How do you taxi at large airports?

[Kenjiro75 59]

If you start your flight an a large airport and get a clearance including many taxiways to the runway, do you need to write them down and use charts to navigate? Is there a taxi line displayed? How is it done in MSFS?

[Will Fly For Cheese 1,710]

Saw in one of the vids that 'Progressive Taxi' is available which will give you blue arrows on the taxiways to follow like the old yellow arrows in FSX.

[Andreas Stangenes 1,628]

If you use the default atc system the taxi route is listed there for you as a reference. Havent seen any dynamic guidance system in the videos so far (ie yellow glowy line that guides you). Havnt seen any mention of a follow me car feature. 

[badderjet 181]

On airports you're familiar with you'd have an idea of the most probable route. If it's your first time you can write the clearance down of course, and if you have no paper at hand you can just use the CDU s/p (if you have one). Very often you won't even get the entire clearance up to the holding point though, especially at huge airports. You might very well have multiple frequencies to go through along your way, and each one might give you a clearance for the next part ahead of you. There are airports where the tower is like the 4^th or 5^th frequency you talk to on your flight. If you mean specifically MSFS, since they have NavBlue as a partner there might be charts to help. Or maybe not, we don't really know. At least some planes will have AMM stuff built in.

Edited August 5, 2020 by badderjet

[wim123 758]

48 minutes ago, Kenjiro75 said:

If you start your flight an a large airport and get a clearance including many taxiways to the runway, do you need to write them down and use charts to navigate? Is there a taxi line displayed? How is it done in MSFS?

i think you can always do topdown view , zoom out a bit..  see it as an airport chart.

[Tuskin38 6,459]

1 hour ago, Andreas Stangenes said:

Havnt seen any mention of a follow me car feature. 

It’s there, it’s in the difficulty options now, not a toggle in the ATC menu.

[vadriver 247]

1 hour ago, Kenjiro75 said:

do you need to write them down and use charts to navigate?

of course ... but maybe it's on the CPDLC

 

1 hour ago, Kenjiro75 said:

Is there a taxi line displayed?

not unless the airport has "FTG" ........

Edited August 5, 2020 by vadriver

[vadriver 247]

2 hours ago, Kenjiro75 said:

How is it done in MSFS?

it's done in P3D4&5 ......

[SAS443 1,716]

Keep in mind that all generic airports have

• All taxiways can be used in the airport.
• Taxiway names: are procedurally generated
• Taxi signs: allow user to taxi with success to destination
• Taxi signs: Acceptable placement (Procedural)

This means that for any generic airport out of the box,  3rd party EFB or navigraph/navdataPro taxi diagrams are not much help since they wont match MSFS.

 

[Andreas Stangenes 1,628]

55 minutes ago, SAS443 said:

Keep in mind that all generic airports have

• All taxiways can be used in the airport.
• Taxiway names: are procedurally generated
• Taxi signs: allow user to taxi with success to destination
• Taxi signs: Acceptable placement (Procedural)

This means that for any generic airport out of the box,  3rd party EFB or navigraph/navdataPro taxi diagrams are not much help since they wont match MSFS.

 

I bet that real world taxi charts/airport diagrams will help in the sense that you can see on the map what the taxiways and turn offs are called, and you can estimate which is which in sim. 

[Chock 17,769]

45 minutes ago, Andreas Stangenes said:

I bet that real world taxi charts/airport diagrams will help in the sense that you can see on the map what the taxiways and turn offs are called, and you can estimate which is which in sim. 

For many older airports this won't be the case at all since it isn't how the taxiways have been numbered owing to how the the airport has evolved. Lots of the taxiways, runways and terminals at older airports have been added in various expansions over a long periods of time, so the attendant taxiways for the expansions end up getting whatever names/numbers are available.

Sometimes older taxiways are renamed to suit this, but more often than not it's less disruptive to keep all the old names and just add in the new ones for the new bits. This means it is entirely possible that you might have Taxiway Quebec joining up with Taxiway Alpha, instead of it being all nicely alphabetical as you taxi along A, then turn onto B and then to C etc. This is also why you see things like Gate 241 alongside Gate 16 or whatever, as new terminals are built or added to.

