As with many pilots, I’ve been having some challenges. Without official documentation telling users the correct usage, i can’t tell if the problem is ‘early access’ or lack of understanding what BATC expects of pilots. Thanks to everyone here who are providing answers and clues to making it work. The YouTube videos are somewhat helpful but with frequent coding updates, content from last week may be outdated. And few rarely give specifics such as altitude constraints or why ATC stops responding. And I really dislike Discord. It’s like 1000 people in a room all talking at the same time. This forum has been the most help. 

BATC really needs to have a manual some day. Or a generous community willing to document the finer details. 
 

1 hour ago, Danno said:

why ATC stops responding

Sorry if I'm the only one, but I still haven't understood what I should do, when BATC stops talking when I'm on a STAR. Should I then just descend at my discretion (which is rather unrealistic) and call "establish on approach" when intercepting the ILS or what is the solution here?

 

10 minutes ago, carlito777 said:

Sorry if I'm the only one, but I still haven't understood what I should do, when BATC stops talking when I'm on a STAR. Should I then just descend at my discretion (which is rather unrealistic) and call "establish on approach" when intercepting the ILS or what is the solution here?

 

Indeed. It seems from the discord that there is a lack of understanding how STAR's work outside of the U.S. on the developers side.

In the U.S. they will tell you to descend via the STAR, in the rest of the world ATC will give you their own descend profile to prepare you for vectoring if traffic permits. So not only will you not fly the STAR completely most of the time, they will also very often descend you much earlier than what crossing restrictions on any published procedures might show.

6 minutes ago, Farlis said:

Indeed. It seems from the discord that there is a lack of understanding how STAR's work outside of the U.S. on the developers side.

Actually, the developer knows absolutely nothing about ATC. And I mean absolutely NOTHING. He said so himself btw. At least, when he started out on this journey. 😉 By now he does know a lot more but it all had to be told by him by volunteering real world ATC'ers. Unfortunately most of them were FAA: IIRC there only were two ICAO guys on the beta and one of them was Vatsim only. During the entire beta ICAO always lagged (quite) a bit behind FAA. Anyway, it's of course not ideal that an ATC addon dev doesn't have any knowledge about ATC himself. I remember how much time it took to make it clear how transitions worked... it seriously took a few weeks before it finally dawned...

24 minutes ago, carlito777 said:

Sorry if I'm the only one, but I still haven't understood what I should do, when BATC stops talking when I'm on a STAR. Should I then just descend at my discretion (which is rather unrealistic) and call "establish on approach" when intercepting the ILS or what is the solution here?

 

You are not the only one. Apparently the new option to say 'established' might solve this but I have yet to try it myself. But apart from that this could mean that you are without any ATC for a long time (if the error start during the STAR already). Up to now I usually solved this by restarting BATC until ATC made some sense of it all again.

I think the program uses scenery data for SID/STAR. Which with some freeware sceneries can yield amusing results. With the update last night, it now gives me an appropriate runway out of Burlington, VT, but the SID doesn't even exist. The dev didn't at least say requesting runways is on the roadmap.

I have no regrets on my purchase, but I think it works best with flying between major airports.

The EA is very apparent from time to time.

Flew to Heraklion and had multiple snags. The first one was that ATC cleared me for an arrival and approach on to 27 (which was correct at the time for real world ops despite a relatively high tailwind). However ATIS informed that 09 was active. Which ATC completely ignored. Consistency? Not so much.

 

Then when I was switched over to tower using auto tuning and auto repsonse, I ended up on approach again, was given the same clearance to the RNP again and never issued a clearance to land (since that is towers job, which I wasn't switched to).

2 hours ago, Farlis said:

It seems from the discord that there is a lack of understanding how STAR's work outside of the U.S. on the developers side.

Absolutely, agree wholeheartedly. And it's not just that, but many, many non-US procedures, ways of doing things etc. There are a lot of things to like when it all works out, but for the time being I'll refrain from using it.

Please note that I state the above with 45 year's experience as a controller.

I really wanted to like BATC and, while I realize it's in EA and they have done great work, I tried SI and can't go back. Yes, for now, it costs more. But, that will change and is the only area (for me) where BATC beats SI. It's great that we have both of  great options available.

