was in my training ifr. But thence is everywhere. And I looked it up just so I could be right on this podcast. Dictionary.com says that word means from that point or from that place.
10:50
Bobby Doss
So when you get in a SID to a point where it says thence, in essence, it's telling you, from this point, follow these instructions. And normally those instructions are very long. And what I told my classmates this week is these instructors are just as biased as I am in Houston because they read the same plate for Memphis Tyson, Nashville over and over in this training. Because every scenario in the first few days are those three airports. So they know the words. They're looking at this block of information with eight line items in it, eight notes, right? And they're like, do you see this note? It says we can't go left. I'm like, I haven't even got through reading all eight notes yet. I'm not as biased or I'm not as familiar. And it takes time.
11:39
Bobby Doss
You would have to prepare and plan for some of these things. But the third one is a hybrid sid, which is a little bit of radar vectors and a lot of preplanned routes at the end of it to probably avoid some terrain or something that might not best for you and your airplane if you're flying them. But flying the radar departure, the rnav, I've learned so much that my little prop plan's not been able to do right. It's mostly about the speed and altitude, these sids. And I've flown sids, we get a SID out of hooks quite a bit. But if I'm always going west, there's one I'm getting every time. It's the Industry 9, probably transitioning via Syntex. And I've probably flown that 50 times. How long do you think I'm actually on that SID when I leave hooks in a 182 Wally?
12:34
Wally Mulhern
Maybe not at all.
12:37
Bobby Doss
Maybe not at all. So it's a very true statement. But when I have, I don't think the longest I think I've ever flown, it's like three minutes. And it was like in imc, right? Three minutes is about how long it takes you to get out of that first shelf from Hooks. And what do you think they say? They don't even say direct syntax. They just say direct Austin. Right? Like, right, you're clear. Direct right again. 45 minute flight, maybe from there, but. But the part of that is my muscle around this procedure has not been very strong and this week it has gotten a lot stronger and my understanding has gotten much more crisp about how to read those plates. All the supplemental stuff in the terminal procedure.
13:24
Bobby Doss
I mean, I know I studied that for my instrument time, but I don't remember reading much past those days because again, I'm not at altitude. I don't really have to go to this thing. I use almost every flight now about the climb gradient based on my airspeed. I just. What are my options in a 182? It's either as much as I can or somewhere in between, but there's like not that much option. We were talking energy management before we started and you reminded me that the cruise speed of a 172 is about 20 knots faster than the V ref. So there's not a lot of difference.
14:03
Bobby Doss
But in a jet you may be going three times faster, four times faster, five times faster ground speed than you are Vref and to get down from 31,000ft is a very different ballgame than 8,000 and a 172.
14:19
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, you know, as we're talking, occurred to me that we may have some listeners out there who don't know what a SID and a STAR is. A sid, it's an acronym SID and it stands for Standard Instrument Departure. And a STAR is an acronym for the arrival, which stands for Standard Terminal Arrival Route. So it's basically, you know, it's that intermediate area. It's not the approach, it's not the en route, it's kind of the terminal area. So. And you see these at larger airports. I remember the magazine Professional Pilot always had a. My dad used to get Professional Pilot. And I'm going off on a tangent a little bit here, but it's kind of funny, I think my dad got Professional Pilot.
15:10
Wally Mulhern
It came every month and whenever it would come in the mail, I would grab it and go through and look at all the pictures and everything. And there was a section in the back that was a cartoon and it was called Sid and Star. And it was two guys, they were two pilots, two corporate pilots. One guy's name was Sid and one guy's name was Starr. And they always did kind of crazy things. And I remember when I started my instrument training, we started talking about sids and stars and I thought, wait a minute, those are the cartoon guys in the back of Professional Pilot. So anyway, just a little sidetrack there.
