Gentlemen (and Ladies)Try this one! Flying from EHAM to KSFO with an alternate of KOAK, about 10:50 hr flight time. About 8 hrs into the flight and all is well, I'm not flying with ATC so I've set up the approach and landing to KSFO, a GOLDEN GATE FIVE with my own vectors to an ILS on RWY 28L. At this point bed time has arrived so with everything set (including pause at TOD) I toddle of to bed. Up early to get the flight underway I find that pause at TOD has worked as advertised. However, the FMC hasn't, my flight plan, STAR and ILS approach to KSFO has disappeared and I'm heading straight for KOAK. Oh dear what a muddle and despite my best efforts I was unable to recover the original plan. I then tried to set up an approach to KOAK; to cut along story short I ended up in a complete bu**ers muddle and had to abandon the whole thing. This is not the first the FMC has done it's own thing, the other day on the way in to KJFK it suddenly inserted a 2000 ft step climb 2 miles before TOD. I managed to sort that one out and got down OK. So what am I doing wrong? I'm working my way through the manual but I've not read anything that would have got me out of my KSFO situation.RgdsSteve HLincoln UK

And that's why I always do short (max 350 nm) hops... :( (And also because FSX with the MD-11 tends to get corrupt graphics when I want to access the menu or switch to Vista after an hour or so of flying,.. requiring me to save the flight and restart it all, after which I always end up with cabin altitude alerts... very crappy. But I don't really care because I do like those short hops!)

The TOD pause never stops to amaze me with it's ability to work 95% of the time. This is the first squawk that had the sim paused but the MCDU progressed. Normally, you can't even change screens on the MCDU in pause, it is just a black screen until the machinery is allowed to move again.