Arrival airport inserted before approach

[bill321 0]

Hi

I purchased pilot2atc for use with x-plane 11. When I file my flight plan and then load it into the G1000 gps in x-plane, it inserts the destination airport as a waypoint before the first approach waypoint. If I fly this plan, the gps takes me to the airport and then back to the first approach waypoint. Is this expected behavior -- or am I doing something wrong?

Bill

[PeterS72 2]

If I may guess, you did not activate the approach.You need to do that manually via "Proc" button, "Activate approach". If you don't do that, the autopilot will just ignore the approach and fly your regular waypoints, which usually end in the destination airport. This is not related to Pilot2Atc.

I usually activate the approach when I am at the end of the SID (or own judgement when not using a SID) and ATC has given me clearance for the approach. Not sure if that is real life procedure, though. :)

[bill321 0]

Thanks -- that is probably it.

Bill

[PeterS72 2]

11 hours ago, PeterS72 said:

end of the SID

Ehem, end of the STAR of course. How embarassing. 🙂

[Sidney Schwartz 11]

On 11/2/2020 at 1:01 AM, PeterS72 said:

If I may guess, you did not activate the approach.You need to do that manually via "Proc" button, "Activate approach".

That seems to be a peculiarity of the G1000...none of the other GPS or FMC's I've seen require it. It's a nuisance, IMO. In any case, I always check the flight plan waypoints in the GPS/FMC with the waypoints in P2A...usually they'll be the same, but sometimes there are discrepancies that can cause P2A to think you're off course.

[PeterS72 2]

Both X-Plane G530 and G430 also require to activate an approach. Not so with the airliner FMS, though unsure about the vanilla FMS, have not used that in a while (flying Zibo when flying airliners). While I have no knowledge about real-world procedures, I think it makes sense. You probably don't want to have the autopilot start the approach before you get clearance. Not sure what happens if you are at the end of the STAR and got no clearance for approach yet. Hold? Ask ATC? Does that ever happen?

Apart from that, having the pre-set flight plan with SID, STAR and Approach before even turning on your plane and then being able to fly it to the letter without any future change is probably somewhat unrealistic. As I understand it, you would only insert your flight plan without SID/STAR/Approach and then enter them into the GPS/FMC once you received them from ATC. Pilot2ATC would also support this, there are lots of options for this in the flight plan section, though I have not experimented with all of them yet. If you actually file SID/STARs in a flight plan seems to differ greatly, I've read contradicting information about this depending if you ask an U.S. or European pilot, even within Europe there are differences. Pilot2ATC at least seems to stick to the originally assigned procedures. While there are some randomized options for this, these seem to apply when originally filing the flight plan. It may be possible you get a different STAR/Approach enroute depending on weather changes, but flying mostly short / medium flights I have so far not encountered this.

So far I have not yet encountered any deviation between GPS/FMS route and Pilot2ATC route, even when not loading the autogenerated Pilot2ATC flight plan into the GPS but e.g. the one from SimBrief and insert the procedures as I receive them. Of course you need the same AIRAC cycle in all applications.