IMPORTANT: You should use this site with Chrome or Chromium browser for best results because other browsers may have too many keyboard quirks that will quickly become annoying (for example, the QuickFind feature in Firefox, or the way Firefox uses the backspace key for navigation).

For most users, it will be best to switch the browser to full screen mode (F11), so that the screen won't scroll unintentionally.

REALLY IMPORTANT: This page requires a minimum viewport area of 900px wide by 600px high. It is NOT intended to be used on a smartphone or mobile phone display, but will work on tablets that meet the minimums. You will get best results with a PC running Chromium for Linux in full screen mode.

UPDATE: From August 2017 we fixed this problem slightly. It will now scale the entire screen on Android phones. Unfortunately if your phone has a very small screen, that may make it difficult to read the text.

In the lesson panel on the left side of the page, you will see it has been divided into 3 sections.

The top section shows the available lessons, displayed as a row of buttons. Each lesson is designed to follow from the previous one, so it is best to complete them in order from left to right.

The middle section is the lesson body, which contains all the content of the lesson.

If you see a green button, this means it leads to information that is essential for continuing (exception is on the preflight checks page, where color has no meaning). Blue buttons link to information that may be of interest, but is not essential.

The lesson body may need to be scrolled in order to see all of the content. It is important to remember that when moving between pages, on most browsers the scroll position will not be reset (if you know how to do that without refreshing the page, be sure to let us know). You will need to scroll back to the top yourself.

The bottom section divides the lesson body into pages, making it easy to go back and review what you have already read before.

Most of the time, you should read every page of every lesson. The exception is lesson 1: Check & Start. For that lesson, you can skip straight to page 5 if you have no interest in real-world aviation and only want to learn the MCDU procedures.

This help file is due to be updated and will be given a new separate page with much more detail.

For now, we felt it is better to just get the most vital information out there as quickly as possible, so you can started. We will make fixes as we go, and continue adding content as it becomes possible.

Our site is famous for two reasons... first and best, because of our attention to detail and our solid attempt to create the most realistic free online training tool available for the MCDU. But unfortunately we're also famous for how slowly we can make updates.

We'd like to improve on both counts! And that's where you have the opportunity to help.

This product is available to the public totally free of charge and we don't make any profit from it at all. We volunteer our spare time to work on the project and unfortunately there is less and less of this spare time available.

So we are now asking any enthusiastic volunteers who would like to see this project reach its full potential to assist with developing the project. It is really easy to help and you don't need to be a programmer to do it!

You can help us by adding new airports, waypoints, routes etc. If you can spare just one hour to help with that, even if you only add one line of data, it will go a long way towards getting this project up in the air :)

Everyone who helps will get a shiny new developer credit that you can display on your CV or brag about to your friends or whatever else you want to do with it.

Please use the email contact form to get in touch if you are interested. Also any active duty or trainee A320/A330 pilots (or similar) who would like to help in other ways than adding data, we are also very keen to talk with you!

My sincere thanks to everyone who has helped us to keep this project alive for another year, and I truly hope we can continue to make things even better.

1. I can't see the MCDU at all, what could be wrong?
   This is most likely because you are using an old or incompatible browser (Internet Explorer / MSIE is very problematic), or your computer is really old, or you have a bad connection.
   
   Upgrading any of these is a good idea. Also the page might have timed out before all the files were loaded. Refreshing the page can possibly fix this.
   
   
2. I can see the MCDU but the buttons don't work, how do I fix it?
   It is possibly a browser problem. Try loading the page in a different browser.
   
   Also the page might have timed out before all the files were loaded. Refreshing the page can possibly fix this.
   
   
3. I can see the MCDU, all the buttons work, but some of the text is displaying strangely. What's up with that?
   Your browser might be set to display fonts more large or more small. Scaling the device with Ctrl+ and Ctrl- can fix this, sort of.
   
   
4. Everything works fine, but your MCDU looks nothing like the one in my game! Why is that?
   The MCDU in your game only needs to be realistic enough to make the game more fun and immersive. It is not really intended as a real training tool. Our device is intended to help you learn, so we pay more attention to detail and ensuring that everything is as realistic as we can get it. Also, games can limit what the developer can do, whereas here we do not have to worry about that.
   
   
5. Everything works fine but your MCDU does not look like the one in my real world A320.
   Most likely this is because your aircraft is very new or very old. If it is more new, then it has a push button for BRT/DIM instead of a dimmer knob that has OFF/BRT settings. If it is more old then your airline sucks and you should contact me and let me know which airline so I can avoid flying with them!
   
   Seriously, if the MCDU in your airplane is more old, then the keys will be in different locations, some may be labeled differently, and the screen may lack colors or may have some things a bit different, but the basic operations will be very close. Our model is based on the 2004 release installed in A320-211.
   
   If it is neither of the above problems, then please contact us with details of what needs to be changed and we will do our best to fix the problems. Thank you for helping us!
   
   
6. When I am typing something, the screen jumps. How do I fix that? This happens because the browser tries to scroll the window when you press the space bar. You've probably noticed something similar when you try to pause a YouTube video and the screen scrolls instead of pausing the video, or when you are using your mousewheel to scroll a page and suddenly the pointer goes over the top of a Google Map and now instead of the page scrolling the map is zooming.
   
   If the screen jumps when you press the space bar, the best way to fix it is to press the F11 key on your keyboard which takes you to full screen mode. Pressing that key again will return you to normal mode.
   
   
7. When I make a typo and press the backspace key to clear it, the whole webpage navigates back to the previous page. How can I stop that?
   This annoyance is caused by a very very stupid keyboard shortcut in Firefox that causes the backspace key to be a shotcut for navigating to the previous page, because apparently Mozilla developers think all their users are too lazy to press Alt and left arrow key to do the same thing. The reasoning must be "why press 2 keys when you can do it with only 1?".
   
