Trouble landing 777-200LR

[tdammers]

I notice when landing that the pilot view of the center line is not actually "centered". The pilot is to the left of the true center line of the plane, so must adjust perspective to imagine where the center line is. Would it be helpful to redesign aircraft in order that the pilot seat is directly on the center line of the plane. This way when the pilot lands or takeoffs the center line from the pilot's perspective is actually the center line.

The problem with that is that there are two pilots in the cockpit, for all sorts of reasons, and either of them may be Pilot Flying at any point of the flight. You can't put both of them on the centerline, and seating them one behind the other leads to all sorts of communication, coordination, and ergonomics problems (e.g., designing throttle and flap levers such that both pilots can reach them will be a challenge). So they are seated side by side, giving both a great view out the front window, good access to shared controls, and a view of the other one's instruments (which is important when there are failures: an electrical failure, for example, will usually knock out one side of the instrument panel, but not both, because the left and right sides feed from different electrical buses). The solution, then, is simply for the pilots to get used to the offset seating, much like car drivers are used to the same arrangement (with a passenger also sitting in the front row).

This is great!
In the previous comments mention was made about VREF, though I was not sure how to find it.
When I zoomed into the pilot cockpit dial it was right in front of me with a green line. The funny thing
was that this REF value was 115 in my last fly-in. I had been guessing that I needed a speed of about
170 to land.

IIRC, the 777 will calculate and display it automatically. In the real aircraft, I believe pilots can change this default value to add a safety margin, depending on expected conditions - e.g., if you're expect gusts, you may want to add 5-10 knots to your Vref to get a firmer, but also more stable landing.

That was way way to fast. It made landing much more difficult. At 115, it is super easy. Near touchdown
I can cut the autopilot speed to 100, and add flaps. With so much drag on the plane slowing down is not a problem.
My last touchdown speed was ~105. At such a low landing speed it is much easier to control the aircraft on the ground.
Very quickly the speed decreases to below 70 and the plane is under complete control.

Remarkable!
I can move the speed just to above VREF on landing, add in full flaps, add in full speedbrakes... all I need to do is nose down
and the plane rapidly decelerates down the center line. Before I was having problems with control on landing, with all this
braking ability landing is really easy.

Don't touch the flaps or speedbrakes just before landing, that is not how it's done. Instead, get the plane into full landing configuration earlier, say 5 miles out: airspeed Vref + 5 (or +10, depending on type), flaps in landing configuration, gear down, ground spoilers armed, autobrake armed, speedbrakes up, stable descent on the glideslope, and on the runway centerline. Continuously monitor airspeed, lateral alignment, glideslope, and sink rate. Upon reaching minimums, if any of them is unstable or incorrect, go around, otherwise call out "continue" and proceed. Do one final altitude check when passing the runway threshold: you should be at around 100 ft AGL at this point. Then at a suitable altitude (30-50 ft AGL typically), retard the throttles, pitch up just enough to arrest the sink rate - down to 0 if you want to "butter" it, or keep about 100-200 fpm in for a firmer landing. If you're doing a "decrab" landing (approach with wings level and a crab, but touch down aligned), now is typically the time to de-crab using the rudder, and countering induced bank with ailerons. Your airspeed should swiftly drop down to or below Vref, and the aircraft will sink into the runway. Once the main landing gear has touched down, autobrake and ground spoilers should automatically engage. Do not manually engage speedbrakes close to the ground, ever - you can easily stall the aircraft this way, and there is no space for a stall recovery. You may get away with it in the FG 777, because it doesn't model the edges of the flight envelope very well, but in a real aircraft, it'd be a bad idea.

[flyer]

tdammers, thank you again for your reply.

I am starting to get a better feel for how the plane flies now.
For example, I was surprised that I was able to manually use the autopilot to get lined up for an approach and then the autoland would take over.
I had thought that this might only be available to those who had preset a flight path in route manager and were using LNAV. Given this choice I would probably
always prefer to set up the localization and approach myself. With FG often the approach and departure beacons that are used are only roughly on the localizer
paths. I prefer to be "on" the localizer heading when approaching the radar boundaries.

I am still somewhat unclear, though about speedbrakes/autobrakes/spoilers with the 777. Directly to the right of the "Boeing 777" label on the midline
of the plane there is the autobrake knob. I have been setting this to the maximum setting and then arming it with "=". When i land the speedbrake arm
then automatically deploys. This is one nice feature to have preset braking and not have to stress about it when landing. (too bad other braking features such
as autothrust reverse and perhaps others did not behave in the same way). The problem that I am having is figuring out the difference between speedbrake
and autobrakes. I set the autobrakes to maximum and then the speedbrake deploys. Are speedbrakes and autobrakes the same thing?

I am also unclear about the spoilers. Does the 777 have spoilers? The keyboard keys to use are j and k, is there an arming command? There are also supposed
to be airbrakes that can be used to slow the plane down during flight. What keys deploy the airbrakes? { } ?

Finally one of the videos that I watched mentioned that the blue/orange screen directly in front of the pilot actually indicates the proper flap setting to
use on landing. Is this true?

[flyer]

I love the 777; it is a very well engineered aircraft.
Are there other planes on Flight Gear with similar performance?

I tried the Bombardier CRJ700; it was a nice modern plane, though it did not
have the autoland features of the 777. The 737 gave me problems, though
perhaps it has its own unique flying requirements.

[V12]

Try A320family. Best developed modern liner in the FG world and comparable with Aerosoft or FS Labs payware planes for commercial sims. For me, it lacks only VNAV, WX radar and terrain visualization.
I don't know what 737 You mean, 737YV has very reasonable flight dynamics (close to EASA training device 737-800NGX), but avionic is very simple, without MCDU, VNAV is not implemented too.

EDIT :
You can compare opensource A320family with 100 EUR FSLabs A320, or 737-800YV with 70 EUR PMDG 737 :

[flyer]

V12, is there some special startup required for the 787?
The 777 gives a very simple startup.
With the 787, after a minimal startup, shift b does not appear to
get the plane in motion. Is there some extra step involved?

hmm. I did a look around of the plane.
The plane appears to be locked down with blocks and there appears to be an
energy generator hooked up. How do you remove these?
Oh, I see this can be done with the ground services controls.

Now for some reason when I was in motion for liftoff, increasing throttle stopped the plane.

OK, up and flying. The AP is non-responsive!
Not sure what I am doing wrong.
All the AP commands are being ignored.

Everything seemed to work fine on the 787 except the AP.

[V12]

If i remember correctly, 787 is broken and unmaintained.
You can remove wheel chocks and ground equipment via menu.

[flyer]

Is there a way to start from select location with the engine running?
Mostly when I start up from the select location option the airplane does not have the engine running.
This makes it very challenging to fly while waiting for the engine to go on line (which can take quite a bit of time).

[V12]

Not all aircrafts supports states.