Moving the speed brake lever to ARM

[Will]

For anyone who is interested:

In there real 747, arming the spoilers is done by moving the speed brake lever from DOWN to ARM.

In PSX, f you're used to doing this by dragging the speedbrake lever with your mouse, you may have noticed that it can be tricky to precisely hit the ARM setting when you're moving the lever. (The ARM setting is indicated when your cursor, hovering in the speed brake area, turns from blue to amber.)

However, there doesn't need to be any uncertainty. You can move the lever from DOWN to ARM with exactly one press of F8, or if you have a button set to extend the speed brakes, exactly one press of that button. Once you know this, you never have to hunt for the ARM position, and there is no longer any guesswork or imprecision.

Here's what I do:

I have the speedbrake lever mapped to an axis on my throttle quadrant. I'm using a Saitek quadrant, which has a 2-way toggle button located on the quadrant just below each lever. I mapped the speedbrake axis to the left-most lever, and the toggle buttons just below that lever to Speed brake EXT and Speed brake RET. Moving the speedbrakes is simply a matter of moving the Saitek lever through it's range of motion. It works perfectly.

But to ARM the speed brakes, as long as the lever is in the stowed (DOWN) position, all I need to do is hit the Speed brake EXT button just once, and then the speed brakes are reliably armed. It works perfectly well and is quite intuitive.

Note that if you're on the ground and the engines are running, setting the speed brake lever to ARM will trigger an automatic full deployment of the spoilers (see page 260 in the manual). So, if you want to convince yourself that one key press (see above) or one tap of a button will move the speed brake lever precisely to ARM, try a situ when the engines are off or the aircraft is airborne.

[John H Watson]

Will, running engines are not required, just hydraulics. On some 744's, the system can be fooled into thinking that hydraulics are running by pulling CBs (i.e. The lever will operate, but the speedbrake panels will not come up.

Rgds
JHW

[jlpilot]

However, there doesn't need to be any uncertainty. You can move the lever from DOWN to ARM with exactly one press of F8, or if you have a button set to extend the speed brakes, exactly one press of that button. Once you know this, you never have to hunt for the ARM position, and there is no longer any guesswork or imprecision.

Hi Will,

Good tip. I haven't got around to setting up my Saitek yoke and throttles yet but this is something I wondered about.

[JRBarrett]

Excellent suggestion! I also have the spoilers mapped to a lever on my yoke, and have been struggling with getting it set to the "arm" position by pulling the lever "just" far enough, but not too far. Thanks for the tip!