Sailplane Landing in Microsoft Flight Simulator

Video Transcript

"DIXON GILLETTE: Welcome back to Expert Village, my name is Dixon Gillette and let's continue our tutorial on Microsoft Flight Simulator X. Now the sailplanes, since we don't have an engine, we only get one chance at landing. Oftentimes, you'll find that many real-world sailplane pilots end up very, very far away from the airports perhaps in a field. Now, you're going to want to plan your descent and your approach very well leaving yourself plenty of altitude to get there. Now, you basically will set up your approach at a higher altitude than you would if you had a powered aircraft. Now, once you are lined up on the runway, how you get rid of this excess altitude is by pushing or extracting your spoilers, and this is done by pushing the forward slash on your keyboard. And you'll notice that your spoilers will actually begin to spoil the airflow similar to how we did it in jets. They will spoil our air flow and allow us to make a steep descent to our runway. Once our spoilers are used though, keep in mind that you're going to want to maybe take off the little spoilers if you find out that you're making too steep of a descent. And consequently, the sailplane also has flaps. You can lower your flaps to increase your wing-area speed. Now, your glider only has one wheel; but in this case, it is a retractable gear system. So you're going to want to make sure you push G on your keyboard before you touch down to extend that landing gear."