I did this particular flight using the AI ATC entirely by using the in-sim world map flight planner, and the SID and STAR were pre-selected in the world map planner too. The entire flight was flown using GPS+Nav, and a mile before reaching the IAF I activated the approach and manually went from NAV to Approach by clicking the STEC autopilot’s Approach button. The GNS 530’s CDI button was always set to NAV and there was no need to bother with that at all after that. GNS 530 display did indicate a change from Enroute to Approach when I activated and/or entered the approach leg.
Now this is not realistic. It’s not realistic to pre-select SID, Enroute, STAR, Approach procedures etc and everything else from the get-go before the flight and expect the ATC (vatsim, ivao, pilot-edge or real world ATC etc) to always comply with my own choice, routes etc. ATC can always select a different method or approach and fully expect me to comply. So that’s why right now I’m experimenting with the sim by pre-selecting the departure and destination airports only and nothing else. For everything else like SID, enroute, STAR, approaches etc I’m doing it all manually, and would let AI-ATC change it if they require.
So for example, right now I’m just leaving the approach or the arrivals to “Automatic”, and letting the AI ATC decide and give it to me, like how it works in real life. But by doing so, I’ve been running into some issues, and this is probably why VATSIM/pilot-edge users say this sim is not ready for online ATC IFR flights yet, or at least not ready for prime-time where a full IFR flight completed highly realistically without additional help from ATC.
But the only issue I’ve been having is that the moment I receive instructions from the ATC to perform say for example RNAV runway 27 approach a few miles before the IAF, I’d normally go back to the GNS 530, select and at first load the approach. Well as soon as I do that, the aircraft autopilot does a 180 degree u-turn. The same thing happens when I just activate the approach instead of loading it.
Why this happens? I have no idea. I even started using the excellent GNS 530 mod recently and that too is not helping. As you can see, such a bug (the completely unexpected and uncalled-for u-turn to nowhere) wouldn’t be acceptable either in real life or online ATC networks.
However yesterday I spent almost 5 hours trouble-shooting this issue using various methods and was finally successful in doing a full IFR flight without suffering from an unexpected u-turn, and I think I’m getting to the bottom of this.
As you can see, there’s no bug (u-turn). The solution, as has been confirmed by many others in this forum, is to add the IAF/Transition waypoint as a direct-to, meaning when ATC says something like “Expect Rnav approach to rwy 27 via IBVIM transition. Cleared to IBVIM”, just do a direct-to from your current position to IBVIM. Then, before reaching IBVIM, you can load or activate the rnav or ILS or whatever procedure and the sim won’t do the infamous u-turn.
Or just add the IAF as a waypoint to your flight plan as described here:
The whole IFR/Avionics/Autopilot of MSFS 2020 need some deep, thorough look and bug-fixes, but thanks to the community and third party devs and their mods it’s already quite workable at the moment.
This one I didn’t notice probably cause I wasn’t paying attention. Will look for it today.