15:47
Bobby Doss
That's awesome. The good catch on the acronyms, because I think I've been inundated with acronyms this week, and I swore I wouldn't use any on this podcast. But I would say probably even after I got my instrument rating, sure, I knew it was a departure, but I probably couldn't remember what the other two letters stood for in every. Every time I got asked. And being in this training, I'm inundated with acronyms that I don't know because I'm not around this stuff, meaning the airframe and some of the procedures that we're doing for this company. But the departure is important for faster, bigger flows. No question. We probably aren't going to get them a lot in ga, and when we do, I think ATC is just going to move us out of the way of the faster traffic anyway.
16:33
Bobby Doss
And they can keep us clear and low, and they know it. Everybody's going to be climbing fast up above us. But they're very different than approach plates. I think approaches are in everyone's wheelhouse that flies IFR, because that's where we spend 90% of our time, probably in our training. Maybe a little bit of the inroot stuff, but a lot in the approach phase. And those approach charts are always. Well, there may be. Not always, but 99% of the time they're one page. And I've been working with Jeppesen charts lately because I knew I was going to be asked to use Jeppesen charts here. So I've been trying to breed them and using FAA charts forever. The flow is very different. The reading, it is very different. And it's. That's taking me some time. But a SID and a star might be three pages.
17:23
Bobby Doss
All the notes and things might be a lot more than that first page. So don't get stuck believing that a SID is one page. It can be multiple pages, and the most important information might not be on the first page.
17:36
Wally Mulhern
Right, right.
17:40
Bobby Doss
Go ahead.
17:40
Wally Mulhern
Oh, I was gonna say there. There are a lot of little notes on. On especially the stars. I know, and I know from experience, flying into Houston and flying into Denver a lot. I mean, the airplane I fly wants to descend about 310 knots. But the SIDS and star, or the stars rather for Houston and Denver, require you to fly at 280 knots. So that's something we always have to go in for those two airports. And then if I go to another airport that I'm not familiar with, you really have to scour over the notes because, you know, if everybody's coming in at 2280 and somebody comes in doing 310, it can kind of mess with the flow of traffic.
18:23
Bobby Doss
Yeah, no question. I got to revisit ODPs a lot based on just knowing that air traffic control for these pilots and these planes, they're going to expect me to understand everything. And just a quick reminder that the ODP is going to be there if the 40 to 1 can't be met to avoid something. Right. And in most cases that's probably going to be mountains or something really big towards the end of the Runway. But if you think 40 to 1 being the surface deck that the ODP has got to be able to accomplish and if not, then they're going to make, there's going to be an ODP that you're going to follow to get out again. Something we're probably not going to get a lot in GA aircraft because we're not moving fast enough to get to that quick enough is my guess.
19:13
Wally Mulhern
And what's an odp?
19:16
Bobby Doss
Obstacle departure procedure.
19:18
Wally Mulhern
There we go.
19:19
Bobby Doss
Good call. Good catch again. Maybe I'm not gonna do good with my acronyms today. And then I got to revisit the black T, the black upside down triangle with a T in it. That's really when there's some non standard stuff. Normally that's when the climb gradients requirements a little bit more than the default or the 200ft per minute. There's some stuff in the north and Vegas and west coast that we've done where you had to be able to climb at like 320ft per minute instead of 200ft per minute. And again, those notes are hard. There's so many of them.
19:54
Bobby Doss
But if you know what Runway you're departing on, probably on the atis, it takes those notes and crushes them to a much more manageable level because you really need to pay the attention to the ones that or prescriptive to your aircraft and your Runway and then you're pretty good shape after that. But make sure you read them all because you will be expected to understand and be able to do it. I think that's been the scary part for me is they say, you know, ATC expects you to understand what they're saying. There's no, there is no help anymore. Right. And in our training environment we're always training and I think they know that an ATC does help a lot.
20:31
Bobby Doss
But if you're in a jet and you're at 31,000ft, I don't think they're going to tell you what you're supposed to do on the way down. They're going to expect that you know what to do on the way up and on the way down.
20:40
Wally Mulhern
Yeah.
