What is insane here is the flight plan now has me flying to OCITY as part of the STAR then A5 (what is this? I can’t find a Navaid entitled “A5” anywhere) then all the way back to LMT, MOXEE, PORTL, VANTZ and THEN the approach via MAVER.
I think it gets confused on where you are in an arrival (STAR) if there are several entries. It shouldn’t, but it does, so it is a bug, and not dissimilar to the old loopback one. Here’s the chart for OCITY 3 ARR
In the World Map in your screenshot you can see some grey lines, of STAR entries not used. It is expecting you to be using OED.OCITY3 (bottom left) and you’re (quite reasonably) on LMT.OCITY3 instead (from the bottom right) on the way to MOXEE. This means it sees you ‘off course’ as it thinks ‘OCITY3 28L’ is always from OED, and then just guesses you need to go back to the start of the STAR as its confused.
When the ATC and routing sort of gets ‘lost’ like this (or rather thinks you are lost because it defaults to the wrong STAR entry transition, regardless of what you put in the map originally) then the workaround is just to do a DIRECT TO and ignore its errors. The DIR on the airbus.
So best guess it’s some bad math on how an arrival exits on to an approach, because it’s trying to work out where you are and it seems to not include the entry transition info in the route planning.
The crazy is, I did a DIR to MAVIN, and, of course, it looked like that would be fine as the pathing on the ND back to LMT disappeared. However, upon arrival at MAVIN, it reappeared and started heading back to LMT again. I had to do another DIR to a point further on past MAVIN and that worked.
It’s just frustratingly borked and it’s further unclear how any of this is ever going to be set right considering the sheer number of SIDs, STARs and Approaches that there are for all the airports that utilize them.
Why even write this up? Will it even be addressed? or is this another one of those “Working Title is fixing all the FMSs and then ATC” tasks with no end date in sight?
I think it’ll get fixed, it just might take a while.
The fix is to be able to specify the STAR entry in the World Map, so we don’t see OCITY3.28L but LMT.OCITY3.28L instead (so when the entry transition isn’t default it acknowledges it). This might have just been the case that they assumed it would be simpler than real life is (some STARs just have the single entry etc). It’s basically not finished as a feature.
One other workaround to try for now is to look at the weather at the destination (from the world map METAR) and then put in your arrival and approach in yourself rather than leave it automatic. The ATC then tends to respect that and causes less surprises. Obviously not good if the weather changes on a long flight though. For where the A320 changes the flight plan automatically like that, it might also be worth putting the autopilot into a set heading mode before accepting the approach as well, otherwise you might lurch around randomly.
In terms of IFR, the biggest ATC bugs for me are (1) this Arrival/Approach bug, (2) the lack of vectoring (just because that happens a lot more in real life) and (3) how there is a lack of airport operations info in the sim, as it means often the weather/time/live traffic is all out of sync with each other and reality. Usually airports have various rules on what runways to use and when (noise, tolerances of crosswinds, size of departure etc), and MSFS just has a very simple ‘which way the winds blows’ arrival rule that sort of ruins a lot of what it does well.
Pilot2ATC and VATSIM on the PC have also sort of took the pressure off of Microsobo having to fix a lot of this I think, as a lot of experienced simmers just go with the ‘ATC is bust, I don’t use it’ so it sort of ends up as a self-fulfilling prophecy with a lack of good bug reports or urgency. While Pilot2ATC is complex and works ok, I miss hearing proper other traffic comms, and for VATSIM is really depends on if controllers are around or not (or if I feel like talking into a mic).
Hopefully posts like yours helps raise awareness it’s worth fixing up ATC.
This makes me insane at KSFO where an assigned approach for RWY 01L or 01R is exceptionally rare, yet the sim behaves like that is SOP and assigns it all the time.
As an Xbox-based pilot, these aren’t options for me. I am fully aware and fully accept the limitations of the Xbox platform and what it will and will not be able to do, so having the base ATC (for now) working is pretty important to me.
