PFD & Synthetic Vision

The primary flight display: tapes, flight director, HSI with bearing pointers, minimums and alerting, and WebGL synthetic vision beneath it all.

Tapes and bugs

Airspeed on the left, attitude in the center, altitude and VSI on the right, HSI below. Every PFD readout is a live control. Touch the heading, altitude, baro, course, or minimums field and a numeric keypad opens for it: Select Heading, Select Altitude, Baro Setting, and so on. The knobs edit the same values in real-unit steps: selected altitude in 100 ft increments, baro in 0.01 inHg detents.

The course field is a button whenever the course is actually pilot-set: a VLOC course, GPS OBS, or a Direct-To user course. On a plain internal GPS leg the course comes from the flight plan, so touching the field offers Set OBS and hold? instead. Yes holds the present course and opens the course keypad. An external navigator’s course stays read-only until the navigator reports OBS.

Attitude and flight director

The E3X itself computes the flight director’s command bars. They show what the AFCS (automatic flight control system) is asking for, with your aircraft’s autopilot engaged or not.

HSI

• CDI Source — touch the attitude indicator or HSI (or press MENU on a full-screen PFD) to open PFD Options. Then touch CDI Source to cycle GPS → VLOC1 → VLOC2 (just VLOC with a single NAV radio). The value tints magenta for GPS, green for VLOC.
• Bearing pointers — two independent pointers, each set from a dropdown in PFD Options: Off, GPS, VLOC, Best Airport, or Nearest Airport.
• Radios you have disabled in Setup → Config (Radios tab) drop out of the CDI and bearing-source choices automatically.
• HSI Orientation — fixed heading-up or Auto TRK/HDG. Auto TRK/HDG switches the rose to track-up when airborne with GPS (heading-up on the ground or while the autopilot flies HDG). The GPS CDI scale is automatic: 5.00 nm en route, 1.25 nm within 30 nm of an airport in the route, 0.25 nm on approach. CDI Scale (0.25, 1.25, or 5.00 nm) overrides it until the automatic scale catches up to your pick.

The PFD Options window

Touching the attitude indicator or HSI opens PFD Options. It holds FPL source, CDI source, the two bearing-pointer dropdowns, a G-meter reset, a start/stop/reset timer, and the minimums box. It also holds More Options…, which opens the full PFD Setup window.

Minimums and altitude alerting

Set a barometric minimum from the Minimums box in PFD Options. The keypad’s Clear disables it again. The value shows as a BARO MIN readout on the PFD with a bug on the altitude scale. The alert steps through approaching / reached states as you descend. Minimums are set per flight: they reset at power-up, like the real unit.

Selected-altitude alerting is automatic. You get approaching cues at 1000 ft and 200 ft to capture. You then get a deviation alert if you leave the captured altitude by more than 200 ft. Each one flashes the selected-altitude box and, in X-Plane, plays a tone (Setup → Sound → Altitude Alert).

Synthetic vision

WebGL terrain under the attitude display: hypsometric shading (color by elevation) with hillshade, water with real shorelines, and runways drawn in perspective. Runways show an outlined deck, dashed centerline, and threshold numbers. Terrain that threatens your flight path picks up the Terrain page’s red/yellow shading. The shading stays in a forward corridor along your track, so the picture stays calm in normal flight. It turns off close to the airport, so short final is not a wall of red.

Pathways draws the active flight plan as a corridor of boxes at your selected altitude. When a VNAV profile is set, the corridor follows the VNAV descent path. The boxes are magenta for the active leg and white for the rest, when GPS is the nav source.

Synthetic vision and its sub-layers (pathways, flight-path marker) toggle in PFD Setup. If attitude, heading, position, or terrain data ever goes invalid, the PFD reverts to the classic blue-over-brown presentation on its own. It comes back when the data does.

Round-gauge mode

PFD Setup → PFD Presentation → Round Gauges swaps the tapes for a classic six-pack presentation over the same attitude and synthetic vision. It has round airspeed and altitude dials with a digital drum, a D-shaped VSI, a repositioned HSI, and a ball-in-tube inclinometer.

PFD Setup

Main Menu → Setup → PFD (or More Options… from PFD Options) holds PFD presentation, wind vector style, standard-rate bank pointers, and HSI orientation. It also holds CDI scale, pitch offset, baro transition altitude, and a G-meter. The G-meter can replace the HSI, with automatic display on high load factor or unusual attitude. The window also holds lateral deviation and trim/flap indicators, and the synthetic-vision toggles.