BeyondATC

I had this pop-up as well. I practically fell out of my computer chair laughing at the Airplane! movie reference. I think a little ATC comedy club adds some humanity to the radio waves. In real life those JFK guys roast everyone equally. I’m just waiting for the day when I’m landing a FedEx heavy and the tower calls me a Fatass or some pilot forgets his still on the channel and does his arrival announcement then gets roasted…

2 Likes

Were you cleared for the arrival? If so it is up to you to descend as per the charts. You’re the pilot remember

Anyone else getting issues with no traffic today?

1 Like

Yes, after a restart of BATC I got the traffic.

Plenty of traffic for me out of KDEN this afternoon.

Back for me too but I had to restart several times.

BATC needs a “Disregard request” command, doesn’t it? I flew today from Heathrow to Chicago and constantly found myself having to repeat the same instruction 5 times until I just decided to cancel each request, but BATC won’t resume other aircraft’ services until I get my info. If I could just tell the controller “never mind, we’ll figure it out ourselves” it would save a lot of time on my end.

At the end of the day its tough handling both the plane and the radios when they’re meant to be handled by two, and I just want to make it easier on myself.

A really huge part of my double workload is that clunky GSX menu. If BATC would have the ability to talk to ground crew (i.e. communicating with GSX during pushback, or asking for a jetway connection, calling to begin boarding or requesting a gate after landing etc.) by announcing it instead of clicking it – perhaps Umberto can code the logic within GSX so that calling your ground crew in BATC provides the same result as clicking the option in the GSX menu. This would be really useful and a good idea for the User Voted feature coming after adding VFR.

3 Likes

Such an infuriating programme. 4 times between Paris and London I have had to restart. The programme just gets stuck on “generating speech”. When I check in, I am not stepping on anyone else as there is no “beep”. Then ATC reels off several instructions all at once, cuts off transmissions and readbacks and then gest stuck on “generating speech”. Considering the price paid, I’m disappointed at the stability of this programme.

Check your VRAM usage when running both FS2020 and BATC. Its likely you ran too high.

I’ve noted more frustrations with BATC since the LLM was introduced.

I’m seeing what you describe with the generating speech hang, but I’m also seeing most erroneous actions result in ATC responding as though I requested an altitude change. I get stuck in a situation where I have to give them an altitude, but they say they don’t understand me or I broke up when I respond. I end up having to go to the BATC window and choosing an altitude from the list for them to recognize it. I also can’t seem to cancel the action to get them back on task. This has been happening consistently with my last few flights and I’d reported it to them with my log in the past.

1 Like

My biggest complaint remains with descent instructions. About 1/3 of my flights, when I’m ready to descend, I’m cleared to “descend and maintain” some artificially constrained altitude that doesn’t seem to make much sense, and then I’m never cleared for lower even when I request. For instance, last weekend I flew from KDEN to KEWR; I was cruising at FL390 but when I requested to descend, it was “Descend and maintain FL360” - wut? 3,000’? I’m literally 7 miles in the air and 100 miles to my destination. WTF - I need to get lower and I need time to do it, bro. And then anyway, after ignoring ATC “maintain” instruction and getting low enough, I was vectored for and told to intercept the localizer. All good, but the altitude I was cleared to for the intercept was 5,000’, which put me WELL above the standard 3 degree glideslope. I was 2 full diamonds above the glideslope and 4 whites on the PAPIs. I had to go to VSpeed and descend at 2,000 fpm for a couple miles there to get ont the proper glide.

Firsttime user: I’ve used BeyondATC for a number of flights now within MSFS 2024. However I’ve been unable to complete a single flight (under ATC) due to the ATC logic breaking down. For example the following fails repeatedly. I’d be intrested in a short FP, say 50 NM that actually works end to end.

C172 G1000: - Edinburgh EGPH to Glasgow EGPT (ILS 05) via GRI4D & GRICE. It repeatedly falls apart when vectors are provided sending me to 3000 feet at GRICE which has a 6000 ft minimum. Basically sending me into the ground. It also advises me to use Scottish Center on 124.5. If use the button to ack the request, the frequency change occurs but push to speak always fails with a negative (all other voice reads seem to work reliably). Also the frequency is not one of the options on the radio page. So if you subsequently switch to ATIS you can not switch back to Scottish Center.

Frustrating isn’t it? However you’ve acknowledged that the programme is still Early Access when it was installed, which means it’s not yet perfect. The devs, IMO, are doing an excellent job with a highly complicated subject, with regular updates and modifications when faults are reported - that’s how EA is supposed to work.
But you need to report those problems on their Discord channel where there is a small team of moderators doing their best to help. This forum’s rules say no support may be offered here so, rather than vent your frustration, why not go to the BATC Discord and see if there is an answer there. The BATC team do not regularly monitor this thread.

2 Likes

Better put your problems and bug reports on BeyondATC discord channel.
This forum is for MSFS issues and not for items that concerns BeyondATC.

Short BATC news flash:

Hello everyone,

With the release of the iniBuilds A350, we are sure that people will be excited to fly it with BeyondATC (and thank you for that!). As it happened with the FBW A380, there might be an issue with radios that are not auto-tuning properly as a few people reported.

