ATC never clears me beyond initial climb altitude

As the topic title suggests, the ATC never clears me beyond my initial climb altitude.

Last time I asked this I got a reply that this is like RL, where you have to wait longer than in previous sims to get cleared to higher altitudes. I’m willing to believe previous sims were too fast for this. But I’m long beyond the Departure ATC, I’m already on Center for 100s of miles by now…

Am I doing something wrong, or is the sim still broken and should I manually request increases?

This is just one of the reasons I only fly GA-VFR. I sometimes don’t even bother with Flight Following - I recently had an airliner pass so close in front of me, I could have seen what the copilot was eating. ATC waited another 15 seconds to tell me a had an Airbus at my five-o’clock - gee, thanks for telling me!

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I am cleared to decent to my destination. I flew the entire flight at 7000 feet.
It was a very scenic flight, but not very eco friendly. :stuck_out_tongue:

edit: ah, now after it clears me to decent it asks me to climb to my cruise altitude lol.

That was hilarious :smiley:
Experienced very similar situation yesterday. I was on final and suddenly an 320 appeared right in front of me. It was impossible to see that due to the aircraft light issue we have been experiencing for a long time. So the only solution for me to disable real time traffic.

I am constantly flying airliners and ATC clears me all the the way to my planned cruise altitude with steps. I plan the flight in Simbrief and import it to the sim.

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What helps me most of the times is to completely insert the flight plan in the World map and entering cruise altitude from simbrief in the navlog before starting the flight so atc will know your exact planned flight Plan from departure to approach. I know this is Not real procedure but the Best way to get offline atc to work at the moment. but you still have to enter/import your flight plan into the aircraft

Exactly. The AI ATC goes by the sim’s planner, as far as I understand it. If you import a plan only to the plane’s FMC/MCDU the ATC will not clear you the step climbs.

If you want good ATC , consider a third party app like Pilot2ATC.

While not perfect, it’s 95% of the way there and blows the sim ATC AI away.

They have a 10 day trial.

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Are you flying VFR or IFR ? Sounds like you may just be VFR.

I find in MSFS, if i fly IFR, ATC gives me an excess of Altitude clearances !!!

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Well that is all well and good, but I feel the in-game ATC should actually be working adequately so that there would be no need for a third party solution. Saying that you can purchase a product that actually works isn’t really a solution. But according to the latest developer Q&A there will be improvements coming to the ATC so we will just have to wait and see.

Ah this is the problem then… Thanks.

edit, is there a bug topic to vote on for this?

yep, first clearance to around 10k, then around 20k, then 30k and then the cruise altitude.Working Title guys are planning to rework the whole in-game planner, so there’s some hope this could be fitted into that.

Hmm, I don’t think it’s really a bug. just how it has been designed. The best would ofc be if the IFR plan you file for clearance from the cockpit would be the one ATC were using.

Yes, it looks like their system will be a great improvement, and look forward to it being fully integrated into MSFS.

I assume it will REPLACE the current, rather basic system, so I hope the transition will be smooth and everything will swap over smoothly, without an extended period of both the Old system, and the new WT system, “interfering” with each other,

The this transition has a potential to be more difficult and complex, that the actual re-design !! I hope not …

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I get it.

I should have mentioned that this not only a solution to move forward but is also an enhancement in that P2A also allows for proper phraseology, voice or text atc and route planning with a nice tracking window, and Navigraph integration.

I’ve also been successful at changing plans mid flight. For the price, it’s an incredible expirience.

Good luck waiting for MS to catchup.

Is your altimeter set to the proper value they provided? If not, they will be seeing you at the wrong altitude.

Also if you climb beyond it before they tell you too yeah, they’ll make you go down before clearing you to climb further.

Did you enter your cruise altitude into the flight planner?

Even from the very beginning (even with all of the ATC faults), it’s very rare that I don’t get cleared to my entered cruise altitude. On the very rare occasion that it hasn’t, I simply requested higher altitudes till I got to my planned cruise - this has happened only 3 times in over a 100 flights.

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