   Fortunately this bug does not exist in Chrome or Chromium, so those browsers are recommended for use with this MCDU program.
   
   A similar annoyance exists in Linux where accidently pressing the scroll wheel too hard on your mouse causes the contents of your clipboard to be pasted into whatever document you are viewing / working on. You can fix this by opening a terminal window (console) and typing
   
   

   xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 25 3 4 5 6 7 8 9"

   
   
   
8. When I try to enter CRZ/FL TEMP, ZFWCG, or THR RED/ACC values, the keyboard stops working. What happened?
   This is another Firefox keyboard problem. It thinks you want to do a search because in this case it seems they think their users are too lazy to press Ctrl+F to do exactly the same thing. Boy, Firefox users sure must be lazy, huh?
   There is no way to override this, so you either have to press ESC to exit the search feature, or click on the MCDU again to reset the keyboard focus point.
   
   Fortunately this bug does not exist in Chrome or Chromium, so these browsers are recommended for use with this MCDU device.
   
   
9. I entered the data absolutely correctly but I still got a FORMAT ERROR response. Why?
   This happened either because you accidentally pressed the wrong LSK, or because you accidentally pressed a key like CAPS LOCK or SHIFT, etc before typing. This can cause an invisible character to be typed on the keyboard buffer, and the MCDU reads all the information, including the invisible characters. Just press CLR or use the "spare" key to instanstly erase the line (exception if you were using a debug function).
   
   
10. When I was typing in a temperature, the scratch line put a "<<" symbol instead of + or -, so why did that happen?
    This is a bug in the Chrome or Chromium browser that sends a non-standard keycode for + and - keys on the top row of the keyboard. The only solution is to use the + and - keys on the numeric keypad located on the right hand side of most 101 keyboards. Unfortunately if you have a laptop, you probably don't have this keypad. You can either add a USB keyboard or you can use the mouse / touchscreen to press the +/- key on the MCDU keypad (press once for + and twice for -).
    
    Firefox does not seem to be affected by this problem, but we still recommend using Chrome or Chromium because you use the + and - keys a lot less often than / or backspace.
    
    
11. How can I get more information about my browser or computer to make a help request?
    Type DEBUG BROWSER on the scratch line and then press the "blank" key on the MCDU keypad. You can also try DEBUG CPU but it won't work for all systems (security reasons).
    
    
12. Are there any other useful DEBUG functions?
    Yes. Firstly, pressing the blank key with anything other than DEBUG always erases the line. Using DEBUG with an unrecognized function will do the same thing. Here is a list of DEBUG commands:
    
    DEBUG BROWSER - show information about browser
    DEBUG CPU - show information about CPU class (if possible)
    DEBUG IRS - show current IRS status
    DEBUG ALIGN - force IRS alignment
    DEBUG UNALIGN - force IRS out of alignment
    DEBUG ORIGIN - where am I going from (if set)
    DEBUG DEST - where am I going to (if set)
    DEBUG CORTE - show what CO-RTE is set (if any)
    DEBUG WAYPOINTS - display waypoints info
    DEBUG PAGE - what MCDU page is currently displayed?
    DEBUG FPLNSUBPG - what is current F-PLN subpage number?
    
    
13. When I press the CLR key in my game, it only erases one char at a time, but yours clears the entire line. Why is it different?
    The requirement to test if you hold the key down for 2 seconds is too difficult for us to implement, so the CLR key clears the entire line. We can modify that to only take one char at a time, so let us know your preference and we'll fix it once there are enough votes. It is still possible to clear the entire line by using the blank key, but we did not document this in the tutorial because it is not realistic.
    
    
14. How do I view the privacy policy?
    If the link for the privacy policy is unavailable, this is due to a bug affecting some browsers where the MCDU body extends outside of its defined borders. Luckily all sites within our network share a common privacy policy so you can view an exact duplicate of our privacy policy at this link.
    
    

When we first started this project, many airlines were still using the older MCDU hardware with just software updates, so many of them had a simple OFF/BRT knob that you rotated to adjust the brightness or turn the unit off. That is no longer the case and it is much more common to encounter the newer hardware, so we have implemented a long overdue update to the interface. Now you use the BRT and DIM keys to switch on and off. We have not added incremental brightness yet, but it is planned for the near future.

New FANS / ATC COMM tutorial available!
Additional information is available from document or visit IBAC website).

This is the "Future Air Navigation System" for Airbus(FANS-A/A+/B).
With more funding we will be able to complete it with a demo of the Datalink Control and Display Unit (DCDU), or at least images. If necessary, for tutorial purposes, we might break this down into a separate ATC communications tutorial page which will have a smaller version of the MCDU and a working DCDU beside it, with the two working together to display simulated communications.

For now, it works in a much simplified manner. Tough break, but we need more money!

Fixed PERF CLB / CRZ / DES pages.
Built framework for PERF APPR page, but it does not display yet (needs a little coding, thanks for your patience and understanding).

Now also working on some new LATREV functionality.

Added section to website to allow you to participate in developing this project.

For the moment, because I don't yet have any other place to bring this notice to attention, regarding the soon-to-be-implemented communications features, I would like to present this document containing potentially important information regarding the nature of communications messages and some of the matters that you should be aware of. Eventually we will get around to providing a tutorial on all this stuff here on the MCDU website. The features will be available before the tutorial is ready, so that is why I have made the link to the document, which is not a tutorial but does raise some important issues that will undoubtedly be of help to you in your training.