Leaderboard

MGEISS is correct, but I think you need to sit and watch various FMC tutorials, there are lots out there and without trying to sound smart, your questions are basic level questions for the FMC. One tip would be to search for PMDG 737 FMC tutorial, the FMC is the same except PMDG has more features enabled, but your questions are on basic operations so you shouldn't have any problem finding answers, and video's are much easier to follow that trying to work out what people mean in their text. But to add my points in case you are still not sure. SIDS STARTS and RW can be changed at any time, remember though when you change your STAR in mid flight, it might look like your route has been completely screwed up, but by using the LEGS page, you can rejoin the route to make it correct again. And this leads to your other question, how to select a waypoint that is in the plan but further down the list. This type of change is probably one of the most common and useful things you need to be able to do. Learning this allows your to skip waypoints which is quite common when pilots ask for shortcuts or ATC say go direct to a waypoint, and as I mentioned before, you do this to fix the route once you change a STAR. As MGEISS said, you are basically dragging the route up to join up the complete route, an incomplete route will have a line that says ROUTE DISCONTINUITY. This error was the biggest headache for me when learning the FMC!! All it means is there is a gap in your route, and all you do is select the waypoint below this message, and click on the line above to effectively drag it one line up and join the route up. As I said, find a good youtube video and it will be much easier, you can checkout flightdeck2sim, have a look around the 3:30 mark, you can see how to advance to the next waypoint. I'm at work so I can't watch in detail but I think this helps you out. The green arc is a great tool, but you need to know what it is an it's limits. It basically shows you at which point in your flight path, you will reach the altitude that you have selected in the MCP. So if you are at 20'000ft and you select 15'000ft, it will show you at what point you will reach that altitude...but, you need to do a few things to make it work. 1st you need to actually be descending, so setup a V/S of say -1000ft / min, then once you start to descend. you will see the green arc show up on the ND. The other thing you need to check is that your ND range is correct, so for the above example, it will take 5 minutes to descent 5000ft and -1000ft per min, and you might need 10nm to do that descent, if your ND range is set to 5nm, the green arc won't show as it's out the top of the screen.