Proper procedure for setting up arrivals and approaches?

I’m trying to understand arrivals and approaches, from a flying/planning point of view…

This is my understanding, and I’m probably wrong but for VFR, you set your departure and arrival airport. Go fly, and then once your in the vicinity of your arrival airport, you would contact the tower, to get the vectors to the arrival and approach. Then you would put that into the FMC and follow that. Correct?

For IFR, I’m a little more lost…For flight planning, before flying, you would enter your departure and arrival, and in-flight waypoints. Should you also at this point, select an arrival and approach? Or do you wait till your in the vicinity of the arrival, get that from ATC and then fly the arrival / approach?

My understanding for VFR is that you wouldn’t even put it in the FMC. You would fly vectors in heading mode and then join your left base right base, final as instructed. VFR you wouldn’t be doing ILS approach since it’s considered instrument. For IFR depends how you fly you could do it sim way and enter everything or you could be more realistic and leave it blank and wait for ATC to tell you what your STAR and runway would be. Technically again from my understanding it works like this in real life as well. You might enter everything and if ATC changes it on your as you get closer to destination you’d change it in FMC.

Moved to #student-pilots:basic-gameplay-help

You can use the FMS to fly VFR point-to-point (restricted by speed, altitude and airspace limitations). But you could not use an instrument approach without having filed an IFR plan. You’d have to use the entry pattern while announcing on UNICOM at an uncontrolled airport what your intentions are. At a controlled field, you’d be under Tower control as far as runway use and entry pattern, but you could not use a published IAP.

In real life we do select the arrival / approach we expect already before departure but leave the discontinuity until cleared for the specific arrival or approach. Could also leave it blank and select the correct arrival and approach in-flight. As long as you make sure you don’t actually follow the arrival before being cleared to do so.

Thats how it is in real life, no idea for MSFS.

In order to prepare for approach you usually start determining the Top of Descent (TOD), then before reaching TOD (FPR):

  • Flight plan → select or update arrival / approach.
  • Performance → calculate landing distance, approach speed corrected for wind etc.
  • Radios → (CFM) set Course, Frequency, Minima
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Because it enables the FMS‘s fuel calculation.

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