How do I get the ground crew to guide me in?

User Support Hub Aircraft & Systems
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Been flying the CRJ quite a bit to larger airports in the US. During one flight, I was taxiing to the gate and I noticed a ground crewman guiding me in with his “wands”. Very, very cool. Unfortunately, that was the first and last time I’ve seen this.

Any idea how to ensure he shows up on every flight?

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You can enable the taxi guides, the arrows will point you to the marshaler.

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Any way I can avoid having to activate that “cheat”? I guess I can ask the tower for directions, just tough finding my gate when, for some reason, most of the major airports seem to have lost their gate numbers.

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I hate taxi ribbons.

I think it depends a lot on whether you are using the default version of an airport or some 3rd party (freeware or not). Also which ATC system you’re using.

Since MSFS ATC won’t provide specific instructions for taxiing (or at least that’s my recollection from when I last used it about a year ago) and there are no Follow Me trucks at the airports, what I’m doing as a workaround is:

  1. If I’m flying an aircraft with Navigraph integration (e.g. WT CJ4), I use the airport map displayed on the MFD to guide me through the airport. The problem is that Navigraph obviously doesn’t have info for all airports, or I may be using a default airport version which is not consistent with Navigraph’s (ie. real world version). Major hubs may be more or less fine, but I’ve seen major differences in smaller airports where taxiways are missing or they’re closed by obstacles or whatever.

It may also be that the default airport version has different taxiway names from the 3rd party, so any Navigraph info will only refer to the latter (which may cause confusion if you’re using the default version).

This is when Little Navmap comes into play, as it will have a very detailed map of the loaded airport (whether default or 3rd party), as long as you’ve remembered to update Little Navmap’s scenery database when you last updated that airport. It will even show numbered parking spots which is super handy. Generally I won’t use LNM to guide me in real time, but I’ll have kept notes during the initial planning so that I more or less know which way I should be heading for.

  1. If the aircraft can’t show maps in its displays (or doesn’t have a glass cockpit anyway), then I’ll just use a combination of Navigraph charts and LNM (again with written instructions during planning, not looking at the topdown map while I’m taxiing).

If I remember correctly, Pilot2ATC (which is highly recommended over the default ATC) will provide some specific instructions during taxiing with taxiway names etc so it’ll be of great help to those who use it.

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I use PF3 which has taxi guidance in the form of voice directions and pointers on the VOR1 needle and heading bug of my Warrior. If you are using default ATC, I don’t think there’s a good system built in short of the arrows, but it’s been a while since I used the default.