Now if you're using something like the GNS530 mod then activating the approach is much trickier. You have to actually activate the approach in the PROC page.

On most flight plans created in the World map the plane with the GNS 530 mod will fly the flight plan to the airport without the approach activated. You have to make a choice when to activate the approach in the PROC page. You can decide somewhere along your last leg towards the airport to activate the approach and then the plane will divert to the IAF. Doing this means you have to pick a spot yourself to activate the approach where you want it to deviate from the flight plan to the airport itself and head towards the approach. Otherwise, during flight-planning in the world map you can add in waypoints manually to the IAF as part of the flight plan.

Edited April 4, 20215 yr by Phantoms

22 hours ago, Phantoms said:

You have to make a choice when to activate the approach in the PROC page. You can decide somewhere along your last leg towards the airport to activate the approach and then the plane will divert to the IAF. Doing this means you have to pick a spot yourself to activate the approach where you want it to deviate from the flight plan to the airport itself and head towards the approach.

Only it does not behave that way in the flawed MSFS scheme of GPS.  Instead the MSFS GPS, in its own unique practice, recognizes the initial fix in the approach to be the final waypoint before the IAF.  In the case of the example the original poster used, RNAV 23L arrival into Auckland, the practice of the MSFS GPS would be to use TEVUC as the first approach fix in my annotated example below instead of the IAF of EMRAG.  So activating the approach after TEVUC causes the GPS and autopilot to turn the aircraft back to TEVUC.  This is not how the Garmin GPSs work in the real world.

I have not made this navigating mistake recently, and in fact am back to flying my IFR flights in FSX SE where this all behaves correctly.  What exacerbated the MSFS flaw at least in the first months after release, without a modded GPS, was(is?) that the MSFS GPS/AP would not only turn you back to TEVUC as in this example, but incredibly would continue flying you in reverse along your flight plan waypoints, one-by-one, until you went into the PROC page and again activated the approach.

We badly need the MSFS SDK opened up to established 3rd party GPS developers like Reality XP so that we can receive legitimate GPS/AP behavior.  The mods are very welcome, but its like sticking carrots into holes in a leaking dike.  That is not the same as creating a solid dike that has full integrity.

 

Edited April 5, 20215 yr by fppilot