Would be great if the ATC could assign (or allow you to select) a gate number or parking position prior to landing. That way at airports where there are multiple terminals you know which side of the runway to exit.
I saw another thread asking for people to be able to select which gate they are assigned, this would probably be the easiest way to improve gate assignment, otherwise the ATC would need to know where International, Domestic, Freight and GA areas are, which is probably no small task. But it would be really immersive for the ATC to be able to assign gates based on realistic criteria.
Update: In the replies it was mentioned that you can select a gate as an arrival point, however this breaks imported flight plans, which how I plan all my IFR flights, so perhaps if the flight planning/importing workflow was improved, that would also address the gate assignment issues.
On the world map, when you pick your departing gate. You zoom in, and pick the dot where you want to start the flight and set as departure. At the destination, you do the same, you zoom in to the airport, pick the dot where you want the gate you want to park, and set that as arrival.
Then the sim will build you a gate to gate flight plan, and you just need to set them up as you would normally. Change to IFR if you want, pick the departure, arrival and approach pattern. And it’ll keep the destination gate.
You can check the flight plan lines from the departure and to the arrival, make sure the flight plan line ends at the gate that you assigned. And you should be good to go. You can check in my earlier videos here on how I do it:
I think the ATC ignores it if you pick an approach like an ILS. It’s noticeable because as soon as you pick an Approach, the flight path line that goes to your chosen gate disappears and stops at the runway.
If you pick an Arrival Pattern while keeping the approach as Automatic, however. Seems to still have the line goes to the chosen gate.
This is same for me, seems to be a Bug in the world map.
I find If I left the approach automatic, ATC will assign the gate that selected in the world map.
I sent the report by Zendesk.
Flying a passenger aircraft I want to be able to select the gate/stand at my destination when using ATC, no matter if a flight plan has been filed or not.
Currently ATC is assigning a random gate/stand, sometimes just a stand far off, even though gates are available.
The solution could be a selection of available gates/stands just after the “Taxi To Gate” request has been sent to ATC.
It would be nice if the gate/stand selected by the user would also force spawn a ground crew, just in case there was none present and if possible, remove AI aircraft present at that gate/stand.
Especially with payware addons that have VDGS support (visual docking guidance system) it is currently frustrating to get a random GA stand while plenty of Gates with VDGS are available. As it seems VDGS is only working if ATC has assigned the users aircraft to the specific gate supporting it, meaning you cannot just ignore ATC and approach the gate of your choice.
Or you can just zoom in on the destination airport, pick the gate you want, and select that gate as the arrival. Here’s how I do it. Picking my starting gate, and my arriving gate. But it does mean I have to set a flight plan for it. I don’t think there’s anyway I can do it without filing a flight plan. Maybe by using a VFR instead which works exactly the same way.
That’s exactly what happens when you are being assigned the gate. The currently parked aircraft will disappear and the ground crew will spawn for you. I never had any issue with missing ground crew, unless I’m landing to a small airport with a small parking space.
Those are workarounds.
I use simbrief for my flightplanning which means I load an externally generated fpl into the sim. If I would change the destination to a specific gate, MSFS would destroy the plan by changing it to somewhat utter nonsense.
Giving the user the option to choose a desired gate/stand directly after selecting “Request taxi to gate” seems way more reasonable.
The way FS004 and FSX did it, was that the airport files made with AFCAD could have airline codes assigned to the gates. The flyable aircraft and the AI aircraft would have their airline code specified in their cfg file and the sim would assign the appropriate airlines to the appropriate gates if they were available.
