Dear Asobo, As the title indicate, I would like to have the possibility to
change the ATC Flight plan cruising altitude at runtime. Currently, we are
able to create a new plan or edit the flight plan, add way points, remove way
points, change the origin, change the destination, approach, departure,
runways, etc. but a very crucial part of the FP remains always “read only”
which is the cruising altitude. This has severe consequences for the ATC
system, which is unable to know the final climb altitude for the user, causing
flight plans where despite the destination being very far away, ATC will ask
the user to climb to wrong cruising levels and the user needs to keep asking
ATC for new altitudes which is unrealistic. With the introduction of new
avionics and some of them now configured as default for MSFS (Such as, WT
G1000, WT G3000, etc.) users are able to delete and create flight plans
directly from this units and although the developers of these units included
code to sync the flight plan back to MSFS flight plan system, they are unable
to change the cruise altitude, leaving the default ATC in the dark. Typical
example of problems with this approach: A) User loaded a FP from the main menu
(importing a plan or created one), set a cruising altitude of 29,000 ft since
it is a long flight. Then the user loads the flight and clicks ready to fly.
ATC now has stored the property cruising altitude as 29,000 ft. The user now
decides to change the flight plan inside the aircraft via one of the new
avionics units, this time it chooses a new shorter flight where the cruising
altitude should be 4,000 feet. Consequences : ATC remains unaware and
request the user to climb to 29,000 ft, which is too high for the new flight
profile. B) Similar to A, but instead this time the user chose 5,000 ft as
cruising altitude on the main menu, then changes the flight plan directly
inside the aircraft to a long international flight that requires a cruising
altitude of 29,000 ft. Consequences : ATC remains unaware and request the
user to climb to 5,000 ft maximum, which is too short for the new flight
profile. C) User forgets to load a FP from the main menu, however since all
the new units fitted with MSFS AAU1 and the G1000 from SU10 allows to create
FP direclty in the game, this shouldn’t be a problem, so user proceeds to
create a flight plan with a 400nm journey. However, this time, the stored FP
cruising altitude is zero since no FP exist from main meny, ATC once again
remains unaware of the new requirement for a higher cruising altitude.
Consequences: ATC ask the user to climb to a random altitude which varies
from 8,000 to 10,000 feet. Which is of course wrong since it requires a higher
altitude which can vary depending on aircraft type, etc. D) User loaded a FP
from main menu, performed the flight and now has landed at the destination.
However instead of wishing to go back to main menu, it uses one of the units
to create a new FP. Unfortunately the cruising altitude will once again remain
as it was with the old flight plan. Consequences: ATC will instruct the
user wrong altitude advises during the flight since it is still linked to the
old FP cruising altitude. The problems above affects not only GA airplanes
using the WT units (Default Asobo planes and also 3rd party devs products), it
also affects new advance airliners included with MSFS as default such as the
Microsoft A310, which can create, delete and edit flight plans via the MCDU
and will be unable to update the default ATC regarding cruising altitudes.
This limitation is causing lots of problems with default ATC, you can
appreciate how this can get out of control and trigger lots of unwanted bugs
with the ATC system from climbing profiles to descending profiles and as a
result most people is just giving up on using any ATC facility. I am currently
developing several products capable of creating such flight plans on demand,
and I am encountering all the limitations above. I tried everything, even
registering a listener JS_LISTENER_FLIGHT_PLAN and invoking
Coherent.trigger(“FP_UPDATE_ALTITUDE”, newvalue) just as how the flight plan
menu handles this, but unfortunately it doesn’t work, clearly the cruising
altitude is set to read-only for some reason unless you close the flight and
return to main menu. By allowing changing the cruising altitude not only we
would be able to avoid several bugs with the ATC system interacting with the
user, but also improve the end user experience, which of course is the
ultimate goal here. Thanks for taking the time to read this idea and if you
have any questions or suggestions about how I can overcome this difficulty
please let me know. Kind Regards, Raul