Chapter 6
Tutorials

If you are new to flying, an advanced simulator such as FlightGear can seem daunting: You are presented with a cockpit of an aircraft with little information on how to fly it.

In real life, when learning to fly you would have an instructor sitting next to you to teach you how to fly and keep you safe.

While we cannot provide a personal instructor for every virtual pilot, there are a number of tutorials available that you can follow to become a proficient virtual pilot.

6.1 In-flight Tutorials

FlightGear contains an in-flight tutorial system, where a simulated instructor provides a virtual ‘lesson’. These vary between aircraft from simple tutorials teaching you how to start the engines on the aircraft, to full lessons teaching you how to fly for the first time. To access tutorials, Select Start Tutorial from the Help menu.

The tutorial system works particularly well with the Festival TTS system (described above).

For simplicity, run tutorials with AI aircraft turned off from the Options item on the AI/ATC menu. Otherwise, ATC messages may make it difficult to hear your instructor.

Each tutorial consists of a number of discrete steps which you must complete. Your instructor will provide directions on how to complete each step, and observer how you perform them, providing additional guidance if required.

Within a tutorial, to ask your instructor to repeat any instructions, press ‘+’. You can pause the tutorial at any time using the ‘p’ key. To stop the tutorial select Stop Tutorial from the Help menu.

6.1.1 Cessna 172P tutorials

If this is your first time flying, a number of tutorials exist for the Cessna 172P designed to teach you the basics of flight, in a similar way to a real flight school. The tutorials are based around Half-Moon Bay (KHAF) and Livermore Municipal (KLVK) airports near San Francisco. Both these airports are provided in the base package. To start the tutorials, select the Cessna 172P aircraft, and a starting airport of KHAF or KLVK, using the wizard, or the command line:

When the simulator has loaded, select Start Tutorial from the Help menu. You will then be presented with a list of the tutorials available. Select a tutorial and press Next. A description of the tutorial is displayed. Press Start to start the tutorial.

6.2 FlightGear Tutorials

The following chapters provide FlightGear specific tutorials to take the budding aviator from their first time in an aircraft to flying in the clouds, relying on their instruments for navigation. If you have never flown a small aircraft before, following the tutorials provides an excellent introduction to flight.

Outside of this manual, there is an excellent tutorial written by David Megginson – being one of the main developers of FlightGear – on flying a basic airport circuit specifically using FlightGear. This document includes a lot of screen shots, numerical material etc., and is available from

http://www.flightgear.org/Docs/Tutorials/circuit.

6.3 Other Tutorials

There are many non-FlightGear specific tutorials, many of which are applicable. First, a quite comprehensive manual of this type is the Aeronautical Information Manual, published by the FAA, and available at

http://www.faa.gov/ATPubs/AIM/.

This is the Official Guide to Basic Flight Information and ATC Procedures by the FAA. It contains a lot of information on flight rules, flight safety, navigation, and more. If you find this a bit too hard work, you may prefer the FAA Training Book,

http://avstop.com/AC/FlightTraingHandbook/,

which covers all aspects of flight, beginning with the theory of flight and the working of airplanes, via procedures like takeoff and landing up to emergency situations. This is an ideal reading for those who want to learn some basics on flight but don’t (yet) want to spend bucks on getting a costly paper pilot’s handbook.

While the handbook mentioned above is an excellent introduction on VFR (Visual Flight Rules), it does not include flying according to IFR (Instrument Flight Rules). However, an excellent introduction into navigation and flight according to Instrument Flight Rules written by Charles Wood can be found at

http://www.navfltsm.addr.com/.

Another comprehensive but yet readable text is John Denker’s ”See how it flies”, available at

http://www.monmouth.com/ jsd/how/htm/title.html.

This is a real online text book, beginning with Bernoulli’s principle, drag and power, and the like, with the later chapters covering even advanced aspects of VFR as well as IFR flying

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