ATC driving me nuts! Help please.

[Fortiesboy 1]

Hello - I mainly fly in UK, domestic flights etc. When using IFR I find that sometimes the ATC keep moving me from one ATC to another and back again to the first one; then repeat this time and again.If i was a real pilot i'd soon ask them what the hell they are playing at :)May i ask please, - Is there some way of stopping this happening, ( whilst still using ATC, of course:))Is it to do with the flight levels one selects in "Route", perhaps? TIA

[shermank 170]

Hello - I mainly fly in UK, domestic flights etc. When using IFR I find that sometimes the ATC keep moving me from one ATC to another and back again to the first one; then repeat this time and again.If i was a real pilot i'd soon ask them what the hell they are playing at :)May i ask please, - Is there some way of stopping this happening, ( whilst still using ATC, of course:))Is it to do with the flight levels one selects in "Route", perhaps? TIA

try the payware radar contact....it's well worth the money....http://www.jdtllc.com/there' a forum here for more informationsherm

[Guest ziporama]

Hello - I mainly fly in UK, domestic flights etc. When using IFR I find that sometimes the ATC keep moving me from one ATC to another and back again to the first one; then repeat this time and again.If i was a real pilot i'd soon ask them what the hell they are playing at :)May i ask please, - Is there some way of stopping this happening, ( whilst still using ATC, of course:))Is it to do with the flight levels one selects in "Route", perhaps? TIA

Hello,For the UK, another option to Radar Contact to consider is online ATC such as VATSIM and IVAO, as real as it gets, with real people behind the scenes, which avoids all the built-in ATC nonsense, and the online services are free.Etienne

[Guest jshyluk]

It sounds like you are flying along a boundary between two ATC zones. If you can avoid doing that, you won't get as many frequency flips. If not, then getting flipped 20 or 30 times is not unusual, and it's really aggravating. In the end, you can either disregard the ATC, or find a third-party upgrade. If you disregard ATC, you can either just shut the radio off, you can go off IFR and then file an IFR plan just before approach phase (don't let the sim place the aircraft at the starting airport!), or after a flip, you can set the new freq, but don't check in. None of those schemes is very kosher, but niether is getting flipped around by ATC.Jeff ShylukSenior Staff ReviewerAVSIM

[Chock 17,769]

As Jeff points out, you are probably crossing between various centres. The way to check that is to open the default FS GPS with all the details turned on and see if you cross blue lines frequently, you might need to zoom in a bit to see them on the GPS screen, these represent centre boundaries and airport control zones etc. Avoiding crossing these can reduce handoffs, but there are a few other things you can try, in order to minimise ATC bothering you too much, although some are not particularly pertinent to real airspace in the UK and how it is handled, but worth a shot to avoid annoyance. I've made plenty of flights in the UK for real where where I didn't even have a radio switched on, and those were perfectly legal flights, so simply switching the radio off is not always totally unrealistic for UK flying, but not really very realistic for a cross country trip, nor very good as far as bad habits are concerned if you fly in the real world! (skip to the bottom if you just want the suggestions by the way):Since the UK is somewhat cramped, there are a number of different airports in close proximity to one another, but you would only be handed off to them if you were below a certain altitude in the UK (i.e typically the local transition altitude). In the US and most everywhere else in North America, the transition altitude is at 18,000 feet, which is of course where you switch to the standard barometric pressure, but it is also where you are considered out of an ATC zone for an airport in FS's somewhat simplified ATC, and the ATC in FS tends to use North American transition rules for every country, often with a staggering lack of realism. For example, you'll still be cleared in feet levels over Russia, whereas you'd really get clearances in metres, and there is no oceanic clearance at Shanwick and Gander either, nor any purple airspace rulings for the UK - fly in one of those for real and you'll find a Eurofighter Typhoon on your wingtip pretty sharpish. In reality Class A airspace goes right up to 60,000 feet from 18,000, but again FS ATC simplifies this, so you can usually fly right over an airport at high level and not get handed off to its approach frequency, whereas in class A airspace for real, you probably would have to do so.In the UK, transition altitudes can be as low as just a few thousand feet, but that's also where you are outside of an airport's controlled airspace in many cases, but naturally, since FS uses US ATC rules, you'll usually be treated as at transition altitude only when you hit 18,000. Of course there are really classes A through to G when defining airspace, and they don't all need the same level of radio contact when crossing them at altitudes above the transition level, but IFR flights need to obtain clearance for all such transitions and that's another thing the FS ATC simplifies, where you usually only have to ask for permission to transition class B airspace.With all this in mind, you can do the following; fly VFR and treat it as Special VFR if you are in IMC, which means you can navigate wherever the hell you like and ATC will rarely bother you, but then they often won't let you land without opening an IFR plan if the airport is in IMC. Or fly IFR and cancel the plan after take-off, which still gives you the plan in your GPS and your FMC, but then ATC does not bother you so much, or, fly higher than 18,000 feet and try to avoid ATC centre borders, which again cuts down on the times ATC bothers you. All of those would mean less ATC handoffs, but again as Jeff points out, some of that is hardly 'as real as it gets'.If you don't like the idea of any of those, Vox ATC handles UK airspace rules fairly well, and is much improved just recently, so that's worth a try too.Al

[Guest byoungblood]

FSX doesn't know how to handle a "point out" to another sector, like what would occur in the real world when an airplane may cut across a small corner of a sector. Instead of a controller handing an aircraft off to the very next sector, they will call the sector on a land line, and "point out" the aircraft to that sector and ask for permission to use that bit of airspace without having to have the aircraft actually talk to that controller. When flying IFR, the best way to avoid this in FSX is to stay on established airways. They are laid out to allow aircraft to move fluidly from one sector to another without cutting corners.

[Fortiesboy 1]

Thanks very much chaps for your replies - there is much there to consider, and i thank you particularly because the replies were quite comprehensive.My decision will have to take into account how deep i want to get into this ATC stuff, in view of time constraints and a primary interest in combat stuff ( bloodthirsty type -lol). Also, I don't fly online.It's nice to know that there is so much help out there ready to be given.Cheers