Missed Approach leads to near-desk-flip

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I’m still pretty frustrated about this one, but I’ll try to outline everything that happened in this trainwreck:

  • Had just flown from Iowa to Charlotte, NC in the 787 using an IFR flight plan with an approach that I chose to runway 36C. This was not the active runway, which will become a problem in just a bit.
  • Everything on approach was buttery smooth, the autopilot flew the approach as expected. The only issue was that ATC expected me to descend like a lawn dart but we got through that without too much trouble. Once lined up with the ILS beacons I engaged approach hold because it was foggy and I hadn’t landed this plane yet.
  • At 200ft I killed the A/P and gave it a little bit of power to slow the descent a bit, but this input was apparently too much and the plane started rising rapidly. I knew this wasn’t going to happen so I raised the gear, declared a missed approach, and started climbing.

At this point the ATC told me to go 315°, odd because I approached from the south. It turns out the active runway was 18C, so I’d come in from the wrong direction. I was told to climb to 8000ft and head to the JEDKO waypoint. During this climb I pulled up the approach plate for 18C and got the new ILS frequency, course, and looked over what I’d be doing.

On my way to JEDKO, ATC was dead silent. The approach plate has JEDKO at 8000ft, which I was, and picked up the localizer and glideslope here. The localizer was good, but for whatever reason the plane saw the glideslope as off the scale below the plane (Not correct, based on the plate), so I disabled autopilot and began descending to find it. When I did this, ATC started screaming at me to return to 8000ft. Since I was hunting this glideslope that was somewhere far below me, I kept responding “Say again” to delay it. I never actually found the glideslope, and it disappeared completely from the display around 10 miles out, where it should have been around 4000ft. ATC continued to tell me to go to 8000ft as I passed over the airport. When I saw the airport beneath me I just closed the game.

After all this I’m accepting that at some point I did something wrong (aside from absolutely hosing a landing that was right on my doorstep like an idiot), either I didn’t do something right with ATC or I had something extremely messed up with the ILS that showed the glideslope far below the airplane (I did change the frequency for 18C prior to getting to JEDKO). I can’t understand why ATC was just telling me to fly around at 8000ft though, and I don’t want to point yet another finger at a possible bug but at this point it wouldn’t surprise me.

Has anybody run into something like this before? Or, has anybody declared a missed approach to ATC and actually gotten them to clear you back down?

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The most “common mistake” people does is to forget to calibrate the altimeter with key “B”…

And the ATC is a pretty mess right now, which hopefully should be patched next week…

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Don’t use ATC until they fixed it to resemble real world.
If you use ATC, don’t trust it. Don’t expect it to resemble real world.

From what you describe, one can only assume you might have missed the glideslope capture. This may have been induced by the crappy ATC. In real world you would be cleared for ILS before capture and the controller would expect you to initiate decend without any further saying because the ILS approached as published on your plate demands your decend.

In this case, after you missed the glide, the ATC did a surprisingly good job by intending to keep you on 8000 ft. If you’d miss the GS and therefore the ILS approach, you wouldn’t attempt to wildly decend but indeed maintain or return to the published missed approach altitude.

It’s entirely possible that navaid installation in the stock scenery aren’t aligned to real world procedures. There is a good chance to solve this if you are a Navigraph customer, as Navigraph is now providing updated airport and navaid data for MSFS.

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Did you enter the new runway and approach in the FMC? If you manually entered just the nav freq without clearing out the old approach then as soon as you hit your loc or appr button it will auto tune to whatever nav is in the FMC.

Usually if I miss an approach I will just delete my whole plan and either load the new when assigned or go manual entry. Easy way to delete is just go into the dep/arr screen and enter your 2 airports. It will do a direct and then just load an approach from there. If I have to I will request a new runway and approach from ATC.

This has been my experience in the few flights I have done with the dreamliner. I have never seen it not follow a LOC with the freq and so far other than altitude the ATC will generally clear you even after a missed.

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