20:42
Bobby Doss
And that's really the entire section of 54 in the aim, right? It is the pilot and air traffic controllers responsibilities. And I don't remember that we talk a lot about the regulations and the AIM being non regulatory but there's an entire chapter in the AIM that tells us what we're supposed to be responsible for and what ATC is supposed to be responsible for. And I'm not going to get to it this week, but I will get through that chapter at some point and understand all those rules. And I think it's a good thing for all pilots to be aware of.
21:12
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, there is so much stuff in the aim. I distinctly remember as a young pilot, I don't remember where I was, I had at least my private, maybe my instrument, I don't know, somewhere in there, somewhere in my training career. But I remember really for the first time looking in the AIM and I remember sitting up in my bed, in my bedroom and looking at this stuff and it was a light bulb moment. I, I remember thinking holy cow, there's some good stuff back here. And yeah, I mean I'm a little bit of a geek when it comes to this kind of stuff but you know, up until that point I really hadn't gotten into it which was, you know, shame on me for not. And I'm sure my instructor had said hey, this is in the aim, take a look at it.
22:08
Wally Mulhern
And I probably said yeah, okay, whatever.
22:11
Bobby Doss
But you and another million students for sure.
22:14
Wally Mulhern
Yeah. And you know, I look at the regulations as the stuff that you have to do and the AIM is kind of the stuff that you should do. And I think all of us want to be, we want to be in that. You know, if you should do it, well, we probably should do it, no question.
22:34
Bobby Doss
So let's jump to stars again. Standard terminal area arrival. Sorry, standard terminal arrival route. And this I think on the sids, even in this jet we're pretty much vectored. Fairly quick to go ahead and get up and get out. Right. I think that once you get pointed in the direction of the flow of traffic, maybe it's because it's training, but they are giving us vectors and an altitude. We're pretty much gone fairly quick off the sid, but the STAR is much different. Again, I think they're managing a lot of big iron Little iron coming into these airports. And it's important that you can conform to these because they have a lot of things that I never really had to pay attention to in my prop planes and that is both altitude restrictions and speed restrictions.
23:24
Bobby Doss
And in this jet we can't meet a lot of the speed restrictions on the high end. So if it says like use yours, you just use an example of 280. This jet cannot not get to 280. It's, it's a limitation of the plane indicated. So the ground be probably there quite a bit. But we can't indicate that due to the limitation on the airframe. So we have to slow down or we have to tell ATC we're not going to be able to make some speed restrictions. And in most cases they're probably going to say, okay, best forward speed. And we talked about that a couple weeks ago. But it is important that you understand all of those and then understand how they fit into the whole flow.
24:07
Bobby Doss
A lot of times in the arrivals we'll see MEA and a moca, which is a minimum en route altitude and a minimum obstacle clearance altitude. Those are there for situational awareness or just really pilot awareness. We still have to fly the route guidance in the altitude that's on that arrival. But it's there to help us have some awareness of what it would be if we maybe lost something, communications or had an emergency. So we knew weren't going to get ourselves in trouble. Just make sure were trying to do everything we could to stay above those two altitudes. The thing that I think shocked me the most is when I heard descend via for the first time.
24:50
Bobby Doss
Wally, if you're a pilot that's never been above 8,000ft, really to speak of as pilot in command, when you're at 31,000ft for the first time and you're probably doing your first star and they say descend via, you're clear for the arrival. I really had no idea what that meant and I kind of went to grasping for straws there a little bit. How many times do you get to send via?
25:19
Wally Mulhern
Most of the time, I would say 80% of the time.
25:26
Bobby Doss
And you know what? I'm a fan. I'm a huge fan of it. Now that I understand it right. It's so nice because it's almost like being cleared direct to. You know, you're never going to get direct to in a jet from 31,000ft on the way into a terminal area, there's just too much flow. I would say maybe, but it's very rare. So to get descend via, the automation will take over. If you've got it programmed correctly, that's our next section. But if you got it set up correctly, descend via is like a luxury for a pilot because it's probably already in our flight plan. We probably have all the altitudes bugged.
