@Crunchmeister71
Yes , I gained the same experience when flying IFR. To me it seems as if ATC does
not recognize a reasonable flight level for an approach at all. It doesn’t matter which airport I choose, when near the chosen airport I was ordered to decent just about 5 miles from the airport, out of flight level 10.000 for instance (LOL).
Not all airports have published procedures in the game. You can tell by the colour of the crosshair icon for airports on the world map. If they are blue, they have procedures. If they are brown, then nada.
The bigger airports mostly have SID/STARs available. You can only select them during flight planning if you go with low or high alt IFR. You then select them via drop down menu at the depature/arrival airport, along with the approaches.
However if you know what approach you want to fly, you are better off using an external flight planner like PFPX or SimBrief in my opinion to just load the correct waypoints in without bothering with the world map.
if you really want it to be realistic, google on “Vatsim”…
I just want to to be accurate and understandable. I expect no more, or less, than that.
Otherwise VATSIM.
That’s probably it. I don’t fly at the biggest airports. But I do fly at ones that have procedures in reality and just hadn’t seen them in game.
What works for me - or at least has so far - is I have waypoints turn on, so I can see where I’m flying and - most importantly - what height I should be at. So, knowing that ATC won’t bring me down reasonably, I start asking to lower my cruising altitude to match the upcoming waypoint at a reasonable # of miles out (depending on how far down I have to go). I do this all the way until I get ILS approach clearance. If told to climb and maintain some stupid altitude, I acknowledge the request and ignore it. Eventually, they’ll get to a waypoint in closer, and tell me to descend.
It’s not how I’d like it to be - I’d like to just follow ATC’s directions on descent - but I don’t enjoy having to fly in circles until I get down to where I need to be.
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Realistic within the game itself. Have zero interest in Vatsim tbh.
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I hope they do improve the default ATC in time. It’s pretty shoddy. Have you considered trying Pilot2ATC? It’s not cheap, but it’s good, although it can’t yet interact with AI aircraft in the sim nor read the in-sim weather so you will sometimes end up with AI traffic taking off in the opposite direction to you. In spite of all this, I still prefer it to the default offering.
It’s available from pilot2atc.com, where you can try it for free for 10 days and I’ve made a very short how-to video on getting it up and running: https://youtu.be/XgOHTEEb9VE
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I find the ATC performance total hit or total miss. One flight ATC just go crazy, the other flight is incredibly spot on giving me perfect instructions to descent, approaches. I’m trying to figure out what break the thing
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You can buy pilot2atc its pretty amazing but it takes some effort to learn. I’ve used it in MSFS2020 but it doesnt know the sim weather yet.
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Be nice if they could get ATC up to FSX level (and that was OK at best). But this is an area I see me looking for an add-on down the road. Or I finally just go over to VATSIM.
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Yeah, I was kind of excited that these same three guys would always show up at my destination airport and be ready to guide me in or push me back… until after fueling, one of them backed the fuel truck right into my Cessna.
Jim-Sim
The last patch was announced with an ‘ATC update’ and we got new voices and more bugs. If you want details and a proper answer then upvote this thread in the Q&A forum:
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/is-there-a-plan-to-improve-atc/281389
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Lol. That sounds kind of humorous. Good thing that there is no object impact in this game or that may have become like the #1 complaint of everyone here. As I’ve said many times, they definitely need to do something. At this point, I would rather have Clippy
popping up on the screen and asking me if I need directions to the airport.
He is a Microsoft trademark right? Should fit right in here.
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I just flew in to KEEN Keene, NH and there was a fuel truck passing across the threshold when I was nearly right on top of him. I think he made a mistake and gunned it so he wouldn’t get clipped. A complaint I have is that I wish we could “talk” to the other players. Just to organize an approach or something. It’s a bit pointless to have the real world traffic be able to be held by tower if we’re too slow on the approach but yet we can have ImaNewbie123 come right overhead and crash land in front of us. I’m just glad that crash detection doesn’t work.
lol! Well it keeps it interesting I guess.
For me I use shift P to do push back if ground services not available in atc.