Having flown the FBW A320 since its inception, I have clocked up nearly 300 hours on this plane. I decided this morning to take the plunge and purchased the Aerosoft CRJ.
In one word… WOW! After jumping through a few hoops to get my TCA throttle quadrant set up, and then I set up my SimBrief and Navigraph integration, I did my first flight from EGBB to EDDF.
I can tell you now, it was worth the purchase. it’s a steep learning curve transitioning from an Airbus to the CRJ, but it was so worth while.
The CRJ as you can imagine is more hands-on especially with having no auto-throttle, but what a plane, it’s like an Airbus on steroids!
Below are three links which deserve a mention, as these helped tremendously in setting up and transitioning to my first flight in this plane.
Setting up the TCA throttle quadrant
Setting up SimBrief…
Basic Tutorial in the CRJ…
I’m off now to do a few more flights in this plane.
Congratulations! Another thing that helped me a lot was to get used to using the SPEED mode for climbs and descents instead of VS mode. It felt weird at first but in the end it was actually easier and more intuitive.
Yes, but VNAV does not manage speed at all in the CRJ. IRL, very few Airlines have ordered the VNAV option and of these few, there are even some that dont allow their pilots to use it.
One can always argue how useful VNAV without Autothrottle is…
From my experience with the CRJ in MSFS, id rather recommend to descent manually. The VNAV can be very abbrubt.
I didn’t think it would work, but I tried it and it did. Thrust to idle, set speed, and it will adjust pitch to hold that speed just like when you’re climbing. Very handy on a jet with no autothrottle.
Call me old school, but after flying the A320NX for so long, it was nice to just set the VS and adjust throttle manually. It was a good feeling to see that I hadn’t lost the old skills in controlling the speed whilst descending, and then hold that speed for the approach
With all the system automation these days in airliners, I guess you could loose some skill sets very easily. This was one of the reasons i purchased the CRJ, I don’t fly GA just airliners so my way of thinking is that I now have the best of both worlds when flying airliners in FS2020, Airbus and the CRJ.
To be honest, I can’t wait for PMDG to start launching their Boeing’s.
I completely agree. I fell in love with this aircraft pretty fast.
Since there’s no A/T, I find it better to use VS for parts of the climb and descent (especially below FL100 and around TOC and TOD.
FLC/Speed mode is great, but I don’t think a lot of people in this sim realizes you’re not supposed to climb at 5000fpm+.
It holds speed, as it says. So if you add more power than required to hold the altitude at the selected speed it will climb and when you decrease the power it will descend to hold this speed. VNAV often does the very same thing, depending on its requirements (and the airplane of course) it switches between speed hold and glide path hold internally.
The Airbus equivalents (the basics at least) are Open Climb/Descent for IAS or FLCH and (managed) climb/Descent for VNAV.
It does work, but r/w CRJ operators typically use vertical speed mode to descend rather than SPD. The mode works in descent just as it does in climb - it uses pitch to control airspeed, with rate of descent controlled by engine power. It can cause vertical speed to vary quite a bit, which makes hitting an altitude constraint in a STAR quite difficult. It is typically used when holding a specific speed in descent is of primary importance, rather than hitting specific altitude targets.
It’s probably more useful at lower altitudes, where the pilots may want to descend without exceeding 250 knots below 10,000 feet.
It should be noted that at high altitudes when the “mach” mode is activated, the autopilot is not very good tracking the speed. However at low altitudes when the speed is given in knots, the tracking is perfect.
I used to have the CRJ on P3D and never really liked it that much. However on MSFS I absolutely love it.
The performance is also great as well. In the A320 when taxiing on the ground I will always get stutters especially when turning. In the CRJ it is so much smoother!