26:04
Bobby Doss
The plane's gonna fly the majority of that for us and we get to just sit back and enjoy the ride and probably use all that energy that we used getting up and all that fuel we used to get up to descend and save a lot of economy on the way down for sure. I just didn't know what it meant. The other thing is you can be cleared for an arrival, but that doesn't mean you can use. You can leave your last assigned altitude. So if I was on an altitude from ATC at 25,000ft and they said clear the arrival. Again, going back to that chapter in the aim, I as the pilot need to understand what that means. That does not mean that I'm cleared to descend. It means I'm cleared to follow the route. The lateral guidance, not the vertical guidance.
26:50
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, well, when we go into San Francisco, they give that to you a lot. They'll say clear for the FMS bridge, visual lateral only. So fly the lateral. Well, just do what they say, don't descent, basically.
27:09
Bobby Doss
And, and we're going to get to autopilot or automation really quick here. But I think my eyes are like wide open or made wide open this week by how the autopilot works. I, I knew how it worked, but I think there's really three components in the autopilot that I've really come to learn and manage. And this is one of them. There's a lateral guidance section, a vertical guidance section, and then a mode section. And if you know that and in this plane there's auto throttle, so there's an auto throttle section. And I would assume your jet, although much more complicated, has those same four sections. You gotta.
27:49
Wally Mulhern
Yeah.
27:50
Bobby Doss
And the other component, that's gonna sound crazy to listeners who know I have a podcast with 160 plus episodes. I don't realize I did. I don't think I realized that what were doing. Again, I'm confessing here, I don't think I realized what were doing was programming the flight director. The only thing autopilot does is get engaged to then follow the flight director. What we're doing in most of the emergency stuff in this typewriting class is if we've done it right we're hand flying the flight director because the automation is not really the autopilot. It is, but it's not. It's the flight director. And then the servos in that said autopilot just do what the flight director is telling them to do. And it sounds crazy, but my eyes are open to that.
28:41
Wally Mulhern
That's not that way in all airplanes. I mean we can, big airplanes, we could turn a flight director off and everything's still going to work so well.
28:51
Bobby Doss
I think, I think you could do that in this plane too. But I guess what I'm saying is if the flight director's on and the mode controller, the flight director mode controller has been told what you wanted to do, maybe descend, maybe I want to capture a speed in an emergency, you know, I want to be doing 120 which is best glide in this case I can program the vertical guidance or the airspeed bug to 120 and that flight director will get me to stay on 120 even if autopilot's not engaged, which I have found so useful. And more often than not I probably have had my 182 flight director still chasing the nav mode because I didn't build it correctly for my descent for me. And I end up turning the flight director off because I'm so freaking confused on.
29:39
Bobby Doss
Well, I don't want to be turning right. I want to be staying straight. Now I think I can go home, put the heading bug where I want it, put the airspeed and altitude where I want it, and that flight director will tell Bobby exactly how to hand fly that with the autopilot not engaged. So I almost feel embarrassed to say it, but I've learned a whole bunch about things that I should have already known how to use. And it's kind of crazy because as an ex IT guy, still an IT guy, but many people tell me all the time, Wally, my computer is not doing what I want it to do. And what do you think happens when I walk over to inspect it? Yeah, like you looking over my shoulder on the auto.
30:22
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, they're not telling the right thing.
30:23
Bobby Doss
Yeah, well, it's doing exactly what you told it to do last, you know.
30:27
Wally Mulhern
Right.
30:27
Bobby Doss
Well. And it didn't save it where I wanted to save it. Show me how you did that. Click, click. Yep. It put it right where you told it to put it. You just didn't tell it to put the file where you wanted it to go. And I think that's been my self confession on autopilot is I don't Think I knew it like some people don't know computers. And I know I'm going to interact with it at a much different level when I get back. I know I've learned a lot in this training, but automation, as much as it can help me mostly in emergency situations in this course, I think it can probably cut my workload in half now through my descents and my approaches moving forward, because I know I can trust it a million times. Approach mode.
31:10
Bobby Doss
The knowledge that I had around approach mode. But now it's Bobby's flows. It's how these instructors and how real world scenarios have helped me understand when is the right time. And depending on what I've built in my flight director control module mode here, what does that mean is going to happen when I do hit approach mode? Do I have the right thing in standby? It just. The learning's been deep and we could probably do an entire show on this stuff. But I think as much as it can help Wally, I think it could really hurt some people too. I know it's hurt people. I know it has. And we have to do autopilot stall at altitude in this plane.
31:46
Bobby Doss
And while you might get eight warnings that it's about to happen, I can still see where someone would get confused and it sneak up and bite them, right? I mean, I've heard air speed a lot this week in the sim because I forgot to re. Engage auto throttle, right? And I'm just floating along at idle going, and hit mine. I can imagine my instructor behind me going, think of, think, Bobby, think. You got. You forgot something. You forgot something. And here I am just slowing down at 30,000ft, about to stall. If you don't tell it, if you tell it what to do, but you don't engage it. And in our world now we're calling that button it. If you don't button it, the plane's gonna do exactly what you told it to do. It's gonna save the file in the wrong spot. Wally.
32:30
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, yeah. You know, in the Boeings, we have what's called an fma, which stands for a flight Mode enunciator. And it's a required call out for us when we change the mode of an autopilot. If we go from heading select to LNAV that we, you know, it's not just a button push because when you do push the button lights up, but that doesn't mean it's engaged. What you then have to do is you have to look over at the flight mode Enunciator panel, the fma, and see that you now have elnav. And that's when we say ELNAV is engaged. It's been said that pushing the button is like ordering at a restaurant. But what comes up on the FMA is what shows up at your table. You may order steak, but you may get chicken. Okay?
33:22
Wally Mulhern
And until that food is in front of you really don't know what you're getting.
33:28
Bobby Doss
And similarly, in this smaller plane, it's got a G3000. It's very similar to the G1000, but it's got what they call a autopilot scoreboard in the top of the pfd, right? And I can't tell you how many times I thought I was. I told the autopilot to do what I wanted it to do, but it was just sitting up there white. It was not, it had not been engaged yet.
33:50
Wally Mulhern
Right.
33:51
Bobby Doss
And here I'm going to. I, I asked a couple people a couple weeks ago while I was working on my PC in the hallway. You know, I've never really understood what R O L P I T meant in my plane. Again, G1000 Garmin autopilot, when you hit. I think I was always doing backwards, but I would hit autopilot and then I would hit heading bug, and then I'd turn my heading bug to what I want. So if I know I'm going west, but I'm on a north heading, I'd hit AP and then I'd hit hg, D heading, HDG heading, and then I would turn the heading bug to 270. Probably the exact opposite. I probably should have been heading bug, the 270 heading mode and then autopilot and let the plane fly.
34:37
Bobby Doss
What I programmed or built in that program, what I find here that I've been doing is I've been programming it and yet to forget to hit the dang autopilot button because I'm so used to going in the other direction that I've always assumed that AP is engaged and being told what mode to be in, but I think I'm doing it. But when you hit that AP button, even in this jet, rol and pit come up. And I don't think that from the people I've talked to, I don't think people really understand what that means. And I've come to greatly understand it this week. It's roll and pitch, and if they're both green when you hit autopilot, that plane is going to stay in the same role.
35:19
Bobby Doss
That it's in and whatever pitch it's in and it's just going to maintain that and it's not going to change until you tell it to do something different. And that could have got Bobby in a lot of trouble in the past because I didn't understand that. I think I thought roll was like a intermediary to get to a heading that I might have bugged. That could have been dangerous. And I don't think I ever knew pitch was it. So if I was, God forbid, in unusual attitudes and I just hit ap, well, all that's going to do is hold me there in that exact pitch and roll characteristic. And that could have just got worse. So if you didn't know that, now you hopefully know it. Again, another confession from Bobby's lack of skills.
