VASI confusion

[Darryl]

am i high or low, what colors should i see?

[Dexter Dog]

High!

Should be 2 red and 2 white (I think!) and that gives you a real nice approach all the way! That said, you can do a "dive bomber" approach with many FSX planes if your a bit high - though i doubt that is very realistic in most circumstances!

[BradHosking]

Instead of "dive bombing" do a Side Slip which is very much a gliding a light aircraft real world practice (with the exception of an Air Canada 767 of course!)

Left or right rudder with opposite stick. Aircraft will slew and drop like a rock due to drag, however airspeed will not increase. Then you can level it out when at the right height or do it down to the threshold and kick it straight at the last moment, that in itself is a challenge!

Much safer form of falling from the sky Good practice in a glider if your airbrakes fail.

[Darryl]

I never see any red lights with the VASI down there.

[Pesto]

Here's a couple of links that explain it all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Approach_Slope_Indicator

http://www.faa.gov/airports_airtraffic/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim/Chap2/aim0201.html

I tend to always come in a bit high because I'm paranoid about landing too short.  If you use full flaps then your approach tends to be steeper anyway, so it all seems to work out.

[Hugh Johnston]

I think it looks like a T-VASI where there are no red light just white. If your on the correct approach path you should just see 2 white lights next to each other. If below there will be 1 or 2 white lights in front of it depeneding on how low you are on your approach. Same goes for if you are too high except that the lights will be behind the 2 white lights next to each other. T-VASI's are hard to see in FSX because there is such a big glow around the lights.

                0

                0  -Too high if you see these lights

              0 0 - These 2 white lights are always showing.

                0 - Too low if you see these lights

                0

Hope you understand 

Cheers

Hugh

[John Bosch]

Exactly as I was going to put it johnstonh. It had me a little confused for a while too. Canberra has both. A T-Vasi on 35 and the other type with the red lights on 30. I also agree that the T-Vasi is really hard to see because of the huge glow around the centre lights.

[Darryl]

Good explanation , cant tell one way or the other in the sim. I like the red lights.   , white over white fly all night, red over red and your dead is what they teach new pilots

[UA991]

That looks like FSX standard Melbourne to me. In which case, reality and ORBX YMML have all YMML runways with PAPI lights (the red and white lights) and not the T-VASI lights. Not the first time FSX have T-VASIs present when PAPIs should be. Hamilton Island is another example.

[Flukey]

That looks like FSX standard Melbourne to me. In which case, reality and ORBX YMML have all YMML runways with PAPI lights (the red and white lights) and not the T-VASI lights. Not the first time FSX have T-VASIs present when PAPIs should be. Hamilton Island is another example.

This is due to the Microsoft Airport Data being considerably out of date as Sydney will have the same issue, in FS it uses the T-VASSI, which they did use, but in reality they now use PAPI which has been around for a year I think???

Flukey

[Martin Henare]

That looks like FSX standard Melbourne to me. In which case, reality and ORBX YMML have all YMML runways with PAPI lights (the red and white lights) and not the T-VASI lights. Not the first time FSX have T-VASIs present when PAPIs should be. Hamilton Island is another example.

Correct. You can infact still see the remains of the T-Vasi for YMML in the photoreal imgery. It only went to Papi recently