If I know the tower frequency and enter it, the comm window does NOT give me the option to contact and request clearance for landing. How to proceed?
I would also love to know how to do this and avoid the mind numbingly awful search through the Nearest Airports list. This is my single biggest complaint with the sim.
Seeing only 3 or 4 airports at a time in a list that is constantly changing in order is so frustrating. It wasn’t great in 2020 when you could see 10 lines at once, but somehow they decided that was too easy and made it even worse.
The UI appears to have been designed by someone who has never actually used a piece of software before.
The forum system recently closed my topic on this from January 2025.
As of now, it’s still not working properly with SU5.1 (beta).
I recently tried again at a few airports…hopeless.
And the “nearest airport list” is as bad and unusable as it always was.
It was automatically closed after 365 days without any post. I’ve reopened it in case users want to contribute.
I don’t understand why farms and helipads are even in the list. They could start by filtering those out.
I agree, there should be a choice to exclude glider fields, heliports and so on. Looking for your airport takes you away from operating the aircraft. This is particularly important in Career mode where if you miss a process because the list of airfields is so long you get a penalty. Areas like the EU and usa have so many you are lucky to call atc before entering the pattern.
This is my biggest gripe with MSFS 2024. I could implement something better in a day or two my self, please MS assign someone this simple task. Easy access to Destination communications.
WHEN I know the tower frequency and enter it, the comm window should give me commuincation options.
This is about allowing communication requests after setting the Com frequency.
You can find the nearest tower through the airport information in the game’s tablet, where there are communication channels, if the topic is about it.
I completely agree. The user interface has been poorly designed in many ways since launch. Much of this is because the simulator needs a unified interface for PC and consoles, which are two different environments with distinct needs.
I think this is something that won’t change, so we just have to learn to live with it.
I think at the very least allowing us to remove the airports we are not going to need would improve memory handling for consoles too - surely?
This is also my single biggest frustration in MSFS 2024!
Here is what you do, look at your approach chart, find the tower frequency for that runway and approach, put that frequency into your radio, when you get close enough the frequency will work. You can request landing at that point. Is it perfect? No. Does it work. Yes.
This has not consistently been my experience. I’ve done exactly this and even overflying the airport the ATC UI shows the options to find nearby airports.
The UI is designed by kiddies who have known nothing other than smartphones and swiping their entire life. An easy test to see how old they are or how long they’ve been using computers and software is whether they call software or an executable file an APP or not. Everything is an APP to them, even on PC. Everything needs big tiles and swiping left and right instead of neatly organized and uniform columns and rows descending, or dropdowns.
Is it really that hard to have two different UI’s for different operating systems? Other games do it, they don’t just port over their console UI to PC. especially a triple-A title by the largest company in the world.
Problem is the UI is also mostly very difficult to navigate on console/with a controller, so at the moment it’s bad across the board.
>> when you get close enough the frequency will work. << No for me. I never get communication options even set to the tower frequency