Hi Guys - Real quick question;Assuming i dont what runway ATC will have me land on, how do i know what STAR to program into the FMC? The STARS are selectable in the FMC (installed 0906 Airac).Bear in mind i cannot contact ATC (using the ' button) until im pretty close to the runway and i can see it in the 'Airports Further Away from Me' section.Can someone please help me? Ideally i dont want pages and pages of charts cluttering the place!

Solution: Dont use FS default ATC, use Vatsim/IVAO or Radar Contact :)

If you dial in the atis for the arrival airport in most cases you can get the runways in use from 60 to 90 Nms away.No atis at quite a few airports though so not infallable but at least some help is better than none.If it's default fs then park at the arrival one and you can see which is in use... if using a weather prog you can tell pretty much which one by the prevailing conditions to get an educated guess.Just a shame no acars lol.If online then it shouldn't be a real hassle... at least not as much I guess.Besides most stars are based on an incoming direction rather than a particular runway until you get close.John Ellison

If you dial in the atis for the arrival airport in most cases you can get the runways in use from 60 to 90 Nms away.

This sounds good.Would you mind talking me through doing this? I usually land at heathrow in the 747. How do i know what STAR each runway uses? EGLL has 4 runways, (9R, 9L, 27R, 27L), but like 8 pages of STARS!Thanks all for your help.

How do i know what STAR each runway uses?

Very often there is no direct relationship between runways and STARs. I don't know about Heathrow but most large airports in the US have "expect radar vectors" written on their STARs when you reach the final waypoint. In other words after completing the STAR you must have a human controller guiding you to the final approach course, in such cases it is impossible to program the full path in the FMS all the way to the final approach course. I suspect the situation may be very similar at Heathrow.Of course looking at the direction of arrival at any particular STAR it is possible to deduce which runways would be most conveniently aligned with this direction. In real life you do not "chose" STAR you like - it is given to you by ATC. You can't simulate such flying with the default ATC.

This sounds good.Would you mind talking me through doing this? I usually land at heathrow in the 747. How do i know what STAR each runway uses? EGLL has 4 runways, (9R, 9L, 27R, 27L), but like 8 pages of STARS!Thanks all for your help.

Im not an expert so someone else can chime in here, but not all stars are runway specific, meaning they don't lead you to a particular RW and this looks to be the case at EGLL.*****edit*****What Michal said :(

This sounds good.Would you mind talking me through doing this? I usually land at heathrow in the 747. How do i know what STAR each runway uses? EGLL has 4 runways, (9R, 9L, 27R, 27L), but like 8 pages of STARS!Thanks all for your help.

Heathrow has 4 feeding points (stacks), 2 for southern arrivals: Ockham (SW) and Bigging (SE)2 for northern arrivals: Bovingdon (NW) and Lambourne (NE)Runways 27R and 27L have preferential use (to avoid departing aircraft flying over London city) unless the tailwind component is higher than 5 knots.When rwys 9R and 9L are in use, 9L is always used for arrivals and 9R for departures (a noise avoidance agreement of which I do not remember the name)So, depending on your arriving sector you will be directed to your nearest feeding point via the respective STAR, and from there you will always be radar vectored (for traffic separation) to intercept LOC an GS at 2500 feet and 7.5 ILS DME.

Thanks for all your valuable help, its appreciated.One more point - how do i tune to the ATIS before the airport appears in the default ATC list? Where do i find the frequecy?Can someone give me a step by step guide to tuning and that?Thanks!

The ATIS is printed on all STARs and IAP charts. You can also open the FS map and slew to the airport, drill down and select the airport to display all freqs.

Adrian perhaps a look on this site will helphttp://www.nats-uk.ead-it.com/public/index.php.htmlUse the IAIP at the top to go to the airports page - Afraid I can't say what atis is in use at Heathrow as I use the addon EGLL airport so it might be different than the default one.That site covers the lot basically. As for how to get the atis just tune comm1 to the frequency and swap it over. The default runway is 09L for landing in fsx anyway unless you use weather.If you really want to confuse yourself try sidstars for LFPG or EHAM lol.If it's the US I nearly always look at flightaware.com as I'm hopeless when it asks for which transition to use in the star, mind you I'm just starting to get a little better as to which area to look for a US airport lol.John Ellison