As a real world airline captain, former flight instructor & radiotelephony instructor I know all about the importance of proper ATC phraseology and became quite bothered with the MSFS implementation of it. Therefore I have completely re-written the ATC text-to-speech to reflect correct ICAO phraseology for both VFR & IFR flights. I’ve included some Eurocontrol recommendations but the overall differences from ICAO are minor.
I have reached the limit now what I can achieve with the current ATC system as it is lacking options and features to make the phraseology 100% correct, but overall I think it is a big improvement over the default ATC. Items which I could not include due to missing functionality are still included in the text in between brackets in the ATC window, just not in the text-to-speech.
DEMO FLIGHT
Note: I identified two bugs while making this video which I corrected, upon frequency change to tower the “descent to altitude 4000 ft” clearance was only in the readback. The second bug concerns the missed approach handover: “passing altitude 2600 ft, climbing to altitude 2600 ft”.
I’ve included my 100+ page complete guide to proper radiotelephony! I wrote the first version of this years ago and it has been used extensively in real world flight training. Its part of a way bigger project I’ve been working on during my “COVID off time”. It includes tons of real world examples!
DOWNLOAD LINK
LIST OF CHANGES
Overall tweaks and improvements.
More customization options added.
Installer can be run as administrator again.
Any questions or suggestions please comment below!
As planned or as filed is not gonna be solved by simply changing the text to speech, same as the inHg vs hPa and transition altitudes. There are limitations unfortunately…
Furthermore, please allow me suggesting this: since each update might change the ATC phraseology file semantics and/or entries, you might want to publish the mod in a “scriptable” form (say PowerShell script) doing find/replace into the content so that whatever the next version update, most of the mod entries can slip back into it.
Well yeah, lots of work in progress on that end. I’ve been a RTF instructor so I’ll just change it how I think it should be correct and then let everybody shoot at it.
Officially it is “climb to altitude … ft” or “climb FL …”. Normally this is part of the SID anyway and delivery will never give you any other initial altitude, tower might.
After start-up some airports hand-off immediatelly to ground this way, in FS2020 there are two options, one of which I indeed used “contact ground” the other “for taxi contact ground”. The latter is used to stay on delivery / apron frequency until ready to taxi.
The whole contact after departure never happens in real life. I noticed that even though the frequency is given during en-route clearance ATC still hands you over so I’ll delete it entirely.
I’m just saying that if I would make an ATC phraseology mod I’d concentrate on crunching messages down. I personally would prefer “everyday” shortened phraseology over “official” but much longer messages as they would clog up the frequency easily, especially in crowded areas.
Just listen to all the ATC recordings on channels like VASaviation - controllers rarely stick to the official phraseology 1:1 so going down that road would actually make such a mod more realistic.
Jup, I’ve been a RTF instructor so I tend to stay close to the official phraseology but I’ll make some short cuts here and there. I’m multiple iterations further compared to the photo I added yesterday.