A320 MCDU Practice Scenarios

Before you can program anything, you need to know where things live. This is a walk round the MCDU with nothing to type.

The INIT page is the first thing you touch on every flight. Six entries, two minutes, and the flight management computer knows what trip it is flying.

V-speeds, flap setting and a flex temperature for a Madrid departure — the numbers that decide whether the aircraft flies off the runway you have.

Tune the VOR and ILS frequencies for the approach into Paris by hand, on the page the FMGS otherwise manages for you.

A complete short-haul setup, gate to gate on paper: London Heathrow to Paris Charles de Gaulle, the sector every A320 pilot in Europe has flown a hundred times.

Your first real procedure practice: pick a departure out of Phoenix and an arrival into Las Vegas, from the trainer's real FAA procedure data.

The "NOT IN DATABASE" message is the single most common thing to go wrong when entering an airway. Here is why it appears and how to insert an airway properly — L612, the first airway from London to Paris.

The F-PLN DISCONTINUITY line is not an error message. It is the FMGS telling you it does not know how you intend to join two pieces of route.

You typed the wrong destination. Every pilot has. The skill being practised is not avoiding the mistake — it is catching it and clearing it out cleanly.

At the gate with the OFP in hand: seven numbers on INIT B, and the aircraft knows what it weighs and what it is carrying.

A flex takeoff lies to the engines about the outside air temperature so they produce less thrust. Try three values and feel the trade.

Most pilots type the cost index off the OFP and never think about it again. Try three values and watch what the number actually controls.

Thirty minutes into a Heathrow–Geneva sector, the fuel check: what the tanks actually hold against what the plan said they would.

Mid-Atlantic at FL340, hours of fuel burnt off, and the aircraft can now fly higher and cheaper. Check the maximum, then step up.

"Direct OCK" — five seconds of radio and a chunk of your flight plan gone. On this FMS the keypress is the commitment: there is nothing to confirm and nothing to undo.

Mid-planning, ATC sends you to Brussels instead of Paris. Rebuild the flight around a new destination without unpicking the whole thing.

ATC wants you at an altitude by a waypoint. The vertical revision page is where that promise gets written into the flight plan.

Holding is not a manoeuvre you fly from memory on an airliner — you build it in the box. Here is where the HOLD page hides and what it wants.

The A320 builds its descent backwards from a crossing constraint. Add the fix, hang the constraint on it, then read the profile the FMGS computes.

You are high on the descent profile and the FMGS is not helping. Read the vertical picture off the MCDU, find the real cause (the arrival was never selected, so there are no constraints to descend to), fix it, hang the crossing restriction on the fix, and read what managed DES is actually flying.

You are inbound to San Francisco with the arrival programmed, and ATC changes the landing runway. Re-select the arrival, see what the re-selection does to your flight plan instead of assuming it cleaned up after itself, and put the plan back together so it flies forward from where you are rather than backwards through an arrival you have already left behind.

The approach briefing, in the box: QNH, wind, temperature, VAPP and minima for the ILS onto Heathrow's 27R.

A short, pure procedure drill: a SID out of JFK and a STAR into Boston, using real FAA procedure data and nothing else.

Same drill, fresh city pair: departure out of Atlanta, arrival into Miami, both from real FAA procedure data.

Los Angeles to New York the way it is actually filed: a SID, the J146 jet route, and the CAMRN arrival into JFK.

The northern corridor: Seattle to New York via J70, a different routing into the same busy arrival.