How Do You Implement Your Aircraft Manual?

The A10C manual is almost 700 pages. I've thought of making hard copy of the most useful "hands on" sections. A small fortune to have it printed in color locally. I can print single sided and throw them in a binder, but again, that's alot of pages.

I have a Surface I can view the PDF from, but I dislike jumping around the pages and the print is too small on the Surface for my old eyes. I also don't like having to go hands on to move around yet another screen.

I know it's a personal decision, but what have you found useful and what did you do that you regreted?

Single sided? Double sided? Color or B&W?

I'm getting ready for a long cozy up to the A10C manual.

Would appreciate hearing from other pilots what worked, and did not work, for them.

Thanks!

Cost me 160 bucks to get the F14 manual made by Chuck printed, but after reading it all, now use my IPad mini, as it allows me to easily search and bookmark pages. I believe many real fighter pilots now use an IPad.

The A10C manual is almost 700 pages. I've thought of making hard copy

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I have a Surface I can view the PDF from, but I dislike jumping around the pages and the print is too small on the Surface for my old eyes.

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I know it's a personal decision, but what have you found useful and what did you do that you regreted?

The MS Surface is more like a Laptop tan a real Tablet .. for me, the best way to have the DCS manuals beside my gaming PC is an iPad Tablet .. at first, I used a 9.7" model but some books (like the NATOPs manuals) showed up too small, so I upgraded a couple of years ago to a 12.9" model that it's just perfect.

The iPad hardware is just half of what makes this posible for me, the other half is the GoodReader software (not available for Android) that is a mix of File Manager / PDF Reader .. it allows me to carry my library wherever I go, for example these are my A-10C publications:

The 12.9" allows smaller books (like the DCS manuals) to be easily read on two pages spreads, like this:

The App's user interface can be shown or hidden simply by tapping the screen on its center. I can add notes or highlight ítems easily and can navigate using the PDF index if it has one, or scrolling through the pages sequentially, or by showing page miniatures:

I purchased my iPad pro second hand, and they are now fairly cheap as new generations have appeared .. the 12.9 1st generation pro is superfast for this application, so no need for the latest hardware either :D

Best regards,

Eduardo

I use the manuals exclusively as PDFs, most of the time on my PC. I often open them in the background while playing DCS in order to read up on somethin I want to do.

Sometimes (especially with new modules) I put them on my phone to be able to read them when I'm not at home.

I made a hardcopy of the A-10C manual and will do the same for the hornet as well as soon as it got finished. I prefer having something printed out and I can read everywere, can make some notes etc. The warthog manual is in black and white, the hornet manual I will eventually order in color but depends on the costs.

I'd like printed manuals but I'd rather not do that much printing. I've ended up either flying with DCS on my desktop while having the manual open on an adjacent laptop or if I'm only interested in something specific, reading the relevent manual section on the desktop before jumping into DCS.

In either case, taking notes from the manual to make compressed references is helpful. Chuck's modules guides are good to use in place of the manual at times, and so is making a dedicated training mission with your own notes entered into the mission briefing. Have these missions setup for different objectives, like start up, weapons, nav, etc.

I fly by myself, no online flying. So I save things that maybe useful in a documents folder called Sim Flying. I have my screen set up so the bar across the bottom of the screen is still there when I am in DCS. If I need some help, I hit pause, open one of my saved docs or go to the web. I have printed a diagram of my TM Throttle that I have added labels to so I know what each switch does. I have printed a diagram of a carrier approach w/ a few notes added here and there.

Take the info you may need and convert it to png files and add it to your kneeboard folder of the aircraft also take map related info like flip pages and radio freqs for the airfields and do the same except add it to the kneeboard folder of the map then if you create a mission breifing take that info and put it in the mission kneeboard folder. Only use the dcs kneeboard folder for things that apply to everything. Also a mapping of your hotas controls would go in the aircraft kneeboard folder.

I actually read the A-10 manual on an iPhone! :cry::book:

These days I use an iPad. GoodReader is a great app for this.

Don’t print it, then you’ll realize how big 671 pages is...

I've got the actual A-10C hardcopy from TFC. Wish they'd still produce those. That was a LOT cheaper than trying to get a print in a local print shop.

But mostly I study the pdfs on my rig... have them on a tablet as well, but since I fly in VR, I literally haven't read a manual on it at all since its just a 10" screen, compared to my 24" is just a useless mice cinema. And since I can't read on it with my Rift on... guess what?

I never get how people even dare to try reading up on a phone, that's literally impossible - I mean literally! Pun intended. The tiny fonts on a package insert are like a newspaper's headlines compared to a pdf on a phone microscreen...

It's 2020. I don't print anything because it's a waste and it's useless for searching (and I search a lot when I need to refer to the manual). Otherwise I learn beside playing and not during a flight - that would be huge safety risk :) You can always altTab to the pdf, use kneeboard and tablet/phone. How to read on a tiny 5" phone? First you put it close to you, then you can use scaling too.

ED made only one printed manual for the Ka-50 Blackshark. Because of the quantity printed, the price was pretty reasonable, like around 30 or 40 bucks if I remember. Still have it on my shelves next to my sim.

