SOLVED / FIXED: FBW A32NX FMS pushes all VORs to end of flight plan. Other aircraft are fine

Hi All,
After testing in numerous aircraft in the sim, I sure is a bug with FBW only.
Load the attached .PLN file from the world map.
With the FBW A32NX (either stable or experimental), hit the “FLY” button.
Now in the cockpit look at your flight plan in your FMS Flight Plan page, scroll through to see these VOR waypoints:
TNP DRK GUP CIM LBL ICT BUM FAM PXV IIU HVQ MOL FAK SIE
They should be spread throughout the route with other non-VOR waypoints in between.
However, the bug I’m seeing in the FBW is that these VORs are all bunched-up all together at the destination end of the flight plan, just before the STAR & approach sections.

Is that happening to you too??

NB. I am sure this is not a World Map bug, because other aircraft load this flight plan just fine from the World Map. Only the FBW exhibits this behaviour (ie. moving all the VORs to the end).

What do you folks see?

KLAX KJFK_06L.pln (19.6 KB)

FBW and World Map flight plans don’t work well together. Their custom FMS is designed to work seamlessly with Simbrief. Weird things can happen otherwise.

Have you tried a Simbrief import via the MCDU and see if that works better?

I knew that was coming. And its a rather tiresome excuse.

Fact: FBW is importing the correct VORs but pushing them to the end of the flight plan. That’s a BUG with FBW, since every other aircraft I’ve tried is handling this .PLN flight just fine from the World Map.
I fed up with the way the SB fanboys are always blaming the World Map for everything, and insisting that a paid Navigraph subscription is the solution to everything.

Anyway, can others here try the steps I had explained above?

Hopefully we can soon get this fixed, as I don’t think it would be that complicated for FBW to isolate where the mis-ordering of the VORs in its custom FMS is occurring.

I guess you should ask on their Discord. No one here will be able to solve your issues or tell you how to fix this.

You’ll probably get the same answer there, however.

One main reason you see this “only” in the FBW is because they have a completely custom FMS, in use on no other aircraft.

I’ve learned that a full commitment to FBW also requires a commitment to Simbrief. It’s like a marriage.

@BigCow74 I am not asking you guys to “solve” it.
I have provided an error-free .PLN file, and all I’m asking is for you (and others) to load it from World Map and describe what you see.
Could you do that?

Maybe after I’m done watching my daughter’s baseball game and dance recital :wink:

Okay, I’m helping you out with this…

So I have downloaded your .PLN file and load it to the world map. I have reset my FBW A32NX to set the MSFS flight plan sync to LOAD ONLY so the aircraft will receive the .PLN file that was loaded. I only picked the starting gate from the drop down so I can start cold and dark without changing any of the flight plan. This is what I see in the world map.

Once I’m in the aircraft, the flight plan from the world map gets autoatically loaded into the FMGC. And this is what I see. There’s a few discontinuity, but this is normal and both before and after cleaning them up, the flight path are all crazy. Multiple lines and we have instances with the turning back and circling out again. Doesn’t look right.




Now, I know you’re tired of hearing SimBrief fanboying, so I’m not going to try to lure you in as a fanboy and just giving you the facts of what happened. So I took the liberty of creating the same flight plan in SimBrief, KLAX 06L to KJFK 04L. The SID is the same, but the STAR is different because that’s what SimBrief gave me. I generated the flight plan and downloaded the new .PLN file from SimBrief.

At this point, I already reset my FBW A32NX setting to have the MSFS Flight plan sync set to NONE. So it’s not receiving any flight plan from the world map. Then I load the .PLN file to the world map for ATC purposes. And this is what I get.

Once I’m in the aircraft, I call the SimBrief flight plan from the INIT REQUEST. And this is what I get after doing some clean up like assigning SIDs, STARs, and removing Discontinuity.







Now, all my flight plan is a nice straight connected path from one airport to the other.

FBW team is not going to fix this “bug” because they already decided to move away from the default MSFS world map flight planner because it’s not compatible with their custom FMGC system that’s actually behaving closer to the actual real life behaviour. They’re not going to compromise that integrity just so it can work “incorrectly” with the default flight planner.

Now, like I said, I’m not trying to be a SimBrief fanboy or saying that’s it’s a solution to everything. But I already give you evidence of what happened between using the world map flight planner vs SimBrief, and their respective results. I’m merely taking 30 minutes of my time helping you with this long post. Without trying to tell you which one is better over the other, you can make your own decision and judgment based on these evidence. That is all.

