19 minutes ago, cmpbellsjc said:

I think the reasons a lot of sim only pilots feel certain approaches are hard to hand fly is because flying planes in FSX/P3D/XP is harder than in real life. 

I’ve only got around 60 hours of real flight time and in nothing larger than a C172, but I can attest that flying (controlling) a real plane is far easier in real life than in the desk top sim since you can feel what’s happening and have much better visibility and awareness. Even flying certain maneuvers in a sim C172 is hard than it is in real life.

I talked to a Gol pilot in Brasil once who flies regularly into Santos Dumont and flies the well known curved approach over the mountain base, turning over Flamingo beach near Suger Loaf and then short final to runway. In the sim it’s medium hard to difficult to do well, but the pilot I spoke to said there’s really nothing hard about it at all. 

I think a lot of people who have never actually flown an airplane and just flown sims would be surprised how much easier real work flying is from a control standpoint.

Very well said, and fully agree. Even the SIMs we use at my airline, in my opinion, are nothing compared to flying the real thing.

2 hours ago, busdriver said:

Very well said, and fully agree. Even the SIMs we use at my airline, in my opinion, are nothing compared to flying the real thing.

Whenever nonaviation people talk to me about flying and how it must be so difficult, I always tell them that flying the plane is the easy part, learning the rules, regulations, navigation, and planes systems are the more difficult aspect of it. Most anyone can reasonably handle the flying part of it after 10 hours or less behind the yoke.

You could have scenery issues if you do not see a lot of traffic. The first thing: do you have duplicate afcads? At the office and off hand I forgot, but Vector might have a file for this airport that can conflict if you have scenery. Also if you have scenery and also the addon MyTraffic they supply an afcad that must be disabled.

I like to manually add traffic and alpha india group have created a traffic program that really helps. Many addon traffic programs only create an ai aircraft 15 minutes before departure and remove 15 minutes after arrival. Creating custom AI traffic your models are going to be sitting at the airport in a more realistic fashion.

Could the issue also have to do with any kind of AI limits you are using?  I have seen issues like this with .bgl based traffic in areas where there are several large airports.  You might have AI loaded at KDCA as well limiting what shows at KIAD.  I have seen this happen at KBWI where there are zero AI because of nearby KDCA/KIAD and AI had spawned at those airports while approaching.  I generally have my AI limited to 100 which will have an effect on this.  FSUIPC has some settings to adjust AI aircraft spawning. 

14 hours ago, Boeing or not going said:

Many addon traffic programs only create an ai aircraft 15 minutes before departure and remove 15 minutes after arrival

There is no way that I would accept that. If an aircraft is supposed to be at an airport for 24 hours or more, then I want to see it sitting there for all of that time!!

Edited July 18, 20196 yr by Christopher Low

2 hours ago, Christopher Low said:

There is no way that I would accept that. If an aircraft is supposed to be at an airport for 24 hours or more, then I want to see it sitting there for all of that time!!

When I talked years ago to Ultimate Traffic developers they said for performance reasons they spawn aircraft close to departure and make it disappear shortly after arrival.

5 hours ago, Flic1 said:

Could the issue also have to do with any kind of AI limits you are using?  I have seen issues like this with .bgl based traffic in areas where there are several large airports.  You might have AI loaded at KDCA as well limiting what shows at KIAD.  I have seen this happen at KBWI where there are zero AI because of nearby KDCA/KIAD and AI had spawned at those airports while approaching.  I generally have my AI limited to 100 which will have an effect on this.  FSUIPC has some settings to adjust AI aircraft spawning. 

This could definitely be part of it, I run into the same issue when flying into any of the three NYC airports.  I use FSUIPC to limit traffic.  Need to fiddle with settings more.

Generally though I’ve run into times where IAD was so empty I was convinced I had screwed something up with my AI Traffic.  It seems like IAD has much more extreme peaks/valleys of traffic than other airports oriented around connection banks.