I use the pdf on various tablets/e-readers option. The big suggestion I would have is to use a program to trim the extra white space margins around the text (I actually take the title bar at the top of the page too) which lets you have bigger text on the screen (less page area to display). That lets you use it on whatever pdf display program you want.

I agree that printing them out one by one is either unreasonably costly or a whole lot of work. Plus for the modules in EA (and that still is a lot of them!) things are subject to change, so you'd have to redo the whole thing sooner or later.

Personally I stick to the PDF versions mostly, now and then literally taking notes while reading them, so I end up with a short page of how to do a certain thing, which I can keep around printed. It sure isn't as accurate and it doesn't cover all of the possibilities, but it's enough for me to learn things (or look up when it's just been a long time with a particular module).

Classic examples are a little note I keep around to help me with a few Russian terms on Ka-50's ABRIS, a page of TMS/DMS functions in various modes for the A-10C or a step-by-step guide to the F-86's automatic bombing system.

Once in a while I definitely enjoy simple approaches.

I use the A-10c printed manual, bought it brand new on ebay a year ago, read it twice so far! cost me £30. I'm using the rift S now so the manual is for reference only when not using VR. Very useful in small sections.

I'm just copying eveything into my mind and store it there.

I fly in VR and utilize a custom kneeboard with Kneeboard Builder that I can read from within VR.

I have the Manual, or Chuck's Guide, in the custom Kneeboard in sections pertaining to what I am studying/learning for that particular aircraft.

I too also have the printed KA-50 and A10-C Manual.

I use a tablet on which I switch between the PDF manuals and a personal website with interactive checklists of the aircraft's I use

Yeah I read mine sometimes as a pdf on a kindle

VR flier. No taking on and off the facemask! Iteration and breaking it up is the only way to learn. It's not a 700 page manual, it is ten 70 pg manuals :) The only things I might take out of a manual are certain graphs or speeds or references and they would go into a kneeboard, like a HOTAS direction chart was something of the A-10C I needed whilst learning. I have to minimise the kneeboard length so I read, verify on the ground in 2D, read again until it's clear. Having said that, a TACAN is a TACAN, radios are radios, flight instruments are flight instruments. The only two place I ever dwelled on in the A-10C manual was the CDU which drove me nuts because it was not easy to pick up or intuitive. And the Hotas, but that was a muscle memory thing (and a binding issue as I had a Saitek at the time).

700 pages is a lot of CDU reference and quite a bit of padding that doesnt contribute directly to what you need to know. Therefore, the simple method of learning any plane is splitting the content up into:

AVIATE: Learn plane handling, wing surfaces, bindings, take it literally "for a spin". Race it like you stole it, try to break it. If any manual items come into here, like specific brake handling, special control surfaces, basic flight instruments etc, then you do this first, because if you can't fly, you can't move on. Part of that iteration in DCS is keybindings. I would include basic aircraft systems like lighting at this phase of learning. You can equate it to flying circuits and doing touch and go's until you have the understanding perfect. But no harm in getting lost and blowing yourslef up in a mountain at this point, you want to flex immediately, so do it.

NAVIGATE: There's more to this than meets the word. I will include any system that is related to navigation and going places, but additionally weapon related coordinates, usually the first part is creating a flight plan and entering coordinates, but each plane has nuances and maybe LL, DMS, MGRS, and variations thereof. You need to understand all the systems that surround this points, INS, EGI as well as any ILS, TACAN, ADF, autoland, autopilot if required. There is some overlap with the TGP here.

COMMUNICATE: More of a skill, but we can keep the terminology going by binding radios and looking up all the radio buttons and fixing SRS and testing that in MP. In the A-10C there's that extra radio and you should take a moment to get comfortable with each's capability.

SYSTEMS & WEAPONS: Each weapon has surrounding systems that need to be understood. You are likely to do one each session, so no point in reading ahead. HOTAS I think is a complete area to learn as one part and TGP another, both huge topics that extend into the TAD and SADL systems and such.

TLDR; the manual and how you use it is based on how you learn to operate the aircraft fully. It's not something that is always relevant as a reference. Most of it can be read once or twice in one sititng and the parts that are process oriented are parts to take out and iterate on. How you break out the relevant parts from 700pgs is the art, not just "printing" it in entirety which is a fairly old fashioned approach that disconnects a PC from the sim, when they are in fact always in the same physical location of your screen.

.... Iteration and breaking it up is the only way to learn. It's not a 700 page manual, it is ten 70 pg manuals :)

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How you break out the relevant parts from 700pgs is the art, not just "printing" it in entirety which is a fairly old fashioned approach.

Great post, full of insight .. you probably were a teacher on a previous life :D

https://www.print-my-pdf.com/pdfquote.php

They dont do color printing, only B&W .. almost 40 british pounds for an A-10C manual printed in A-5, including shipping to my country .. too expensive for me, as it would cost more than the DCs module.

How often you need colors? And A4 doest make much extra in size than shipping really. And there are many other services to do those...

I printed out my A-10c manual years ago but I cut out all the history parts and weapons parts, and I still have it in a binder. Now, I put every manual on my Kindle and I have a second monitor that is very handy to pop open to check and confirm what I'm doing. It does help quite a bit especially when you fly planes that you don't fly very often.