lo, all was going fine on Swissair 238 until when 12 NM from Eleftherios Venizelos International in Athens i opened the IFR flight plan. Whilst entering the approach and on something of a downind leg i keep getting repeatedly instructed by ATC to 'expedite my climb to 19 000'! 19 000, 19 000!!!!! im about to start my final APP now at 18 Nm from Visual 3L, this HAS to be a bug, surely?! plzzz help. at the moment the only way to stop the controller saying this is to keep him talking about other things by requesting different approaches constantly. im on the verge of loosing my IFR Service rite now, some1 do something!

You can't leave your assigned altitude without clearance from ATC. They'll hound you to go back no matter what you do. Your only alternative is to cancel IFR and do a VFR approach or ascend to FL19 and then start your descent as per ATC instructions. Yeah, it sucks, but that's the ATC engine. It's one of the things we can look forward to improving in the next FS version.billg

Get some real arrival charts for Eleftherios Venizelos and fly the IFR approach as described in the charts on your own. Maybe not as comfortable as being directed by ATC but easier on the nerves :D.Christianhttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v232/chrismo/sigsky.jpgVacation: wasted time between 2 flights!

No. Just fly on. They'll hand you off to the next controller who will wake up and give you your vectors for approach. That's what I always do and it works ok.

I've seen that before. The worst though is if you land after flying an IFR plan then load a new one or veer too far off course in the beginning, they sometimes tell you to go to a heading that leads to you nowhere. Even being handed off to the next center, they constantly bug you to "turn right heading XXX" not even a proceed on course. This happened after I landed in Las Vegas. Filed a new plan to phoenix, and after takeoff they were telling me to go to a heading right back to san francisco where I started!! I found out that if I use the ATC window to open a "new" plan and just use the same one, it kicks it back into reality.Very annoying though.

yupz, also what i noticed is how when i opened the flight plan at 25 NM from El Ven my next waypoint was Geneva! disaster! & even more comical was how the distance from my 'next' waypoint was something like 918.4 lol

If you're using the default FS Flight Planner, check the altitude that you have in there. I have to do that a lot of times when I create the plan. I have to make sure that I set the altitude to my current altitude (or lower).