G'day all, I'm a great fan of RC3 (and using it with MyTraffic is even better!) I have discovered that Otto will fly the flight plan well enough not to get a vist by FSDO about 50% of the time...not that I care what vFSDO says anyways....he he. But often during the enroute decent I'll get the call..."Upon reaching 10,000' fly heading xyz". Otto faithfully turns the aircraft to a xyz heading but doesn't decent to 10,000. I must take the controls...fly to 10,000 and then I'll get the call to contact arrival. Arrival will give a new heading and then Otto can resume becuase he's supposed to be at 10,000' anyways at this point. If I don't take the controls...he just keeps flying a heading of xyz at the previous altitude. Has anyone else experienced this. Does it sound like a small bug in the code? Cheers, Mike Lyons

Mike,Let me make a few assumptions here.If you're hearing "Upon reaching 10,000' fly heading xyz" then you've missed your crossing restriction. The preamble to the above is "You've missed your crossing restriction."You need to pay attention to the expect - "Expect to cross 40 miles from xxx at 10,000'/250 knots". Then later you'll be told "Cross 40 miles from xxx at 10,000', 250 knots.". This is after you are told PD to something like 17,000' - "Descend at pilot's discretion, maintain 17,000' (or whatever)".At that point, you need to start your final descent and crossing planning. When given the PD, start down and slow down. When given the expect, you should know where that crossing location is, and plan on being there and then. When you get the "Cross 40 miles from...", you should already be heading down.Watch your speed. As you descend from the PD altitude to the crossing altitude, you need to make sure you slow enough, and are descending fast enough to make that. You will usually have 30 miles to do so from the crossing instruction.Otto has no problems making this, but she can't control the speed. You need to watch and adjust that, as well as adjusting your rate of descent.As for Robin not setting the altitude to 10,000', shouldn't she have already done that with the crossing instruction?Also, if you have Arrival NOTAM checked, then Robin will hand the plane back to you when Center tells you to descend, and you'll get the NOTAM advisory.Fly it again and tell me exactly what is happening from where you get the PD to the "Until reaching 10,000' fly heading.." call. When you are told "Descend at pilot's discretion...", save a dat there.

also, make sure you are resetting your altimeter to the local pressure when you descend through 180 (or whatever your transition level)

Two things:1. Missing the crossing restriction must be the reason I'm getting that 'odd ball' response from ATC to begin with. I let Otto handle all the flying until about 20 miles from the airport. I monitor, but let the 'trusty' copilot handle the flying. Otto often gets me in trouble for missing the crossing restrictions...so I guess that's where the issue lies. As soon as I see an assigned altitude below FL280 I reset the airspeed to maintain 270Kts with a -2000 VVI. But I guess that's not completely adequate.2. The real issue is that I'll get a decent to 14,000. I assume Otto misses the crossing restriction and is later told to turn heading xyz upon reaching 10,000. Otto does the heading change but NEVER attempts to decend to 10,000. My thought is that there might be a sofware bug which drops the altitude change response for Otto out of that specific ATC call. This is the only time it happens, but it happens every time I get that type of call (which must happen following a missed crossing restriction.)Thanks for the input...any more thoughts?ML

Which aircraft and panel are you flying?

All default FS2002 Pro panels. 737 and 777.ml

Save the flight (from Radar Contact) when you get the initial descent clearance. Zip up:RCv30saved(name).datFS2002flightsmyflts(name).fltFS2002flightsmyflts(name).wxthe plan (pln) and rc3 filesand send it to me with the description of the problem as you have it from the start of this thread.