5 hours ago, Christopher Low said:

There is no way that I would accept that. If an aircraft is supposed to be at an airport for 24 hours or more, then I want to see it sitting there for all of that time!!

That’s even more unrealistic. Your airports would end up overcrowded. Any aircraft that’s on the ground for more than a few hours in the real world would be parked to a remote stand. In P3D, since this isn’t simulated, the aircraft takes up gate space for that whole time, leading to unrealistically overcrowded airports. Only in the middle of the night do you get long layovers staying at the gate.

Plus, at most airports these remote stands are nowhere near the terminal. at KIAD, United parks their RONs out to the South near the control tower or to the North by their maintenance hangar by the 19C threshold. At SFO, United parks their planes out at the Maintenance Center or SuperBay..the list goes on. Why would I want to waste precious FPS on planes that aren’t even going to be in my field of view anyway? 

I like when it’s set to delete when there’s like 4-5 hours between flights. I’m not sure if there’s a utility to do this, but it would be awesome.

4 hours ago, Boeing or not going said:

When I talked years ago to Ultimate Traffic developers they said for performance reasons they spawn aircraft close to departure and make it disappear shortly after arrival.

I remember buying ultimate traffic years ago and ended up asking for a refund for that very reason, to me it missed half the point of AI traffic.  Different philosophy I guess.

50 minutes ago, DChockey08 said:

That’s even more unrealistic. Your airports would end up overcrowded. Any aircraft that’s on the ground for more than a few hours in the real world would be parked to a remote stand. In P3D, since this isn’t simulated, the aircraft takes up gate space for that whole time, leading to unrealistically overcrowded airports. Only in the middle of the night do you get long layovers staying at the gate.

Plus, at most airports these remote stands are nowhere near the terminal. at KIAD, United parks their RONs out to the South near the control tower or to the North by their maintenance hangar by the 19C threshold. At SFO, United parks their planes out at the Maintenance Center or SuperBay..the list goes on. Why would I want to waste precious FPS on planes that aren’t even going to be in my field of view anyway? 

I like when it’s set to delete when there’s like 4-5 hours between flights. I’m not sure if there’s a utility to do this, but it would be awesome.

I add remote parking to my afcads for any spillover aircraft in the remote areas, maintenance parking and elsewhere. I do not have the computer capable of having AI traffic in P3D yet but I did this in fsx and it worked.

On 7/17/2019 at 6:24 PM, Boeing or not going said:

Many addon traffic programs only create an ai aircraft 15 minutes before departure and remove 15 minutes after arrival. 

It’s not many, it’s only UTL since they are the only ones who inject traffic vs bgl method. All the bgl based traffic addons use the 24 hour schedules.

54 minutes ago, cmpbellsjc said:

All the bgl based traffic addons use the 24 hour schedules.

I know what you mean, but to be clearer for those that don't know, most use a 7 day week (some even use an 8-week rotation now). It's only the weaker one (TG, this is you) that uses a basic 24 hour schedule.

3 hours ago, Dave_YVR said:

I know what you mean, but to be clearer for those that don't know, most use a 7 day week (some even use an 8-week rotation now). It's only the weaker one (TG, this is you) that uses a basic 24 hour schedule.

Yeah, I should have said 7 day week schedule. I was thinking 24/7.

12 hours ago, DChockey08 said:

That’s even more unrealistic. Your airports would end up overcrowded. Any aircraft that’s on the ground for more than a few hours in the real world would be parked to a remote stand. In P3D, since this isn’t simulated, the aircraft takes up gate space for that whole time, leading to unrealistically overcrowded airports. Only in the middle of the night do you get long layovers staying at the gate.

I doubt that my schedules include more than a handful of situations like this, so I do not have a problem with it. I also do not mind if one or two arrivals are directed to remote stands rather than gates if the airport is extremely busy. As long as they have somewhere to park, I am happy.

In my experience most situations would be overnight, when planes are more likely left at gates.  If I’m flying a very late night flight, I want to see other AI traffic at the airport when I’m taxiing in at 2am.

Edited July 19, 20196 yr by regis9