As a reminder, BeyondATC uses regular SimConnect events to interact with all aircraft in the simulator. This means there might be a problem that the iniBuilds team has to solve. This needs to be confirmed. Until this is addressed, you may need to manually tune the radios in the aircraft.

Our dev team is quite busy at the moment, please bear with us during this time. If we have further update on this topic, we will let you know!

UPDATE: The iniBuilds team is aware of the issue. Thanks for your patience

6 Likes

Flew into KMIA last night. Simbrief had me landing on to the west. BATC insisted on having me use the opposite runway and was launching AI traffic in the same direction. A quick check on Flight aware showed that aircraft were landing on 26L and the prevailing winds supported this. How does BATC decide which direction to use for AI traffic and assigning landing? Is there a way to override this (both with my runway assignment and AI traffic direction)? I can obviously land wherever I want but it’s a bit of an immersion killer when aircraft are taking off directly towards me as I’m rolling out.

1 Like

Alright, my European simmers. Say I’m departing a UK airport, and the top altitude on a SID is 6000. I take off, BeyondATC passes me to Departure or Control, and before I reach the fix or fixes that show a 6000 restriction on the chart, they say “Climb to FL190”. Does that automatically cancel those restrictions, or do I have to still follow them, and then climb to FL190?

1 Like

Another major minor update dropped!!!

Minor Update 1.6.40.Experimental
Radios - Allow Comm 1 & 2 On/Off state, volume level and transponder state from the sim to affect BeyondATC. A new option in the options page ‘Enable Cockpit Radio Controls’ must be turned on to enable this feature - it is off by default to prevent confusion for new users.

Vectors - Completely rewrote vector handling engine from the ground up. More on this at bottom of these patch notes.

Traffic - Add flight plans to traffic so they fly waypoints more reflective of real life. Currently traffic flies direct from end of SID to start of STAR. In this release 2/3 of traffic flights now have flight plans. More will be added as we move forward.

Traffic - Improve enroute flight comparison to player position to increase the amount of enroute traffic you should experience, particularly on longer flights. Enroute traffic will also only do an initial announce if its makes sense, rather than just because they are being inserted. This will reduce spamming of the radio particularly if starting in the air saving credits.

Traffic - When using AIG models and using data provide by @MarceloNahas in conjunction with AIG use registration mapping for all aircraft flights that AIG provides. This should increase the model accuracy with AIG models, particularly to special liveries and variants.

Traffic - Alter ground traffic selection logic to ensure that at busy airports with a high ground traffic setting parked traffic is not all ‘at destination’, this has been seen at EDDF for example.

Approach - Improve approach selection at more remote airports particularly those using RNAV only approaches and cloud break approaches.

Approach - Fix a bug where you could be asked to descend to a low altitude early in vectoring, before being told to descend to a higher altitude later in the approach.

Airport Ops Updates - Further airport ops changes for runway allocations and split frequencies based on user feedback.

Procedure - If your flight plan does not contain a STAR you will no longer be vectored from when you call descent, only be given altitude instructions. This should prevent users from being vectored out from 400+ miles away from their destination.

User Data - Added latest AIRAC Cycle 2502, SID/STAR Pronunciation Data and more from Pilot Portal.

Fix - If you have either voice quality setting set to “off” no noise will be generated on a callin.

Fix - Fixed issue with requesting an altitude change would result in the LLM not understanding the requested altitude.

Fix - Finally found and fixed a bug that would cause the system not to hand off to tower. This has been in there since day one, and I have been looking for it since day one and today we have finally eradicated it. Good riddance.

8 Likes

More on vectors from the above patch notes: Our old vector engine was hit and miss when it came to vector instructions. 70% of the time, when it worked, it worked very well, and 30% of the time when it failed it failed badly. This was due to its tuning to attempt to make the vector system sit in a ‘middle ground’ where it wouldn’t under-instruct or over-instruct. The problem arose when the situation called for more aggressive instructions, the system wasn’t able to dynamically adapt to what the situation called for and thus it would fail to give you updated vector instructions. If you followed its path perfectly (no wind, correct input timings) it will be perfect, however if you’re blown off course or take a bit too long to input the heading into your aircraft, those tiny errors would compound into large errors the system was unable to handle.

With this patch, the vector engine is completely new, rewritten from the ground up to dynamically adjust its handling to the situation. This allows for aggressive vectors to get you back in position to avoid terrain, or soft corrections if the system detects you’re starting to drift slightly off course.

Since this system is new, it may fail in the situations we didn’t test it. That means in some instances the new system may appear worse than the old one - but rest assured this new system is far more capable and easy to tune. We need your help to put it through its paces and let us know what’s working and what isn’t so we may tune it to get every situation correct.

We will keep this in experimental a bit to tune it, then move it over to EA when it’s stable. I’ll make a video explaining more about how we solved these issues soon as it’s quite an interesting topic.

8 Likes

In reality, in the UK, the correct phraseology would be “Climb NOW to FL190” if they wanted you to ignore the SID restrictions, if they say it without the now the restrictions apply. I think in other parts of Europe instead of now they say “climb unrestricted” in this case.

I’m pretty sure BATC doesn’t do that yet, or at least I’ve never heard it tell me, so I choose to interpret that BATC still wants me to follow the sid. The truth is currently there is no enforcement there you can bust through any speed or alt restrictions and BATC doesn’t really care. Hopefully they’ll get to that at some point

1 Like