Looking good. I echo the points made above and I presume that the various timings and separations can be fine tuned to allow for more expeditious departures?

Hi Captains,

Thanks everyone, these are exactly the kind of comments that are useful at this stag

On the taxiway centreline / hold-short positioning: yes, that part still needs polish. One important distinction though is that the operational source of truth for us is the chart / DFD / procedure side, not the visual scenery itself. The actual physical movement inside the simulator still has to use the airport ground network and scenery data that the sim exposes. If the taxi graph, painted markings, or runway entry geometry are not perfectly aligned in a scenery, that can show up visually in the aircraft placement.

That said, we do not want to hide behind that. The surface executor still needs to become better at validating and refining the final stop position, especially near runway holding points, so that aircraft sit correctly on the taxiway centreline and remain properly behind the hold-short line wherever the data allows it.

On the departure timing comments: yes, that is absolutely tunable, and the current video is intentionally on the conservative side. The goal is not for departures to wait just because an arrival exists somewhere in the picture. The Director should reason about arrival ETA, runway occupancy, predicted vacate time, departure staging and short-final traffic as one shared operational picture.

So yes, more expeditious departures are definitely part of the direction, but only when the timing and separation picture supports it.

I will also review the moment around 2:50 again. Some of the radar presentation and spacing logic is still WIP, and this is exactly why we are sharing these videos early enough to catch those cases.

Voice / phraseology is a separate layer and we will show more of that later. Right now we are mostly focused on proving the operational behaviour underneath it.

Towards the end of the turn onto the runway, the aircraft seem to drift too much.

With respect to the aircraft holding to the left of the taxiway centreline in the video, is this due to the Taxiway nodes in the AFCAD not aligning with the visual scenery centreline or some other issue?

On 6/16/2026 at 3:20 AM, Ianrivaldosmith said:

What's all this talking about cooking? Is this a new young person's saying?

I thought cooking was something you did to make food.

you're out of touch (and so am I LOL) - my kids have an all new language... so many new words - not sure why haha

8 hours ago, cowpatz said:

With respect to the aircraft holding to the left of the taxiway centreline in the video, is this due to the Taxiway nodes in the AFCAD not aligning with the visual scenery centreline or some other issue?

Exactly!

In ACE of ATCs we're following a source-of-truth which actually that's the alignment data coming from DFD files charts and AFCAD data. but sometimes, not every scenery is visually aligned with the real data. That's why they look not aligned but we have an idea, not promising but we may find a solution. We found a way to decode .bgl files and now we're trying to read that data coming from .bgl files and finding the mismatch.

But I believe we will find a solution.

/Anil

10 hours ago, cowpatz said:

With respect to the aircraft holding to the left of the taxiway centreline in the video, is this due to the Taxiway nodes in the AFCAD not aligning with the visual scenery centreline or some other issue?

That is highly probable. Some developers really need to sharpen up with stuff like that. I edited literally thousands of AFD files in FSX and P3D over the years, and some of that was because of misalignment between AI pathways and taxiway centrelines (and AI parking spots for that matter).

6 hours ago, Christopher Low said:

That is highly probable. Some developers really need to sharpen up with stuff like that. I edited literally thousands of AFD files in FSX and P3D over the years, and some of that was because of misalignment between AI pathways and taxiway centrelines (and AI parking spots for that matter).

Hi Christopher,

Exactly. That is one of the things we are seeing as well. ACE is not drawing its own visual taxi lines; it follows the underlying airport taxi graph/path data. So if the taxi nodes/pathways in the airport data are offset from the painted centreline, the aircraft can look offset even while following the sim-side path correctly.

We are adding diagnostics around this so we can distinguish between our own steering/path-following errors and scenery/AFCAD alignment issues. In the long run we may also add scenery-specific correction where it makes sense, but the first step is making sure we are reading the ground network faithfully.

/Anil

It would really need to be aligned with the user's scenery AFCAD (or whatever it's called now in MSFS), however, this has limitations when flying online due to the possibility of different scenery packages available for the same airport. I don't know how you deal with this limitation.