After much trial & error, I have finally figured out why flight plans generated with custom WPs, are not being followed properly by the AutoPilot in NAV mode. Thanks again to @Fliggity1976 and others on his Twitch stream for helping me FINALLY get to the root of the issue. Perhaps this is a well known issue by the community…but if not, hopefully this can help raise the awareness, and prompt some sort of fix by the developers, or at least a work-around.
So here is an example of a flight plan created in Little Navmap 2.6.15, containing a lot of custom WPs, mixed in with a few airports for touch-and-go landings as we circle the wonderful island of Jamaica.
So we load this into MSFS, with the Working Title Garmin G1000 NXi application installed from the Marketplace. Notice how only the airport ICAOs appear in the flight plan. When AP NAV mode is activated, none of the custom WPs will be followed because they are not recognized…the aircraft will only go to the ICAOs listed. This is not expected behavior, as we want to follow all custom WPs:
So we remove the G1000 NXi application, and reload the exact same flight plan, and the result is as we would expect. All WPs plus all airport ICAOs are loaded into the flight plan:
Finally, to make LNM generated flight plans even more reliable, and more immune to the bugs introduced by SU5, is to export your flight plans as IFR, even though you intend to to the flight in VFR mode. In my recent experience, this eliminates that pesky TIMECLIMB indicator, and other strange AP NAV mode behaviors, like taking you back to your departing airport.
I hope this helps those who may have been struggling to understand exactly what has been happening with AP-NAV mode, and reliably following flight plans containing custom WPs.
My question to the developers and community experts: is this a well known issue? Is there any planned fix to this? Or is there some other setting that would allow the G1000 NXi addon from the Marketplace to be able to recognize custom WPs?
Thanks!
Scott