6 Likes

Hi Neo, thanks for taking time out to respond to my post. :slight_smile:
First thoughts, you analysis doesn’t confirm or refute what I was saying. This is because your analysis and conclusions are subjective rather than objective.
For example, along the original route there are a number of VOR waypoints. I’ll repeat them here:
TNP DRK GUP CIM LBL ICT BUM FAM PXV IIU HVQ MOL FAK SIE
If you had analysed the original PLN file (change it to a .TXT file and then read the contents in Windows Notepad), you would have seen that those VORs are spread out in their correct order throughout the route.

When you saw the same jagged lines in the FBW’s FMS that I did, were the VORs re-arranged as I described – ie all bunched-up at the end of the route?

This is what I’m trying to isolate.

Now what did I do to fix this anomaly?

  1. I deleted all the VORs which were bunched up at the end of the route – as I had described.
  2. I closed-up any further discontinuity.

Et voila! My PLN-based route looked and worked fine. There was only a slight difference to the resulting track, because I had removed the VORs. I could have re-inserted the original VORs manually back in their correct order.
That is something I don’t need to do with the other FMSs in FS2020 because are already doing this perfectly fine when importing a PLN route from the World Map.

This looks to me like a non-insurmountable bug which could easily be fixed, and if it was fixed, that would please a lot of users of this aircraft using FS2020, for which this mod is specifically designed for.

I did open the .PLN file with Notepad++, but reading it gave me a headache… lol. So I’m not sure what I’m suppose to look at in there. They’re spread out, yes… But that’s just how it’s suppose to be, so as you said in your previous post, the .PLN file is fine as it is.

The VOR doesn’t seem to be bunched up at the end of the route for me. it’s still screwed up, but the VOR are spaced along the route, so I don’t think the VOR spacing is the issue for me when I tested it.

By other FMS, are you talking about Aerosoft CRJ, PMDG 737, or Fenix A320?

A lot of users are already moving away from the world map. And this isn’t something because of a fanboyism or something. It is officially written in the FBW Documentation that you can access here in the first paragraph. Preflight - FlyByWire Simulations Documentation

A lot of us just simply following their recommendation. So I don’t think this is an easy fix as you said, without compromising the integrity and features of their custom FMGC system. The FBW team has committed to move away from the world map for now. Unless the world map flight planner behaves in a more “prosumer” manner that would support the custom FMGC.

Source please

You can just jump into the FBW community in their Discord page. Ask if anyone there is still using the world map flight planner as their main flight planning for the FMGC. Like I said, we were just following the official recommendation that I linked the source above.

The discord page is also a good place to get immediate support if you have any issues. Chances are you’ll get better answer than I do posting your same question here in there.

Hi Neo, I just noticed the above. I did not do that !!
Rather, when I arrived at the World Map screen, I immediately press ‘Space’ => Load the .PLN from PC. Then I hit FLY.

Then when I got to the cockpit I immediately went to the FMS flight plan page.
And there all the VORs are bunched up as I had described.
See screenshot I just took for you…

What you did caused the World Map to recompile the route before sending it to the A32NX! :slight_smile:

When choosing from the drop-down it shouldn’t recompile the entire flight plan, but only for the SID portion to place the starting point. The recompile only happened when you pick something from an icon on the world map (like manually selecting a gate by pressing the white gate/parking icon from the map and set as departure). But choosing the gate from a dropdown won’t recompile it, an FBW developer already confirmed that method especially when we want the ATC to still read a flight plan without affecting the FMGC when using a SimBrief flight plan.

This is the first thing that I did when I load your flight plan the first time. I load it, then I press FLY straight away. But it made me spawn on the runway. Something that is highly frowned upon. Because FBW A32NX doesn’t work that well when starting from the runway, the panel state just doesn’t get setup properly compared to when starting from the gate.

It’s difficult to isolate the actual problem in the flight plan, if the aircraft itself isn’t designed well for starting with everything on the runway. That’s why after resetting my EFB to test this issue, I came back to the main menu, load your .PLN fille again, and select a gate to start from using the dropdown. I’ve confirmed that the world map doesn’t get recompiled because nothing on the world map changes apart from the line drawn from the gate to the departure runway.

But to entertain the notion, if it does recompile. Why is that an issue? You are trying to create a flight plan from the world map, right? So you should let the world map recompile everything until you have a fully working flight plan. So any VOR that’s placed in the flight plan should be the way it should even after you press the FLY button.

more subjectivity!

