Live Traffic, in conjunction with AIG or another program can provide a very realistic and immersive experience. However at large and busy airfields I am now finding that the application of live traffic is creating the following issues:
-
Frequency congestion as there are too many aircraft attempting to obtain clearance, pushback taxi and take off clearances for the rather slow, limited and excessively verbose ATC system to cope with.
-
Excessive delays at holding points due to ATC’S inflexibility and inability to expedite departing traffic using the current system.
-
Excessively high go arounds due to traffic bunching on final and landing traffic trundling slowly towards the distant runway exits.
Now many of these issues could be partially resolved if the ATC system, or AI traffic systems were improved, but that will take some time and not be easy to achieve. In addition if live traffic is correctly implemented, then most busy airports would be permanently at maximum capacity with AI aircraft, as they are in reality, and flight sim aircraft would have to use reduced separation at all times to land and take off and probably ignore ATC instructions in order to operate.
So as I see it there are two possible solutions:
-
Place a limit on the number of AI aircraft operating at any airport, probably dependant on the number of active runways. I would imagine that at a busy international airport the traffic would need to be limited to approximately half the full live traffic levels in order to allow the current ATC system to cope, and flightsim users to operate.
-
Provide an AI LIVE TRAFFIC slider in the traffic section to allow users to control the number of AI aircraft. Ideally this slider would adjust the maximum rate of landing and take offs, so that airfields with light traffic levels would not be affected.