I totally gave up on ATC and expecting the same experience I had with FSX. ATC will have you at 41000 feet 150 miles from the airport for example. Yesterday for the first time while in the 787 my throttle decided to shut down right before rotating off the runway. Learned it’s best to turn off AI assistance. Then then the LNAV would not catch the flight path even when I’m perfectly on it. So preparing myself to babysit the heading knob the whole flight in some cases.
So AI assistant does not assist you, it actually hurts you. ATC is totally useless so this brought me to the conclusion I am on my own with this game. It’s not good when what is supposed to be helping guides have no credibility. I hope we get better ATC and better guides in 2024. Beginner flyers should have better than we currently have in 2020. With all that said, it’s good to have an active imagination to make the most out of FS2020.
While the sim’s ATC is not without its flaws, the real issue, in your case, is the AI Assistant.
I messed around with it in my early days of learning MSFS 2020 and I had a case where it didn’t even deploy the landing gear of the 747 when I allowed it to land at KSFO.
I would encourage you to take a step back and fly something less complex completely on your own and gain the confidence to not bother with the AI flying your aircraft. Allowing it to do your radio work is fine, but beyond that it is an exercise in futility.
Using the in game atc is for beginners, just to have fun. when you wanna get into realistic flight simulation, you either are gonna have to navigate with just your flight plan programmed into your plane or get vatsim or you could also get some of those AI atc which also work good.
I wouldn’t say in game ATC is for beginners because it will send them into a mountain causing much confusion. This is why I said beginners deserve better because they should have good guidance.
this is actually a good point
if the current atc flies you into terrain, and it is up to you to discern if the vectors make no sense
then it actually is for the very experienced only
food for thought
I’ve not had any of those ATC problems. I know they are not 100% realistic in all instructions, but it has always guided me in a decently usable way. Then again, I didn’t come into this expecting ATC to be real world accurate, so I guess reassessing expectations may be in order for some.
While we’re on this topic, is there any way to use GPS and see how many miles you are from the target airport in any plane? In the GA planes it’s easy with the G1000 but I have yet to discover how to do this in the 787 and I’m sure I’m just missing it.
I plan on using charts to know when to start descending and lining myself up for approaches. I think this is the way for now.
On the CJ4, you can see flight plan leg distances along with a TOD make if you set everything up correctly. It doesn’t show an as-the-crow-flies distance to an airport that I know of, but that wouldn’t be usable for calculating TOD anyway.
I’ve been flying without ATC Voices since 2020 released, and it’s very enjoyable. I don’t need them, and I don’t miss them.
I have only recently started to play with the autopilots in the airliners, and for hand flying with minimum AP assistance, things work okay, not great.
I think the biggest issue here is the wild variety of states the aircraft can be in on launch. Some import fuel, some import flight plan, some load weights and balances, some need external tools, etc. It’s a crazy task trying to design automation for so many initial states. Cold and Dark and Ready for Takeoff should be identical across all aircraft. These should be “green” states that have a happy path to flying or it doesn’t get on the Marketplace. I hope 2024 tightens the requirements for quality.
I remember in FSX I would simply put my destination in the GPS thingy and it gave me the total flight time estimate, and how much time and distance was left in the flight in real time the entire flight. That helped me know when to do things flying without ATC instructions.
Yes, I find it difficult to believe real pilots fly like this today. Modern airliners are much more “intelligent” than they appear in the sim. There are many aircraft in the sim that simply won’t fly correctly without pushing buttons on the MCU. E for Everyone, remember?
Have you tried Say Intentions? I have been using it for several months and I am a RW pilot and love it. Can’t imagine flying without it. Actually, I wouldn’t fly without it. I would go back to flying DCS.
I don’t have much experience with other aircraft flight planning, but the CJ4 was updated to do all this as well. The only difference is you can’t simply put in the destination airport and execute. Now you do have to also select the departure and approaches you plan to fly to get you a full flight path to the runway. There’s also now cases where you may get manually sequenced onto the approach, which would need to be deleted in the FMS to get the full routing and all the time and TOD estimates. It’ll also now follow VNAV instructions for SIDS and STARS, but I don’t suggest that unless you fly VFR when it comes to ATC. If you fly IFR with ATC, then you can get some discrepancies with the FMS routing.
If I want full sim ATC, then I don’t do a full flight plan in the FMS so that I can have the aircraft follow their instructions without conflicting with something like VNAV. Basically pick your poison.
I agree with your opinion.
The base of MSFS2020 ATC is somewhat okish but the script often reminds me to the meaning of the most important squawk codes.
75(00) there’s a KNIFE (passenger with bad intentions)
76(00) troubles with our radio FIX
77(00) we’re going to HEAVEN
In MSFS2020 I squawk 7700 by default but it never gives me any priority.
Happy
That was one interesting realistic surprise I had not long ago. I decided to change my squawk code one day after being assigned one. As soon as I changed one digit, ATC was yelling at me to change it back. Lol
