Learning the SA227 Metro III

For my upcoming adventure around New Zealand and Australia, I decided to learn to fly the shorter-range Fairchild-Swearingen SA227 Metroliner III, a twin-engine turboprop in which I've had some experience riding as a passenger, for business flights back in the 1984-2010 time frame. Back in those days, we hopped from San Diego to airports in the Los Angeles area, and also connected to Santa Maria airport from San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles, before they started using the CRJ to fly directly from Denver to Santa Barbara. I learned to take my flying earplugs with me, as the Metro III's turboprop engines sent quite a bit of vibration into the cabin.

The cockpit view of this aircraft is quite a bit busier than the old Cessna 172 type planes in which I've logged most of my time. This plane has its own additional "killer items", like a switch to arm the nosewheel steering that must be off while flying, cabin pressurization driven by engine bleed air systems that must be off for takeoff, but on before getting above 14,000 feet, and hydraulic systems that enable the landing gear to actuate.

To help me manage all the systems and associated switches and gauges, I downloaded the Xchecklist plugin for X-Plane, which guides me through the steps with written and verbal prompts for each required action. Even knowing what to do, I still had a steep learning curve, just becoming familiar with the locations in the cockpit, of each of the switches and gauges. I heavily modified the Metro III checklist that I found, to be in a more logical order. Along the way, using some of my rusty programmer skills, I created an Xchecklist User Defined Language (UDL) that provides some basic Xchecklist keyword highlighting in Notepad++, my favorite text editor on the PC.