Why is it that whenever I try to do a flight plan it always insists on overflying the airport directly before it turns onto the final approach leg? This is none example but it happens at every airport I try and do a plan at.
It doesn’t matter what approach I load or what runway, it always goes direct to the airport, departures seem fine its just the landings. I expect something more like this that I can do in LNM.
What approach plate are you using for ILS 15? According to the Jeppeson chart for ILS 15, the approach starts at the airport so flying over it is correct. It looks like MSFS has created your flight plan correctly. If you don’t want to overfly the airport, RNAV RWY 15 should work.
I find you have to do a bit of experimenting to get the plan correct. MSFS insists on putting the full instrument approach procedure in the plan sometimes rather than allowing a route to final approach. If an ILS has an arc, then there’s no way to NOT have the arc. My workaround is to manually enter the correct waypoints to the start of the approach rather than entering the approach from the dropdown menu. I sometimes find it easier to load an RNAV approach and then just use it to get onto the ILS.
Can this really be the case? Take Manchester approach for eg, the flight planner always inserts the MCT VOR (right at the airport) into the flight plan and then directs the aircraft back out to do a U-turn and back to the airport on the ILS. I watch loads of aircraft on flightradar24 into Manchester and not one has ever flown an approach this way.
I wouldn’t mind too much but the flight planner won’t allow you to delete the MCT waypoint in any way. It’s also more complicated because I fly in VR so don’t have access to all the waypoint names once i’ve got the headset on so can’t really make my own flight plan inside the aircraft.
Looking at the charts for Manchester, all the approaches except one use MCT for the IAF. This is probably due to terrain, traffic flow to/from adjacent airports, and noise abatement. The only approach without MCT as the IAF is RNAV RWY 23L. Could this be the approach being used by the aircraft you are seeing?
They’re probably getting radar vectors to final. It’s not uncommon for a chart to show a full procedure that never gets used. If you’re getting vectored you don’t need to track via the initial approach fix and fly the full procedure. Sometimes there are STARs that take you direct to final but in the case of Manchester it looks like the STARs take you to a holding pattern and from there you would get vectored to final.
The problem with MSFS is that it’s not smart enough to know this. All it knows is the published instrument procedure, it doesn’t know the full procedure is never flown and that it doesn’t make sense to fly the full procedure in a busy traffic environment. So you end up with situations like this where the only approach is the full approach and you can’t delete waypoints that are part of the approach.
Whatever the charts say, real world approaches don’t go that way. About once every three minutes an aircraft joins the approach somewhere just north east of Hyde without having passed anywhere near MCT.
Unless the weather is unusual, they only use 23R. 23L is not used for landing, though that’s what MSFS ATC tells you to use. I am pretty sure that 23L doesn’t even have an ILS.
I think I’m having the same issue. Whenever I load a plan on the World Map page of FS, I select IFR and a desired runway. The plan loads fine and flies the course until I get close to the airport. Then the plane banks and turns off course for no reason. The leg is still highlighted magenta, but the plane is doing something else every time. Why is this??
Have similar issue. I was able to see just the final approach leg - magenta line (example setting ILS4 to KLGA). For some reason, now when setting ILS I can see the whole FMS straight in path and need to fly away from the runway towards the previous leg magenta line before switching the NAV hold towards the runway. A mystery to me, why is not just the final magenta leg showing?