10 minutes ago, ricka47 said:

I really wanted to like BATC and, while I realize it's in EA and they have done great work, I tried SI and can't go back. Yes, for now, it costs more. But, that will change and is the only area (for me) where BATC beats SI. It's great that we have both of  great options available.

Competition is great. And that's the best thing about MSFS, is that we have so much choice because of the sheer amount of competition.  I own BeyondATC myself, but I may be enticed to try SayIntentions.AI in the future, if SayIntentions improves much further, and the price of it comes down (and I believe the price is expected to lower a bit, with the OpenAI lowering their API costs, as announced by the head of SayIntentions in his Youtube video).

Edited May 16, 20242 yr by abrams_tank

I am with the camp who say they keep coming back to BATC. Despite any shortcoming, I am really enjoying it.  I even laugh once in a while (“Four Papa Bravo… you are nowhere near two-three. Why in the world are you asking for take off clearance”).

I had my first flawless flight today although it was into an untowered airport. Maybe that was why. However, the landing was a bit anti-climatic… we are just told frequency change approved once we indicate established on the ILS. I dutifully tuned into unicom and announced my position even though I’m just talking to myself at that point. 

 

 

2 hours ago, SierraDelta said:

Please note that I state the above with 45 year's experience as a controller.

You should become a member of their team: they like to have real world controllers, specially ICAO, I can imagine!

Now since you are here... 😉 There is a debate going on that if ATC (ICAO) tells you to fly to a certain altitude while you are flying a SID or STAR, should you fly directly to the assigned altitude or should you keep all published constraints on the way there? Some say you should keep all constraints while others say you can ignore any constraint. Specially interested how this is in ICAO land.

For instance: you are climbing on a SID passing 2000 ft and ATC tells you to climb to FL180 and there is an AT 4000 ft constrant ahead: what's the official real world thing to do?

Edited May 16, 20242 yr by tup61

11 hours ago, tup61 said:

Now let's see how I think about all this tomorrow... LOL!!!

So, well, okay... BATC saved the day! LOL

After starting MSFS I noticed there was a new AIRAC available. I decided to ignore it. While I was flying to EIDW I noticed the expected chart (from SB) wasn't available in my G3000. Thinking it was because of the new AIRAC I did a bold thing: I quit MSFS, installed the new AIRAC, started MSFS again and positioned myself as best as I could near the spot I left the sim.

After quickly setting everything up (handy pause option!) I discovered the expected STAR still wasn't in my G3000...

In the meantime I had restarted BATC which picked me up at the right spot. After a while it assigned a STAR that actually was in the G3000, however not with the correct runway. I loaded the STAR with the wrong runway anyway but later on I also loaded the correct approach that BATC assigned (which actually was available). After a while BATC started to vector me and... it got me all the way down to EIDW!!!

Great job, BATC! 😉 

Ja, ja, Jantje lacht, Jantje huilt, zoals ze bij ons zeggen, haha!

Edited May 16, 20242 yr by tup61

6 hours ago, carlito777 said:

Sorry if I'm the only one, but I still haven't understood what I should do, when BATC stops talking when I'm on a STAR. Should I then just descend at my discretion (which is rather unrealistic) and call "establish on approach" when intercepting the ILS or what is the solution here?

 

Do you mean you get told to like descent to FL 150 via the STAR and then at FL150 it says nothing anymore? Or doesn't it give you descents at all? Never had that problem in all of my flights, so I can't really relate and am surprised.
Or are you flying in the US? In the US you're told to "descent via the STAR" only and that means "descent to the lowest altitude on the last point of your STAR". So you would indeed keep descending on your own (since you are cleared to descent via the STAR's altitudes). This is US only, though.

O, btw, I used the new option Established on the approach (or something like that) this evening but all ATC did was say Affirmative. It didn't had me over to tower or anything. Seems like a rather useless option...?

I really like where BATC is heading, but am having one issue that I'm hoping somebody here has already seen/fixed. BTW, I haven't turned a prop in about 4 days so I may be missing an update or two...

Have any of you GA fliers noticed a problem with BATC not getting your registration correct. I normally fly as C-GTSM, and BATC (so far) insists on trying to convert it to an airline callsign like Tansvir SM or something like that - always an airline name/VA name followed correctly by SM. Just wondering if I've missed a setting

 

Thanks in advance!