Incidentally, when we hear pilots firing the readback for a taxi route issued by ATC and wonder how the hell they can remember it, the answer is, they are actually reading it off the ACARS screen (or equivalent system), because it is usually sent via text as well, so don't feel like you are cheating using that ATC text window, because that is what the pilots are doing a lot of the time too.

Edited August 5, 2020 by Chock

[badderjet 181]

6 hours ago, Chock said:

This means it is entirely possible that you might have Taxiway Quebec joining up with Taxiway Alpha, instead of it being all nicely alphabetical as you taxi along A, then turn onto B and then to C etc.

Plus, at some airports that's not the system at all. They would somehow try to name a 'northern' taxiway N, a 'western' one W and so forth. With tons of variations of course, but they have some very different systems than just going alphabetical sometimes.

[bonchie 2,305]

8 hours ago, SAS443 said:

Keep in mind that all generic airports have

• All taxiways can be used in the airport.
• Taxiway names: are procedurally generated
• Taxi signs: allow user to taxi with success to destination
• Taxi signs: Acceptable placement (Procedural)

This means that for any generic airport out of the box,  3rd party EFB or navigraph/navdataPro taxi diagrams are not much help since they wont match MSFS.

 

That's not necessarily true. My home airports have correct taxiways.

I can't piece together what data they are using, but it's not totally random. My assumption is that they are adding correct taxiways as they make more and more passes over the airport. But the initial naming is coming from something, even if it's just an algorithm that predicts what taxiways would normally be called based on their location to provide a starting point.

Edited August 5, 2020 by bonchie

[Janov 2,383]

7 hours ago, Chock said:

Incidentally, when we hear pilots firing the readback for a taxi route issued by ATC and wonder how the hell they can remember it, the answer is, they are actually reading it off the ACARS screen (or equivalent system), because it is usually sent via text as well

I don´t think there is such a system - yet. We get datalink clearance and CPDLC while enroute, but that does not extend to airport taxi clearances or even terminal vectoring (it is too high latency for that). Frankfurt is experimenting with sending pushback clearances over datalink, also de-icing requests and such.

The truth is that we normaly know which taxiroute to expect, and we also have the airport diagram open where we trace and visualize the clearance while it is transmitted to us.

I often type the letters into the scratchpad of the FMS as well - this not only helps with the readback, but also helps to remember the full clearance when you get to an intersection a few minutes later and don´t remember if you were to hold short or not 😉

Cheers, Jan

 

Edited August 5, 2020 by Janov

[Chock 17,769]

1 minute ago, Janov said:

I don´t think there is such a system - yet. We get datalink clearance and CPDLC while enroute, but that does not extend to airport taxi clearances or even terminal vectoring (it is too high latency for that). Frankfurt is experimenting with sending pushback clearances over datalink, also de-icing requests and such.

I'm going off what I know occurs at work at Manchester EGCC with a few airlines, which do have that capability. Not all of them get that stuff of course, but some do.

But as you say, most people who get familiar with the airport tend to know the routes anyway and it's only when there's some maintenance on a taxiway or if someone's taken a wrong turning or whatever that things tend to alter for how you get to and from the runway to a particular stand, and in any case, most airlines use the same stands most of the time to the point that if someone told me to go to, for example, the British Airways Dornier 328 at EGCC, I know it'd either be on stand 51 or 67, or one very near there and if something was pushing off 22 it'd be backing a long way up Delta and so on.

Nevertheless, we are always careful to have the aerodrome map on hand to check these things because they can change quite often at short notice and it is your responsibility to be au fait with the latest stuff. In the tugs, we  have a book which lists the exact pushback procedure off each stand for either a jet or a turboprop (sometimes different for each type). Generally speaking a standard push is usually back off the stand and a turn to face the aeroplane toward the taxiways ending up with the nosewheel in line with the centreline of the next stand along, but there can be non standard pushes where they'll want the aeroplane somewhere weird or whatever, and we always go to the page with the procedure for the stand we are on and check it, just to be sure even though we know these things like the back of our hands.