A brief look at manipulating TFM

The TFM Control Key

Talking Flight Monitor has a Layered keyboard command system. In the majority of cases, you will primarily interact with TFM using the TFM control key, followed by a subsequent command to read instrumentation or manipulate Talking Flight Monitor’s options on the fly. For English keyboards, the TFM control Key is set to right bracket. For instance, if a user wanted to check the aircraft’s current speed or heading, a user would press and release right bracket, followed by either the letter s or h on their keyboard. If the user then wanted to check their heading, the tfm control key would be pressed again, followed by the letter h. Talking Flight Monitor will beep to signify when you have invoked the TFM Control command. The TFM control key can be customized within keyboard manager.

Note: Please see the section in the Quick Reference Command book for all of the possible commands that can be used within the TFM key layer.

The Alt key, quick access shortcuts, and The TFM Menu Bar

To access Talking Flight Monitor’s Menu bar, while in TFM’s main window, press the Alt key. The menu bar allows you to access the various screens and windows of the application, pop out windows, and access the application’s preferences. After pressing Alt, you can press any of the quick access keys listed with any of the menu items to quickly access that specific option. Holding down Alt while pressing a specific quick access menu key will not yield the result that you may expect, as alt keyboard shortcuts have been assigned to numerous other functions that can change based on the currently focussed window. This can primarily be seen in all windows within the Aircraft menu excluding the CDU. A prime example of this behaviour is within the MCP section. As you tab around the various controls, you will notice that TFM will speak quick access keys after the currently focussed control is read. In most cases, you can either press that quick access key with or without alt. This can be very handy in cases where you are inputting data into a field and wish to invoke a quick access key without moving your focus away from the entry field.

aircraft panels

TFM gives access to various panels in the PMDG 777, which can be accessed through the aircraft menu, specifically the “aircraft panels” menu item. The panels are made up of an expandable treeview, followed by controls you can tab and shift+tab through. First letter navigation can be used within the treeview. Prompts are given for most of the quick keys in pannels, and there is also a search function you can jump to with the F2 key.