[BUG LOGGED] ATC asking for descent in to terrain?

I knew it was the wrong altitude, but couldn’t believe it wouldn’t just tell you to go to 15,000. Pikes peak is north of their at its a bit over 14,000.

That’s some beautiful country, but difficult terrain to fly in a light aircraft. I’m generally in single-engine GA aircraft, so night flying in the Rockies is not one of my usual activities.

You must admit that the ATC was correct. It asked you to go up to 14 k, your altitude was 12k , I do not understand.

Pikes Peak is 15500

Basically, ATC caused controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), he should have been told to go to at least 16,500ft based on the Pikes Peak example.

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Pikes Peak (14,115ft) has a bright light on top of it in real life…I wonder if it’s in the sim. But your experience sounds quite typical of default ATC in flight sims.

I don’t think the game gives you an option to say “unable” do they? The best you can do is ignore them if they tell you to do something you shouldn’t for now. Hopefully it will get patched if people log zendesk tickets about it.

Anyway, don’t think that ATC won’t ask you to do things you shouldn’t in real life. For example, they can tell me to go onto a particular heading but if that puts me too close to cloud then I’d have to tell them I was unable due to cloud clearance. Other reasons do include aircraft performance limitations. I know this doesn’t help with current bugs, this is just a bit of info showing that it is up to the pilot, not ATC to decide on what to actually do. So ideally the game would allow us to tell them as much. That would be really cool.

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14,115 ft. But I wasn’t at Pikes Peak

I agree . They should fix this. I just flew to Las Vegas for ILS approach. They told me 4,200 ft. Plane was following GPS path and it drove me right into the ground

My flight instructor told me very early on: “There’s a reason they call it Pilot In Command.” You ALWAYS have the final say in how to control your aircraft.

When my son was young and he’d ask me “why?” with regard to an instruction like “pick up your clothes” I’d always respond, “Because I’m Pilot In Command.” :smiley:

To this day he’ll still say, “I know… I know… you’re PIC.” He’s 23… lol!

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There are similar issues elsewhere. Berne approach is one I have seen (and I ignored the command…)

atm the ATC is in whatever mode till it get’s fixed in a future patch.
posted about it a week ago where atc would tell me decend to FL11 , and the moment i started to decend it told me to climb to FL 12 and this went on and on and on ping ponging between Fl 11 and FL12 till it was time to land.

That made me smile, thank you for that :slight_smile:

I have a love hate relationship with ATC in this simulator. There are some definite improvements over FSX and there are some areas where it has gone backwards. I by no means consider ATC improvements to be urgent in the grand scheme of things, but I hope ATC is the target of one of the Sim Updates in the future.

ATC is clearly an important issue for people here, it is the 8th most searched term on the forums and has a click through ratio of 49.4%. My hope is when we start using the upvote system in #self-service:wishlist next week, we will see some good ATC suggestions that get upvoted.

That sounds great! And thanks for the smiley! :slight_smile:

I agree that there is a plus and minus with ATC compared to FSX. I also agree there are bigger fish to fry.

One of the things I use Flight Sim for is IFR practice. It’s great to help stay current, and it’s lots less expensive than flying around in real life. Plus, I get to fly the SR22 in Flight Sim. By the time I actually get to fly one irl I’ll have dozens of hours in the simulator!

You should not accept a lower level than your LSAT, make sure you know the radar lower safe as well

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Same happened to me on a flight from Denver to Aspen. When I was over the mountains at FL170 (as instructed) the ATC went into a loop, requesting FL120, FL130, FL140,130,140,130 like every 5 seconds. I settled for FL140 which, as I’ve just noticed once I’ve reached it, would’ve sent me straight into a mountain top. Luckily the TBM 930 has enough power for a quick climb, I disengaged AP and just barely made it. Hope this will be fixed with the next patch (ATC needs a serious overhaul).

Flying from CYYC to CYXC, ATC directs one to descend to 8000 feet before lining up with runway 16 (while you’re still well in the mountains). Actual charts indicate MSA in that direction is 14100…

If you follow the ATC instructions, you crash into the mountains every time.

Any suggestions?

Don’t follow the ATC instruction? :stuck_out_tongue:

I think they need to add a “Cannot Comply” type option for the pilot.

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Haha, yes, and if you disregard ATC, as you know, eventually after being badgered repeatedly, it will eventually say, “ATC terminated…”, leaving one feeling like they’ve done something incorrectly.

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If they put some of that Azure natural-language processing power to work on a nicer ATC… :small_airplane: :smiley_cat:

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