36:03
Bobby Doss
But staying in rolling pitch is really only good if your wings are level and you're flying level to give you a chance to catch your breath and take. Take your breath. A lot of the newer autopilots have lvl, which is just going to level the wings for you and kind of level the plane off. My182 does not have that feature. But if I'm straight and level and I hit ap, it's going to maintain that roll and pitch until I get a chance to catch up and maybe get in front of the airplane again. Anything to add to that, Wally?
36:37
Wally Mulhern
No, I don't think so.
36:39
Bobby Doss
Again, lots of information. Hopefully my lack of knowledge and a lot of learning this week will help all of our listeners understand some good stuff. I think the big takeaway for me was that the flight director is extremely valuable. Even if you're not using the autopilot while it's engaged, it can help you do a lot of things to descend at the speeds and directions, lateral and vertical that you want. I think an acronym or not an acronym really, but a phrase that I've heard before, but. And maybe it was from you, but it's build it, bug it and button it is what we use in this plane. And that's build that plan in the autopilot flight director. And then bug everything that you want in that as well.
37:23
Bobby Doss
And then hit the button for autopilot, VNav, auto throttle, whatever button you have to push to make sure. And then as Wally said, I have incorporated to myself that I will call out that I have bugged it and that I have actually buttoned it and that I see it in the scoreboard so that I know that I have checked myself and don't Leave myself kind of in a. In a purgatory of unknown and the computer saving the file in the wrong spot kind of thing, if that makes sense.
37:52
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, and we've all done that. I actually did that with Amazon the other day. I bought something on Amazon and was going to be here the next day and it was not there the next day. And then the next day comes along and it still wasn't there. And I'm mad at Amazon and I go to look at my app and guess what? It's still sitting in my car. And I did the cart. By now it's like, dang it.
38:16
Bobby Doss
Yeah, well, yeah, been there, done that many times. Because I buy so much crap from Amazon, I've actually decided that I won't actually hit buy until like 3pm because I still will get it the next day. And I know I'm probably gonna pick one more thing so I know try and help save the world a little bit by not getting eight deliveries in one day. So sometimes I forget to check out and same thing happens. So I think again I've learned so much that's gonna help me in my 182. I hope I get to fly this jet a lot in the future and get to continue to grow my skills as a pilot. But I would just on the service, this automation alone, I bet it's going to save me half the workload when I'm descending.
38:56
Bobby Doss
Even just going to Austin and make me a much safer, better pilot through all phases of flight. If you have questions about SIDS again, standard instrument departures or stars, standard terminal arrival routes or any of the automation. We didn't talk about every autopilot kind of focused on Garmin there. Lord, if you knew what we could talk about foreflight or electronic flight bags and all the charts and things that you could really do better with in your. In your single pilot resource management world. Whole other show there as well. Anything to wrap up with Wally?
39:33
Wally Mulhern
No, just good luck the rest of the way. How many, how many days left do you have?
39:39
Bobby Doss
About to walk over and do a little about four hours of studying before I call it a night. I've got three more sims, so really two sims tomorrow, one sim on Tuesday and checkride on Wednesday. So.
39:53
Wally Mulhern
All right.
39:54
Bobby Doss
Hopefully there'll be a show in a few weeks about my experience and my new type rating. We'll see. All right, as always, thanks for listening and stay behind the prop. Or maybe this week we'll say in front of the medium bypass fan turbine engine.
40:10
Wally Mulhern
There you go.
40:13
Nick Alan
Thanks for checking out the behind the Prop podcast. Be sure to click subscribe and check us out online@bravetheprop.com behind the Prop is recorded in Houston, Texas. Creator and host is Bobby Doss, co host is Wally Mulhern. The show is for entertainment purposes only and is not meant to replace actual flight instruction. Thanks for listening and remember, fly safe.