Since we notice and post about so many things that don’t work well, I wanted to bring attention to something that worked better than expected.
As a preface, when I first started using ATC in FS2020, shortly after World Update 6 or 7, I had the built-in ATC do some unusual things, like telling me to ‘expedite your descent’ directly into a long mountain range when the airport was on the other side of it. And when I didn’t listen, ATC would get offended and terminate my radar service. So I was conditioned to expect the occasional illogical insrtruction from ATC that would have to be ignored, and to then proceed without radar service from that point on.
Fast forward to today, in SU16. I was exploring NZ in a small GA twin-engine, under IFR ‘flight following’ conditions, going from New Plymouth to Whanganui. My route was planned at the low sight-seeing altitude of 5000 feet.
Leaving new Plymouth, you get a distant view of North Mount Egmont to the south, a solitary and scenic ‘Lonely Mountain’ style peak rising out of otherwise mostly flat land. I decided to break from my more direct flight plan, and make a detour to loop around the mountain and the Egmont National Park. At 8261 feet, I knew the peak was above my cruising altitude. But my plan was to loop around it, not go over it.
So as I get close and begin circling the mountain, I suddenly get a call from ATC saying ‘Flight Nxx, please expedite your climb to 7800 feet’.
It took me a second to recover from my surprise and comply. Here was the default FS2020 ATC engine being intelligent and proactive in providing a more suitable minimum altitude for my position, which was several miles off of my flight plan.
While I’m not sure it’s the ‘official’ minimum altitude for that region considering the actual height of the peak, algorithmically speaking it was a more logical altitude for the ‘foothills’ terrain I was flying over at the time.
As soon as my loop was completed, and I was back over the more flat terrain between the park and Whanganui, ATC returned with an instruction to ‘descend to 5000 feet’ that was logged in my original plan.
So all that to say, it’s nice to see this improvement in action. I’m not sure when this ATC terrain awareness fix was introduced (somewhere between WU7 and SU16) but I’m glad to see that, at least in this scenario, it worked beautifully!