Ask Captain Lim

Dear Capt Lim,

I am KH Koh from Singapore. I am not a pilot but I fly the Boeing 777 on the Microsoft's Flight Simulator.
 
I have a question regarding the glide path during approach using autopilot on the Boeing 777.   If I am not mistaken, the pilot can set the run way frequency during approach and have the autopilot on to align the aircraft with the runway center line automatically.  
My question is, does the autopilot take care of the approach speed and altitude automatically when coming nearer to the airport runway?  Or, these have to be set manually depending on the distance of the aircraft to the airport?  For example, if the aircraft is 20 nautical miles away from the airport, the targeted altitude is 10,000 ft and speed say 250 KIAS. At 15 nm, the targeted altitude is 7,500ft and speed is 220 KIAS and so on.  Does the pilot need to change these data manually while approaching the airport even though the aircraft is flown by the autopilot?  If these are all automatically changed, what do you input to the aircraft computer so that the autopilot will know what to do?

Would you please advise?

Thank you very much.

Best regards,

KH Koh

Hi Koh,

The pilot must tune the ILS frequency for the Runway before he flies the autopilot approach.  The autopilot will fly the approach landing profile accurately but the pilot would have to adjust the speeds for each flaps setting, reducing progressively until the landing flaps (30) is selected.  So the speeds must be manually selected by the pilot until the final landing speed at about 1000 feet above ground level.  This is the real scenario but I am not sure how your Microsoft Flight Simulator works as I have not flown on one yet.