I fly most of my flights using the built in ATC. I truly enjoy the real world procedures as I am currently taking an online ground school for Private Pilot and Instrument.
I want to say the built in ATC is good but you really have to respect IFR flight planning and rules. Otherwise, you will be fighting the system. Bottom line, you need to know what you are doing in making official flight plans. I have tested the built in ATC thoroughly, it works pretty nicely so honor the EFB’s arrival airports runway suggestion. After all, that is the active runway. Start your flights before selecting an arrival airport. Then, build a real world flight plan in the cockpit and honor the rules.
Sure, there is room for improvement especially in regards to taxi information corresponding to real world charts or being able to ask for deviations to the east or west around weather and other bells and whistles. But if you know what you are doing, your flights will be better with the built in ATC. If you do not know what you are doing, then do not use it because you will be fighting the system. When you fight the rules, ATC will constantly correct you or get confused. So if you are going to use ATC, fly like a pilot. It’s a challenge and real fun.
I use a console so I use the built in ATC and I really look forward to performance improvements for ATC and improvements to interactions. But right now, I can use it successfully to fly all kinds of routes and even do the same approach over and over again successfully with ATC. I can even sync the Microsoft ATC with Simbrief and PMDG. Simbrief is good, but it is better using the runway selection found in Planner.FlightSimulator.com so I match Simbrief to planner. Then, my PMDG FMS syncs with the built in ATC and the simulators Live Weather. If you work hard, it will generally work for you. It’s all good fun. Thanks for listening.
We must be playing different games because my ATC never listens. I set up a nice descent profile, send it to ATC yet it still wants me to drop from cruise to approach altitude when I am basically over the airport.
So True. ATC will sometimes not clear you early enough or at all to descend to proper altitude restraints even with a proper and matching flight plan in the Garmin and EFB. Descend anyway. Hopefully, that is a logged bug about the failure to give descent commands already.
Or It could be that you need to change from Jet airways to Victor airways or vice versa and match with a corresponding route, arrival and approach. You have to select the appropriate Legs for the job.
With that said, there are still some routing problems. I did an RNAV Y RNP 26 approach at KABQ recently that vectored me to the tip of the runway from a side angle at too high an altitude recently. The problem is the Cessna Corvallis 400 is incapable of RNP Approaches. So I think it missed a waypoint or something. Did you know RNP is all runway 26 at Albuquerque has available because of terrain issues and precise turning? The Corvallis can do ILS 8 all day long. But I also cannot change the active runway from 26 as long as ATC is enforcing Flight Plan and 26 is the active Live Weather runway because it will reroute me back to 26 at the transition even if I chose to land at ILS 8. And I cannot fly 26 IFR in a Corvallis. You see it is strict. At least under, ATC Enforce Flight Plan.
To select a different runway without confusing the system, I turned off ATC Enforce flight plan. I turned on my own custom weather with wind from 35° and ILS for runway 3. That will work. But you cannot still have ATC enforce flight plan on as far as I know without having to use the Live Weather runway. This is speculation from my past experience.
I am going to make sure mostly going forward that my Garmin approach procedure lines up with the EFB after sending to ATC and Avionics. Yes, I think it still does need work. General aviation aircraft mostly cannot do precision landing though some can. So some approaches like rwy 26 require a manual VFR landing in certain planes once the runway is in sight.
So on those high altitudes issues that could be a mismatched airway to the arrival, a missed waypoint, Garmin procedure not matching the EFB or changing the arrival runway away from the active runway. My guess would be an airway mismatch or the ATC failure to give descent command which is the bug on your issue.
I used default ATC in MSFS (about 2000hrs) but stopped using it in FS2024 soon after BATC became available. I hope it’s better now because it was awful at the beginning, somehow they made it worse than in MSFS.
Two things I never liked were vectoring and very late approach instructions. For vectoring you have to ask for vectors every 30 seconds because they will never give you one automatically. With late approaches it was frustrating when I was in the middle of a STAR pattern and suddenly ATC tells me to land on the opposite runway. Why they cannot tell me what runway to expect when I am 50nm from the airport but they wait when I am about to capture localiser.
I am getting frustrated more and more with BATC so would love to switch back to default ATC.
It is infuriating because I have tried the fixes I found in this forum and they will not work except every once in a blue moon, when the planets align, I will get a mission that somehow accepts my flight plan and descends me somewhat normally. It still sometimes requires idle thrust and deploying speedbrakes, but the descent is at least possible to do.
The Default ATC is shockingly bad, just look at the taxi sequence Should be Beluga 330 Taxi to and hold short of 27R via L, B, A, Link21, A2, because your taking link 21 iy would be A2 not A3 but then again it was night for me so i should be following the greens until Titan and then hold short A2
I think both views can be true here. The default ATC is not completely useless if the plan is clean and you fly what it expects, but I still wouldn’t call it robust. The weak spots for me are exactly the inconsistent descent instructions and some taxi/routing logic, especially when the flight gets a bit more complex.
For simple offline IFR it can get the job done, but when I want the ATC side to be a real part of the flight I usually use an external ATC tool, lately FSHud, mostly because the vectoring and traffic separation feel more predictable. I still like seeing people get decent results out of the default system though, because it means there is something there worth improving instead of just throwing away.
Yes, we still have VATSIM, but I miss the old days when we could set up our own server and ATC radar and communication functions were built into FSX that people could use. Groups like BostonATC and a few others I used to belong too, where the flight areas were limited so you had full coverage on any given night.
Edit: BostonATC is now integrated into the VATSIM organization. It used to have its own FSX accessible server(s).
I miss that kind of setup too. VATSIM is great when there is coverage, but a small group with a known area and predictable ATC for the whole evening is a different feeling.
For offline IFR, that is basically why I care so much about the ATC layer now. I want the airspace to feel like it has some structure, not just a menu of clearances. If the sim ever brought back a lightweight hosted ATC/session option, I think a lot of people would use it.
