My favorite large aircraft is the B-787 (like the wings) but have had trouble getting VNAV to work on complicated flight plans. I made a little blog here that tells the story of getting it to work with all the needed references:
I of course invite comments and fine point on the procedures. I am reposting here since I suspect most of the people who read the original post gave up on me as a hopeless case.
I think your premise of a hands off flight is a false start. With all the automation that is offered, it will not complete the entire flight hands-off. You will need to get involved on the flight deck from preflight, through FMS set-up, and all the other phases of flight through transitioning from the arrival procedure onto the ILS. True, it does have auto land and it does work, but there is no AI First Officer to play Pilot Flying to your Pilot Monitoring to meet your stated challenge.
Practically speaking, once your flight plan is in the FMS, you will need to check each waypoint to see if it complete and correct. You may wish to make changes along the route before departing. This all takes place on the flight deck, sorting out whatever the sim has passed along to the EFB. You may wish to ask some more specific questions so other can maybe help you out?
Thanks for the response. When I was flying it was the C-172 mostly hand flying until we got G1000s in the Club. The B-787 is a lot more complex and I had the fantasy that you could automate it more.
I just confirmed I have the basics down by flying on VNAV from LAX to SFO. This worked perfectly automated from the initial set up after TO in LA. I now know that once you set the VNAV at cruise you just have to put in your low point on the descent in the altitude selector. In this case I put in the FAP for the ILS at SFO at 3000’. VNAV took me then from cruise at FL350 to the CAT III roll-out at SFO hands off.
For me this is way cool… but maybe I have low criteria…
I have one flight this did not work on. This was a shorter flight from Reno to Fresno over the High Sierra. You have to stay high over the mountains and then let down in a corkscrew to land in Fresno. It is only a 160 mile flight and I tried to fly it at 20,000 feet but would not set the T/D properly to hook up with the ILS.
This one will be a challenge. Will try starting to cruise at 15,000. Mount Whitney is 14,000.
It is way cool and it sounds like you know what you have to do to make it work. The Dreamliner is not so much discussed these days because it is one of the least defective models in 2024. It actually got very good in 2020 but I stopped flying it for a long time when the PMDG 777 came out. I had to get to know it once again to learn how to set it up in 24 via the EFB. It is one of 2 aircraft that I will fly IFR in IMC in 24, it’s that good.
Whatever bugs there are are mostly cosmetic. Have you noticed that there are a few switches on the overhead panel that are not labeled at all or mislabeled? PACS and Taxi lights? LOL
We used to have a Frasca simulator in my laboratory and I wrote the graphics code for it:
https://web.stanford.edu/~yesavage/AIR.html
So I have spent countless hours doing IFR in a simulator and the Frasca had basically NO bugs, I squashed everyone of them at the start and it ran impeccably for 20 years? This is why I have little tolerance for what is going on here. I mean this is basically mathematics and the algorithms work or do not work.
Anyway, the C-172 is not bad for sightseeing and I guess I will keep doing that and I like to fly in real weather when we have it in the SF Bay Area. But I am very irritated that they let this IFR simulation out in the wild and allege they want to train pilots on it in its current state.
I do not see the point in fine tuning the B-787 as they have ignored problems for years.
Just to digress, the first programming I did in simulation was with SGI machines and these were the folks that developed IRIX/OpenGL, which was later ported to C++ and I wrote in for years using Linux on Dell Precision Workstations. It was bombproof. We automatically collected NIH research data on it using scripts in 100s of subjects.
I also went through the full history of texture mapping with SGI and it is very clear that you can only put so much detail in a sim before it grinds to a halt (like what we have). I guess it helps their marketing, but the overall rating of the product is so bad I think they made a big mistake here letting this out of the barn as is.
One more digression, the runway texture at takeoff I did by hand (individual tire tracks) and if you can get this to run properly, it is the true test of the simulation… theirs is poor. It hurts to see this.
Anyway, Clear Skys!
Have finally perfected the Reno to Fresno RNAV route. Need to do it all at FL350 and extend the descent so that the Top of Climb (T/D) did not occur after the Top of Descent (T/D)… an error message.
An added bonus after a long autoland I noticed something on the freeway and decided to taxi over there… you can tell I was over the High Sierra:
I filed a bug on a problem with the Flight Planning and VNAV where the planned cruise altitude is not carried over to the VNAV section of the AP.
Screws up automatic descent.
Bug report:
