I can recommend using Chartfox.org as an alternative to navigraph charts. Definitely doesn’t have as many charts as the paid NG subscription of course. But it’s a worthy free alternative 
.
Do mind that you need a free, zero strings attached, VATSIM account to use chartfox.
Thanks. I’ll have a look.
But how do you know which approach route fits well to your position?
I could of course refere to some charts available online. But i would like to avoid this, as im flying in VR its difficult to put off the headset everytime you have to check a pdf chart. And also charts available online are not necessarily matching to the ingame approach routes.
You can get maps / charts to go on the toolbar that are also visible in VR (just like the current vfr map in game).
One provider of that is Navigraph, which also solves your second question. With their data service your maps / charts will be the same as the data because they offer very good coverage all over the world (IFR) of maps and data.
They have also announced that they will cover VFR fields better soon as well.
And if you don’t want to pay for it (yet), you can also, like all real pilots do, plan your flight in advance. 99% of the time you already know what you can expect as an approach, just the vectors might be different.
For such a situation, you can use LittleNavMap which shows the departures, stars and approaches in an convenient way and it becomes very clear what the most ideal approach is.
Navigraph is nice no doubt, but with their abo payment model is not an option for me due to my principles.
Planing in advance i can do with the flight planer in the sim itself. This is how im doing it today. The problem with this is when you are on a long flight with live weather, it can happen that the winds change direction and also the active runway changes. Chances are you end up landing downwind. This happened to me quite often. Also the ATC does not care. Once you have filed a flight plan with a particular runway and approach route specified, ATC will guide you according to your plan and will not assign you to another approach and runway. Seems like youre supposed to change your flight plan in flight yourself and get clearence for it from ATC yourself before beginning with the approach.
Of course in reality you enter the approach and all that in while in flight. In practise you can do it before you start. The wind rarily changes full 180 enough that you actually need to change the direction of landing, not sure why you have experienced that this often. Maybe you fly in a very dynamic area.
Not sure which principle you have against paying for quality work? They supply a monthly service with updates and do it with great commitment and customer support.
Its not their “quality” all they do is to load jeppersen charts into their pad. I may consider paying for this if it was one time payment. But i don’t like abo like payment models in general and try to avoid it where possible in any aspect. Its not worth it for me. For me its just a game. It is maybe an option for real pilots who want to use fs for practising IFR (which i doubt is a good idea). Im not taking it that serious to be honest. I like realism but to a certain degree. If i want maximum realism i go fly for real, ive got PPL-A license too. The whole IFR in FS is coming short anyway, its not just this. Doing IFR with serious enthusiasm, with charts and everything may be fun if it was working properly. But there are many things that are far from the reality and many things that are kind of broken too. Im doing it more for fun. I don’t want to deal to much with IFR charts, just being able to select another approach route that fits the situation. I wouldn’t mind if ATC assigned propper approach route to me automatically and i would just click a button to update flight computer without having to care about reading charts at all.