Hi all!
Does somebody know if PMDG will release the 737 in the sim marketplace? If so is there an eta?
Thanks in advance. Sincerely,
Filippo
Hello. For those things it’s better to check out the PMDG forum.
As noted by others here, many thanks for your interesting and helpful comments on the 737. I find it interesting that the Max has seemingly significant differences in flight deck instrumentation. I was under the impression, from all that has been written concerning the sad history of Boeing and its Max development, that Boeing went out of its way to make the Max a seamless successor to the NG in order to save the airlines pilot training expenses. Can you give us a better sense of how the flight deck on the Max differs (at least materially) from the NG?
Anyone knows why the flightplans saved with simbrief downloader under the PMDG flighplan folder do not show up on the MCDU??
From memory, there are two potential file manager directory paths that have flightplan directories, but only one location is correct. Not at my computer right now to check the path.
You also do have to load them in after filtering for them in the mcdu route section.
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just found out, but its really confusing.
I was saving from simbrief downloader under the Community - PMDG - Flighplan ( simple than the other, but why is that folder there if its not working?)
its under:
C:\Users*****\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\packages\pmdg-aircraft-737\work\Flightplans
Where is the EFB PMDG!!
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An airliner website said that fuel jettison for the Airbus A32X is an optional system to choose when an airline buys this plane, and the A340 and the Boeing 747 can do it:
Personally I would not want to sit in an airplane being in need of an emergency landing in a field, knowing that to the left and right of my seat are 20.000 litres of gasoline waiting to start to burn as soon as my plane will touch down (because of the high chance that the wings and wing tanks will shatter).
Safety is the most important feature. 
After reading more information I have to admit that I am shocked seeing that almost no airliners have fuel jettison systems.
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Yes one directory has a folder for flightplans only, the correct path that you found has both flightplan and wx directories, you load the wx file from simbrief too into the wx dir.
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Thanks Masklin, didn’t read the release notes for the PDMG update!
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They both work, but the community folder one only works if you save the flightplan before starting the sim (as the community folder is effectively only “read” once - or something like that anyway). The other directory works at any time, so if you start the sim, do a plan in simbrief and download it, you can immediately access it in the aircraft.
It’s just small differences that are big enough for you to go “Gear up? Where’s the gear lever??? Oh there it is”. Not a big deal. It’s the same airplane with better engines and with some logics modernized. The speedbrake is now fly by wire and has some fancy new functions like the emergency descent, the elevator jam landing assist or the landing attitude modifier. Apart from STS we now have MCAS which is pretty nice. The air conditioning panel isn’t trying to kill us as much as on the NG and now it will warn us if the packs or the bleeds are off after take off… and now it’ll do it even BEFORE the passenger O2 masks fall out.
Some differences are more significant than others. For example the landing gear lever in the NG has positions UP DOWN and OFF. In the NG we put it in OFF after take off when we read the after take off checklist. The MAX’s landing gear lever does not have an off position, just UP and DOWN. Hasn’t happened to me but it’s very easy on your first flights on the MAX to be very close to lowering the landing gear when by muscle memory your hand goes straight to the lever before putting the autobrake in off. It’s an issue because the initial reaction after the blunder would be to want to put it quickly back up again and you can’t just do that. The landing maximum landing gear extension speed is 270kts while the maximum retraction speed is 235kts. So if already flying at 250kts and you make the mistake of lowering the landing gear wanting to put it in off, you will need to ask your colleague to slow down to 235KTS before you can retract it again as he laughs in your face.
I’ve been flying the MAX more than the NG for over a year now. The first time I flew it it happened by surprise. The whole crew was called from stand by. So not only I was at home watching TV not expecting to fly, now I was going to fly the infamous MAX for the first time ever as was my colleague. It was a bit stressful for a few minutes. We had done all the training, the lengthy e-learning modules and the simulator but still… After we sat in the airplane everything fell into place and training kicked in. In the things that matter the airplane is the same exact piece of unergonomic metal but now it makes less noise and it takes 2,5 minutes to start each engine instead of 45 seconds like on the NG.
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An emergency landing is not a crash. They just land at a bit unexpected timing or place, and use the same aircraft again.
If that gasoline burns at once for some reason, that occasion is a crash not an emergency landing.
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We should probably just get a new forum to discuss the pro’s and con’s of fuel dumping.
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A 737 BBJ with 9 aux. fuel tanks can take off with a lot of fuel. Are those BBJs equipped with fuel jettison capability?
Or they don’t need it because even that amount of fuel is also capped by MTOW which is not too far from MLW, just same as other 737s?
The BBJ has the same MTOW and MLW as the normal 737. It just happens that it carries more fuel than people and things. It doesn’t have jettison.
Yes, and that’s because when you have the type of emergency that requires a landing not at your destination it doesn’t mean that the airplane is going to crash. Maybe your weather radar stopped working at night time and there’s thunderstorms forecasted. Maybe your landing gear won’t go up or maybe you have a sick passenger and you need to land at the nearest suitable airport. If that is the case, the pilots will decide if it’s better to burn some fuel or if it’s a better idea to decide to land overweight. We’ve already stated here that landing overweight is not a big deal and you’re only subject to your landing performance (as with any landing). You just choose a long dry runway and that’s it.
Now if in your head an emergency landing always means that you’ve lost half of the wing or both engines, I’m sorry to tell you that the fuel jettisoning system is really not that fast. You can’t get rid of a big part of your fuel in under one hour. Airplanes that have a jettisoning system often establish themselves in a hold and dump fuel there for about an hour… the same amount of time that would rid you of 3 tonnes of fuel in a 737 flying low in a holding pattern with the gear out.
A large airplane like the a340 dumps fuel at a rate of about 1000Kg/min. If they need to get rid of 100.000Kg to reach your max landing weight, you do the math (100 minutes). They would never dump more fuel than the necessary to reach the maximum landing weight.
If in a 737-800 you take off with 66T and for some strange reason the crew want to burn enough fuel to land at 65T, they’ll just need to fly in circles for about 20 minutes tops. It’d be a waste of time because the airplane lands just fine at 66T.
If you have a catastrophic malfunction and you’re basically looking for a field to put the airplane in, having 6500Kg of fuel instead of 6000Kg is the least of your problems. You have a big imagination. There’s nothing wrong with that because it makes you curious about these things.
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I’m sorry but you really have no idea what you’re talking about with comments like this.
Thanks for the very informative reply. Living in Seattle, I was totally immersed in the saga of the Max – and of course, the long grounding had a real impact on employment at Boeing, especially in Renton, where the plane is assembled. I’ve come away with the impression that the tragedy had much more to do with mistakes by senior Boeing management than the day-to-day work of Boeing engineers. That’s been reinforced by conversations with a lawyer friend of mine in Houston, who represented Mark Forkner, the only person criminally charged in the affair. As he put it, Boeing’s management through Forkner “under the plane.” Happily, Forkner was exonerated.
My only flight on the Max as a passenger left me with the impression that there was little difference from the NG – which, as a very frequent flyer, I’ve always liked (although I’d take a 757 any day).
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The Netflix documentary on the MAX sums it all up perfectly. I loved working on the 757. Such a perfect workplace. I wish it was the hyper successful platform that the 737 turned out to be and that the industry had demanded updates. There’s still no other airplane competing in its role in terms of payload and runway performance. Let’s see what the 797 brings to the table.
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I was always wondering what exactly is the purpose of that landing gear OFF position in the 737…