ISSUE DESCRIPTION
In career mode and for flights to little airfields with no ATC tower, centre ATC ends IFR at the beginning of the arrival when the destination, no matter the actual weather conditions and no matter the approach options available (VFR, RNAV, VOR…), leading to VFR approaches and visual landings in poor-to-no visibility conditions (see captures).
(Also true when flying at night)
To my understanding, either the local centre ATC should handle the IFR to the field provided a visual approach is possible, or the flight should not be possible.
Suggestions:
- Make centre ATC handle IFR arrival (and approach ?) when visual landing is possible
- If even visual landing is not possible, prevent the mission from appearing in the menu in career mode - (EDIT following @DarkStarQQ ‘s answer:) OR - add a full-IFR alternate route to the plan that can be triggered with the appropriate ATC com options in flight.
- Add (or partially replace VFR flights with) IFR-compatible flights to/from larger airports with ATC towers for some career missions such as medium cargo
FREQUENY OF ISSUE
Always
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:
-
Go to career mode and choose a medium cargo (for ex.) mission with severely downgraded visibility (check destination weather or go at night)
-
Start the flight and ask for IFR while airborne (usually this kind of flight also begin at airfields without tower so you have to contact the centre ATC after takeoff)
-
Fly until arriving at ~40NM from destination and the ATC asks you to go to VFR and does not provide further service.
YOUR SETTINGS
[PC Only] Are you using Developer Mode or have you made any changes to it?
No.
MEDIA
On the screen below, I’m about to enter the circuit as the field should in sight right in front of me, and I’m already below the safety altitude (2300ft) :
1 Like
I suspect at some point they will start dinging your score if you enter a cloud while VFR (Search & Rescue Rotorcraft missions already do), but then it would be even more the pilots responsibility to decide to fly or cancel IFR while in IMC.
ATC isn’t going to know if the conditions at your untowered and unmonitored location are suitable for VFR or not or if it has lights or not (you can fly VFR at night) – that is really supposed to be the pilots responsibility.
What would be nice is to have an appropriate alternate that you can divert to. But until they add such a feature I don’t think they should remove these missions (they are fun and challenging)
Pilot should also verify that both the departure and arrival runways are appropriate for your flight (not water runways in a non-amphibian plane and are of sufficient length and type).
Recommend to read You're Flying IFR To An Airport With No Instrument Approach. Now What? | Boldmethod
2 Likes
Thank you for your intel and for the link, that’s really interesting! 
I understand and agree that it is my responsibility to check the weather and the available routing options for my flight plan… if I am the author of the said flight plan (ie. in free flight - ie. not in career mode).
That’s the point of this Bug Report: the Career mode does all the work for me, I am offered a limited choice of missions with pre-prepared flight plans. I cannot check the weather while browsing the missions (without relying on the online planning tool, which the unexperienced user does not even know that it exists because it is not mentioned anywhere in the Sim), I do not have access to the departure and destination airfields’ details or charts (the charts are not even available in-sim! so how do I check for Minimum IFR Altitudes?), I cannot set/edit the plan before flight and I cannot set alternate departure or destination airfields. The whole point of this feature is to allow users like me that have few-to-no knowledge of flight planning (MSFS formations completely ignore this aspect!) to just jump in an aircraft and fly a (more or less) realistic flight with a plan that has been prepared for them without bothering with the planning themselves.
I am currently reporting a bug “the career mode may offer missions that cannot be flown under today’s conditions”. In such cases, the objective of offering valid missions for unexperienced users is not met. Manually checking with third-party resources if a proposed mission can be flown for each proposed mission is really time-consuming (I’d rather file my own plan instead at this point), and besides, the choice of missions for a particular activity (in the vicinity of the current location of your aircraft) is already kind of limited, so on cloudy days you would easily end up with “oops, bad luck, no VFR conditions today, so no valid missions, come back tomorrow”… well can’t I fly a mission to a destination with instrument approaches instead?
On my first message, I originally thought that the local centre ATC could/should handle the IFRing in such conditions, but you’re right that it is not possible for airfields that do not even have instrument approaches… (One precision though: for medium-cargo missions, ATC releases IFR control even for RNAV approaches, so you end up flying RNAV approaches unmonitored. Is it realistic?)
Users should not have to check if the missions imposed by the Career mode can be flown, be it because of the weather or the nature or length of the runways. Either you give free reigns, or you guarantee that what you impose is valid.
To my opinion, what must be done is:
- when in no-VFR conditions, either prevent proposing missions (no matter the activity) comporting at least one VFR-only leg -OR- add a full-IFR alternate and offer the possibility to trigger the alternate in the ATC com options
- propose more missions with full-IFR plans for lightweight airframes (I have been doing medium-cargo for some time now… 95% of them are from no-towers to no-towers, and even when they have towers you’re still supposed to fly a visual approach even if you logged a RNAV approach.)
1 Like
Suspect we just have different expectations and desires, which is fine… I see it more as raw job offers “Customer A wants to get thing B to location C – will you do it?” and it’s up to me to either accept or pass on that offer (at this time). I’d be fine with some additional filters or flags on the missions. But they do kind of already tell you the conditions at the departure and arrival airports with the VFR, MVFR, IFR, LIFR indicators right on the mission, before you even click on it.
But I’m not sure what you mean about “free reign” – you already can alter the flight plan (I do it all the time), you can also deviate from it for many miles before it will fail the mission – but no amount of changing the flight plan will get you IFR into an airport with no IFR approaches. You cannot change the DESTINATION of course because it’s the customer offering the job. But you have control over how you get it there and when or if you take the job.
Checking the weather is a huge part of being a pilot, go watch some Missionary Bush Pilot if you haven’t seen his stuff – so many of his videos start with some variation of “well the weather is kind of iffy today”. So you are kind of asking to remove one of the big aspects of flying from Career mode. I think they want pilots to make these decisions for themselves and not just have the game decide for you – more like the “real world”.
Also remember that early in Career mode you get ONLY good weather missions, you have to pass the Instrument Rating first, then you become responsible for the weather conditions. So the “inexperienced” pilots are already taken care of. Maybe there should be a bigger warning on it that says “once you pass this you will become responsible for the weather conditions you choose to fly in”?
What I’m all for is giving people more tools and in-game information to make these choices (like you cannot currently see the weather details until you accept the mission – and I think the difficulty there is many missions define their own weather – but maybe we could at least see what the Live weather is). I also like the idea to offer more missions to airports with precision approaches for more IFR flying (and tools like filters so users can find them easily). I WANT bad weather, so a filter on conditions VFR/MVFR/IFR/LIFR and also airport types (VFR only or IFR capable) would be great.
Anyway, good stuff, thanks for the considered reply and good flying!
