Many posts here have described the frustration of receiving an ATC command when approaching an airport to “Climb to 10,000 ft”. It makes it impossible to descend properly for a landing. Sometimes ATC gives seemingly random climb or descend instructions that don’t make sense. ATC alternatives are used because of the very high frustration with the “broken” ATC.
I looked at and created various flight plans researching the issue with cruising altitudes. (See Part 1) I created IFR flight plans using MSFS World Map, Navigraph, SimBrief, and Little Nav Map (LNM) using the same departure, destination, SID, STAR, and waypoints. My initial assumption is that all of the created flight plans should be identical and would be flown identically.
I discovered that all of these flight plans were different in minor but important ways. The MSFS World Map flight plan added altitude restrictions (at or above, at or below, in between) and altitudes according to the SID or STAR information. The other flight plans did not contain altitude restrictions although they may have been documented in the detailed flight plan information not sent to ATC.
What about ATC and these flight plans? I used an airliner to fly these flight plans using the default cruising altitude of 38,000 ft. When the Navigraph, SimBrief, and LNM flight plans were used, ATC issued many strange climb or descend commands to random altitudes. This is matches the current “broken” ATC.
When I flew the flight plan generated by the World Map flight planner, ATC gave correct altitude instructions according to the altitude restrictions in the flight plan. ATC did not send random altitude climb or descend instructions. The flight was successfully guided by ATC through the arrival and approach phases to landing.
It appears that using flight plan altitude restrictions “fixes” the problem with random altitude climb or descend instructions issued by ATC.
Many users do not use the World Map flight planner but load their FMS from their SimBrief flight plan or prefer to enter all the flight plan information manually. I do not know if these FMS flight plans are communicated correctly to ATC.
Apparently the ATC issue of random ATC altitude instructions is fixed if the World Map flight planner is used. ATC remains “broken” if other flight plans do not contain the altitude restrictions needed by ATC.
I will now be using only the World Map flight planner to create my IFR flight plans. The other flight planners continue to be valuable tools for flight planning but their flight plan exports need to be fixed to be usable.