FSX: Boeing 747 Hairy ILS Approach Into Singapore

This video was captured on the Monsoon Approach mission in Flight Simulator X. The realism settings were set to hard of course! This is the final 6 minutes of the approach. If you get bored of nothing happening you can fastforward to near the end.

I do a crappy landing. I put the throttles back to idle too early, then yanked them up suddenly when the "pull up" warning sounded. As I went over the threshold noted that the vertical speed was way too high in the negatives. Over -600 feet/min might cause some structural damage (and pissed off passengers?) in a real plane*, but you probably don't need a number this high to constitute a "hard landing". With that in mind I flared about 5 degrees nose up (I think this a pretty significant angle) and kept the power up. The plane ended up stubbornly floating and floating before touching down pretty far from the threshold. Damn, not a pretty landing.

It seems like I need a lot more practice on the 747! I'm much more used to the 737-800 and A321, which are much easier to handle than the 747. Also the default 747 that comes with FSX doesn't have a radar altimeter so it's hard to know when to flare. After all, flight simmers don't get the sense of "3D" that real pilots get so it's difficult to tell how far off the ground the plane is while landing.

There was a moderate to heavy crosswind - it's a monsoon after all.



* I'm not sure how accurate this number is. From what I've read on the Internet that's my rough guess. Yes it's just a guess - don't take it for a fact. I've also read that the maximum landing vertical speed depends also on the aircraft type and its weight. I need to do more research on this topic. Perhaps this will be one of my upcoming posts in a few weeks time. Oh I just remembered - in the FSX add-on FS Passengers, anything over -600 feet on touch down in a 747 results in a blown tire and terrified passengers, and you get rewarded with a "nice" landing if it's around
-200 to -250 feet per second (not sure of the exact range). However that's not a scientific source of info of course!