Here is a list of ATC issues noticed when flying in the Caribbean
-Departing San Juan Luis Muñoz Marín International TJSJ - ATC handoff to 118.15 crossed with Eugenio María de Hostos TJMZ ATIS (an airport 66 miles away) thereby preventing contact with ATC until out of range.
-No RNAV approaches for Terrance B. Lettsome International (Beef Island) TUPJ
-In general, ATIS sometimes reports the wrong runway in use regardless of prevailing winds. Tailwind active runways are not usually assigned if the tailwind factor is more than 8kts and when requesting the RWY that should be active, a circle to land is assigned.
-Many airports report taxiing instructions as “use taxiway Alpha” despite the airport having multiple taxiways available (I recently received detailed taxiing instructions when departing TJSJ for the first time since the 22-Dec update)
Before this latest update I was flying from the Dominican Republic to St. Maarten in the TBM, got handed off to San Juan Center on 118.15 and had the same issue you found, although if I remember correctly it was the ATIS for San Juan Int’l.
I reported the radio conflict between TJMZ and TJSJ to zendesk back in october, but additional reports probably can’t hurt.
IRL Mayaguez uses ATIS information of Aguadilla about 20 miles north, so the 118.15 frequency at TJMZ is not based on real world data.
It would be nice if we could edit/override the default airports but that doesn’t seem to be possible at the moment. The only alternative being remaking the aiport from scratch.
Nice! Thanks for the info. Do you live or fly down in that area in real life? I’m from NY but spend as much time as possible in the Caribbean and I absolutely love flying there.
Thats funny! I’m a New Yorker too (living in Germany now) who has been to the Caribbean several times. Most of my IRL flight training was in Florida and some in the Tri-State area but Island Hopping was always a dream of mine. That’s why I spend most of my time in the Caribbean.
Unfortunately the coastline bug has ruined the experience for now and I’ve been forced to look at other areas now (which isn’t such a bad thing either). I had one of those “ah-ha” experiences flying into LOWI Innsbruck with live weather, complete with icing and snowy runway. Wow.
Excellent! You never know how someone words the problem they’re experiencing and therefore don’t know if it’s been reported or not. Glad I’m not the only one having experienced that. Kind of frustrating not being able to get through to ATC.
exige81 is correct regarding TJMZ using ATIS information from Aguadilla BQN according to the AOPA 2020 Caribbean Guide. SkyVector lists TJMZ ATIS as 118.15.
Interesting that skyvector is showing TJMZ ATIS as 118.15 on a few of the charts (Though not on the airport information page).
The official FAA documentation for TJMZ lists “none” for ATIS and referees BQN as I mentioned previously. Im guessing there’s an error in the dataset that both skyvector and MSFS used to populate the data.
Might be worthwhile inquiring with skyvector
Hopefully it gets fixed in the future or the SDK is updated to a point where this type of thing could be manually edited.
SkyVectors international coverage, most especially in the Caribbean, has been pretty spotty a lot of times. ForeFlight correctly shows that there is no TJMZ ATIS frequency, with WX information received from an AWOS colocated at BQN ~14nm north. I assume there’s a typo here - you should be handed off to 120.9 or 119.4 - both dep freqs for SJU. Perhaps it was intended that you swap to 118.75 (straight to SJU center?)
In general, ATIS needs some TLC. I always just grab the latest metar from an app and plan my arrival from there - usually hoping for the best! I have found where the live weather was correct, but the ATIS information was not…