Let’s boil it down: The World Map does two things:

  1. Compile flight plans in MSFS World Map using the drop down menus;
  2. Use a pre-made flight plan directly from a folder on the PC.

I am talking about option 2 !
What you did, by using ANY drop down menu and then not spawning on the runway, ie contrary to the original flight plan… was option 1 ! :slight_smile:

reading through this thread it seems to me that you don’t want any help but want the airplane to behave the way you want it. Talk about subjectivity.

1 Like

It’s not subjective, but reasonable and logical to test the simplest of steps – to determine where the import of a simple flight plan is clearly tripping-up in FBW A32NX’s FMS, where the same thing doesn’t happen in other aircraft in the sim.
If it was repeatable in other aircraft as well, then we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

But for some reason they will do and write anything and go around in circles, to avoid doing those simple steps.

Okay, so the question here is, how do you get a pre-made flight plan from option 2 if you haven’t create it using option 1 in the first place? Flight plans don’t magically created out of thin air. It has to be compiled from somewhere first.

Whether you load a flight plan from a .PLN file or created from the world map. You are trying to use the world map to inject the flight plan into the aircraft anyway, right? So regardless of which option you’re going for, it’s still subject to how the world map flight planner interpret and process those flight plans. In other words, what’s the difference between loading a .PLN file, and recompiling it using the world map, if you’re still going through the same route from the same departure airport, to the same destination airport, with the same SIDs, same STARs, same routing. I just don’t see why there’s this need to differentiate the two… they’re the same thing.

If by doing option 1 gives you a different result which solves the issue and you’re still flying the same route, then why not just accept that’s the method to use instead of wasting all this energy trying to “fix” option 2 as if that’s the “only” way to do it.

Again, we’ve been through this. A32NX FMGC is a custom system that is developed entirely separate and not fully compatible with the World map flight planner. I have linked the source to the official A32NX documentation saying that is so. The reason why it doesn’t happen in other aircraft in the sim, is because those other aircraft don’t have or use the custom FMGC that A32NX has.

Even if I can replicate the same issue as you do, that doesn’t mean anything because I don’t use the world map flight planner as the main flight plan anymore. I only use it for ATC purposes, while I use SimBrief to sync the flight plan into the aircraft.

If you refuse to use SimBrief, that’s all fine. It’s not the end of the world. But you can’t use the world map flight planner to sync the flight plan to the aircraft anyway because the custom FMGC is not compatible.

So the solution to your problem without SimBrief is by creating your flight plan manually in the FMGC. Add your flight plan departure airport, destination airport, SIDs, STARs, and the routing airways and waypoints in between and VORs manually into the F-PLN page yourself. Once you do that, you’ll get a working flight plan just like everyone else, and just like a real life pilot flying a custom route.

Objectively speaking, that’s the solution to your problem. Take it or leave it.

Well if that’s the way we should do it then no casual who wants to quickly takeoff on a runway and fly somewhere automatically and accurately could use the FBW mod without a Navigraph/SB subscription.
So that immediately rules out a huge segment of the user base who don’t want to spend time programing an FMC – probably the majority of people who have installed this mod.

The fact is that the FBW does use the World Map, and does load all the waypoints. It just mixes up the ordering of the VORs. So they are 90% there already, and why not then just fix the last 10%?

There’s a reason why the default Asobo A320 still exist… They’re there to cater to these types of the user base. The choice is there. You want a casual flight to quckly take off from a runway without spending time programming the FMGC, fly the Asobo A320neo. It already has everything you need as a casual simmer. Nothing wrong with that aircraft.

This is legacy code, coming from the development of the default A320 where it all started. They’re probably going to end up getting rid of the 90% than fixing the 10% and make it totally ignoring any flight plan loaded in the world map. Because the 10% isn’t worth compromising the integrity of the custom made FMGC.

If I follow your procedure, yes.

This, with some other fun waypoints added shortly after the SID. My “Sync MSFS Flight Plan” option was set to ‘Save’ in this case.

If I have my “Sync MSFS Flight Plan” set to ‘Load Only’ I get something similar, but there is an additional 560 track miles somewhere in the flight plan. I didn’t bother searching for the differences.

If I have my “Sync MSFS Flight Plan” set to ‘None’ then my F-PLN is blank, as I would expect.

I think the key takeaway here is that this behavior isn’t a bug, it’s a choice, detailed and explained by the FBW team in their documentation and on their Discord server.

You can use Simbrief for free. You aren’t required to buy a subscription. You will have a slightly older AIRAC cycle with the free account, but it would yield better results than this un-flyable plan.