Flying with RTA

[MDFlier 2,031]

I love flying with RTA active. To me, it really adds another layer to the overall flight experience. When you're cruising along into a headwind and you look down at the FMC and see "Late 03:00", it adds a level of stress to the flight. It's also very cool to take off and see it showing that I'm a minute late and then catching a tailwind and seeing it go back to saying "On Time".

I'm still playing around with how to select the proper waypoint and time to input into the FMC during the preflight. If there are any RW pilots reading this, how do you guys (and gals) do it? If I subtract the 8 minutes planned taxi in time from the arrival time and use that time with the runway as the RTA waypoint, everything goes great right up until the end of the SID. At that point, the FMC seems to think that you're on final immediately as soon as the SID ends leaving no time padding for the transition from the SID to final. If there's a vector or a procedure turn at the end of the SID I'm a minute or two late when the wheels touch. It seems like there should be some time for maneuvering onto final built into the RTA calculations. So I guess the pilot is responsible for making it work out right. What is the proper method of selecting the time and waypoint to input on the RTA progress page during CDU preflight? There must be a super secret pilot trick that none of us know about to easily determine what to input. You know, the "subtract 8 minutes from the gate arrival time and divide that by 12 and then multiply the result by pi to get the arrival time at the runway" sort of rule.

Edited December 14, 2020 by MDFlier