ATC needs looooooots of work

I would wholeheartedly agree with you…if VATSIM had every tower in the world manned 24x7. Well ok, half of em. Well ok, some of em. Well ok, 1 in my country 24x7.

That came across REALLY sarcastic and it was only meant to be slightly sarcastic. Apologies.

But the point stands. It’s half past midnight on a saturday night in the UK right now and there are no manned ATCs on VATSIM in the entire country. Right now, after the kids have gone to bed and the missus isn’t whinging about something, is when I want to fly.

I see your point. I usually go West, where Vatsim ATC is still available / awake as I am not partial whether it is in my country or not, besides a good learning to hear how the yanks run stuff ;-). (yes of course that is then not in your own country anymore, if this is what you insist on).

VATSIM works on a top-down method so all positions needing to be manned all the time isn’t necessary (though when they are like during events it’s incredibly fun) and in the end if an appropriate controller isn’t online you can use use voice (or text) and announce intentions on 122.8.

In your case you’re stuck between a rock and hard place, you either deal with the the lack of controllers online at zero dark thirty (I’ve actually come across some controllers and quite a lot of traffic within an ARTCC online at surprising times) or deal with a very poor AI ATC (which you may as well turn off). Will ATC be fixed at some point? I’m sure it will but it will always be problematic and lack any real depth.

As SierraHotel2873 brought up you may want to sometimes try flying on the other side of the pond. When I fly on VATSIM I do quite often hear many pilots that are obviously not from North America and flying domestic with airlines from North America, it’s not just your long hauls from across the pond. Plenty of those not from North America are also flying general aviation. Personally I don’t fly anywhere but in North America (the United States more specifically), I have not studied up on how things are done across the pond.

At the end of the day VATSIM is volunteer organization and coverage 24/7 all over the place is impossible but during events (which happen a lot) you will find an absolute massive amount of traffic and ATC online and it’s loads of fun. Events don’t even need to happen for this to occur though it will happen inevitably.

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The sims ATC also needs some deviation action. My cub is sent right through thunderstorms flying across Europe and there is no way i can ask ATC to deviate a couple of degrees left or right.

Yep, I hear ya.

I find it somewhat…thinking of the right word here…odd…low tech…unimaginative…that in a massively multiplayer online game, ATC on your system does not recognise the existence of any other player flown aircraft.

Probably wouldn’t be flying a cub IFR (I suppose you could in the Cubcrafter with glass panel) but I agree nevertheless, the whole ATC system needs an overhaul.

You musnt of ever played fsx before. We all know that the atc is rubbish and if you want real life atc you use vatsim for IRL experience

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Oh yeah VATSIM is great. They even manage to have the entire worlds air traffic on seamless servers, of course they’re getting a lot less traffic than all of MSFS does so yeah, they can do that. The trouble with VATSIM is two fold though. There’s not enough ATCs manned all the time…and I’ve got friends I want to fly with who, for whatever reasons, don’t want to learn proper ATC comms.

So it’d be very cool if in game ATC did the job. Go on Asobo, I know you can do it. Make us go wow!

I don’t use vatsim to often because i sometimes leave for a couple of hrs at long flights. But MSFS after a year in could have done a bit of work with the ATC. ‘Speed not above 220knts’ is not something i have heard IRL. But thats not the worse thing. Star and Sids could be way better, not ending up 2000ft above the runway because the send you down just 80miles before the airport. Those kind of things

I know it would be better if Microsoft improved the ingame ATC but you could always use VATSIM for a better ATC experience.

The usual “Use VATSIM”

Right now I’m on Greenland, crossing the Atlantic into Europe.

No VATSIM coverage for 97% of my world
Tour flights.

We need a strong, better offline ATC.

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100% agreed.

Another issue with VATSIM. If I have 60 min of free time per day, I may need to speed up the cruise phase of the flight

Saves often ignore state of flightplan ,the state ,speed & altitude of plane as well.Loading a save often seems to reset ATC just as if you’d restart the flight…
Saves also seem to fail to hold the data of the point you were at during flight
Here I shared an image(last one in the post) that shows the disconnect between IFR plan & ATC commands after loading a save Sim Update V (1.18.13.0) Bug Megathread - #438 by TripsyTipsy
Perhaps not saving logbook at all either
Frequent Flyer Miles Achivment? - #2 by PauL1eeeeeeeeee
After loading a save,the ATC often is totally messed up as well.As if all progress was wiped during reloading…Would send you all back to the start in a long flight,even if you actually saved at arrival stage etc https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/incomplete-save-load/272840?u=tripsytipsy

Totally allowed in uncontrolled airspace. :slight_smile: Just monitor and make sure you’re not entering controlled airspace while accelerated!

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After the update… I did notice that KLAS tower, did comment on me using the wrong runway and not cleared for take off.

Would be nice, to have clearance do something at a Class Bravo airport when taking off VFR.

Picking up a pop-up IFR clearance seemed to be a bit more ‘realistic’, course headings, intercept, and altitude. But… constantly told to expedite climb to 16,000 when at 16,000 is a bit annoying.

oh well… baby steps.

I use the in sim ATC and i agree it needs lots or work…As does SU5

That’s a joke, right?

No. You can post on these forums all you like, but the way to get something actually fixed is to raise on zendesk.

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