When flying IFR or receiving VFR flight following, its a total immersion killer when each successive controller (after handoff) says “Radar contact”. A controller will only say Radar Contact once (unless that controller actually loses radar contact, which is extremely rare). Please just have the simulator respond with [Callsign] “Roger” when the pilot checks in with the next controller after a handoff. Repeatedly having successive controllers say “Radar contact”, after their airplane has previously been ‘radar identified’ is a big immersion killer, especially for former air traffic controllers like me.
Thank you.
Personal Comments and Observations
Given there is not an underlying layer simulating Centers, TRACON, etc. with actual radar coverage, the likely way this could happen is a scripted response that assumes perfect radar coverage.
WT may have something for this, but ATC scripting would need to be revamped a lot more, and some kind of incremental tally made every time you change sectors or controllers. And what happens if you deviate?
The Locpak file providing the voice scripts/prompts isn’t anywhere close to doing that. Personally, I would consider this a Wishlist and not a Bug, since it’s a Feature addition to the base ATC function.
Copy all, thanks. I still consider this a bug because this is a “very” basic ATC function. And, all you would really need to fix it is a single flag that says whether or not “Radar contact” has ever been said. If yes, then don’t ever say it again. True, there might be cases where a facility does lose radar contact, however the simulator doesn’t ever tell the pilot “Radar contact lost”, so there wouldn’t be a need to keep track of that with an incremental tally, just a simple On/Off flag. Is that a ton more software code? I doubt it. But, if Asobo was ever to revamp their ATC software, I would love to provide feedback for that project. I was a controller in the U.S for over 20 years.
Thanks for the reply.
Yeah the Locpak file is simply a reference file to pull the scripts appropriate to the moment from, and has generic fields like “ATC Agent” where that would be replaced by Center, Approach, Departure, etc name located in a name table inside the same file. The flagging would be very sophisticated compared to the relative smoke and mirrors ATC is right now and beyond the file’s ability.
Got ya. Thanks for all the info. Like I said, if they ever want to do a major ATC update, I’ll volunteer to provide feedback (before implementation).
Cheers.
Tim
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You may want to check in at Working Title’s Discord to see if they’re looking for Volunteers.
That would be cool. I’m pretty new at this simulator stuff. Where do I find that?
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Click on this link. You’ll need to register an account for free. You can use that same account for any other organization’s Discord server after.
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