Hi,
with the overhauled ATC, picking the correct rwy worked for some time. But now I get increasingly wrong runways assigned for takeoff and landing.
For example takeoff from EKCH: steady weather conditions. Wind 70/07. And ATC assigned rwy 22L instead of a 04 or 12.
(yes, I have the correct assistance settings)
All I can say is, it never changed for me. Before or after this or any of the previous updates.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I have never been able to really narrow it down enough to any sort of logic.
The only time it does work, is if I pick the approach based on the expected conditions from the world map before I start the flight. Which is ok for my usual 1-1.5h flights in the Canary Island region.
But anytime the flight time exceeds 90 minutes I would not put too much money on the forecast still being correct.
I still do not understand why this appears to be so bloody hard for Asobo to fix. Just go back to FS9/FSX it worked 100% when it comes to that aspect.
If you have custom sceneries, have you tried with your community folder empty or starting in safe mode ?. I am asking that because with one of my custom scenery ATC was always assigning the same runway whatever the wind direction was. I contacted the developer and he identified an issue, made a change and it fixed the issue with ATC assigning wrong runway.
If this is not the case and you are still having the issue without any mod installed, then there is an existing bug report where you can post your issue:
Thanks for the suggestion.
I’m using addon linker. So my community folder is kind of emtpy every flight - only the addons I need for that flight. I had in general many flights where ATC worked as intended, right after the ATC update. When the wind is variable or has changed short before arrival, this can be a mess. But that’s expectable.
But since a few days, I have more often the situation that ATC gives me the opposite rwy (according to wind) on several airports, even with stable wind conditions, even on airports that I use more often (and everything worked correct before). Could be a random thing, that I havn’t had this until now.
I’m sure I’ve read from some non-Asobo devs that the wind modelling is really tough to develop with because the winds can vary greatly in small fractions of a second. So, I wonder if that is the issue.
As an example, if the winds go something like 0, 30, 90, 150, 90, 100, 180 , 0 degrees in the space of a second then which value are they using for runway calculations? This could explain why it seems so hit or miss. Smoothing the numbers over time can work in many situations but how well it seems to work depends so much on not just the algorithm but the amount of variability. Smoothing can hide the issue.
Also note that it is not that uncommon for airports to have active runways with tailwinds. So just because you have one doesn’t necessarily make it not realistic. EG:
There are other reasons but they are the two main examples I’ve heard of. Though I doubt MSFS takes any of that into account it can be good to keep in mind for realism reasons.
I haven’t flown in MSFS for some time so maybe I’ll jump on and see if it is better for me. My main gripe was windsocks not pointing the right way! I think that is supposed to be fixed now though.
Thanks. I think you’re totally right, regarding realitiy. But as you already mentioned, in the sim it’s different. The sim gets METARs. And there’s wind and it says e.g. 70/7. That’s it (even if the weather engine might add some variations). That’s why I wrote, the weather conditions were steady no VRB03 or so. No sudden changes. Also I think the ‘ATC engine’ in MSFS is still pretty simple. It’s just: if the wind changes, the rwy changes. Things like ‘ILS or not’ are not considered.
My observations above are not about realism, just about a potential bug in the sim (ATC doesn’t do what it’s suposed to do).
Tower controllers do not change the active runway just because of minor changes in wind direction, especially when the winds are light and variable. The OP is correct that MSFS’s ATC is inconsistent when assigning the active runway, but that isn’t because the real world ATC logic for assigning the active runway is complicated. Airports like EKCH have two parallel runways aligned with the prevailing winds and a crosswind runway that is roughly perpendicular. The crosswind runway is likely to be used only when the prevailing winds are at a sharp angle to the parallel runways plus the winds are strong (25-30 knots) and gusting. My home airport, CYVR hasn’t used its crosswind runway since 2015:
I’m also getting this issue. It always picks a different runway than the one I picked out from the Fmc. I also can’t tell ATC to use the runway that I’m using. The only option is approaches.
Had it yesterday again. NZAA approach, wind was steady between 170 and 210 with 7-10kts for an hour and at arrival. ATC gave me (and all other traffic) 05R.
One thing I also realized - for example EDDF (Frankfurt):
when departing at EDDF, you always get 25C from ATC (with the according wind situation). Even if the wind is, let’s say 190°, you never get rwy 18 for departure. Don’t get me wrong, you could get runway 25C with this wind conditions, but you could also get 18. But with the MSFS ATC right now, you never get 18. 18 is off.