User Guide

Flight Simulator
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Microsoft
I’ll bet you’d like to try this approach, wouldn’t you? Okay, here’s the setup.
Select Tutorial 14, Situation 5. (You know where to find it.)
I’ve placed you approximately 10 miles northeast of the RDD VOR on the 224-degree course inbound.
Your navigation radio is set to RDD with the OBS set to 224.The autopilot is off and you’re at 6,700
feet. ATC has cleared you for the approach, which means you can descend to the lowest altitude
shown on the route you’re flying. In this instance, you’re inside ITMOR intersection (position A), so
you can descend to 3,700 feet. Give it a try.
Press P to begin the simulation, and then press P to pause it once you’ve reached the MAP (which is
the VOR located on the airport).
Just in case you’d like to try the same approach with a 1,000-foot ceiling and one mile visibility, select
Tutorial 14, Situation 6. Have fun.
Did you get all that? I just took you through a quick course on VOR instrument approaches,
something that usually takes instrument pilots months to understand. If you want to put an ice pack
on your cranium, I’ll understand. But, believe it or not, there’s only one more approach you need to
look at in order to have a general idea about how most instrument approaches work. It’s called the
instrument landing system (ILS). We’ll talk about that in the next (and final!) tutorial, but first, hold
everything!
Hold that Pattern!
When an airline captain comes over the
intercom and says, “Umm. . . looks like
we’re gonna have to hold here for a
while,” you probably groan and think,
“Great. A delay.” Well, you know more
about instrument flying than you think
you do, because that’s exactly what
holding is designed to do—delay an
aircraft. An airplane can’t just pull over to
a rest area when ATC needs to delay its
arrival somewhere because of traffic
congestion or weather conditions. So the
controller tells the pilot to fly a holding
pattern.
Figure 4