If you want to experience realistic conversations with the ATC, you need to edit a realistic flight plan from scratch. Following, an example with an Ajaccio to Nice IFR flight...
- First of all, you need the SID and STAR our flight plan is based on. In this tutorial, I will only do the Ajaccio SID chart. Once you will have done one chart, you will be ready to do any other chart.
- Note that it’s better to think "modularity" by creating separate charts than one single big flight plan so that you can re-use the charts in different flight plans. Once the charts are created, it’s very easy to add them into a new flight plan associated with other charts! And maybe, one day, you could share your charts with the community!
- This is one of the Ajaccio IFR SID charts...
Fields
Identifier
You take-off from Ajaccio airport so click on the first cell of the first row in the list,
Identifier column, and type “LFKJ”.
Type
On the
Type column, since you take-off from this airport, select
RWY. Note that
APT would be selected if the plan was to fly above the airport without landing or taking-off. By selecting
RWY, the
ATC is informed we effectively land or take-off from this airport. Actually, in the case of the very first checkpoint of the flight plan, the
ATC guesses that you are going to take-off from this airport.
ATC callsign
On the
ATC Callsign, enter the name of the controller that is supposed to manage your take-off. In this case
Ajaccio. Actually, you can write
Britney Spears if you want. It’s just the callsign the
ATC will use when talking to you.
ATC frequency
On the
ATC frequency column, type the frequency of Ajaccio tower “118075”. Note that we omit the decimal in the frequencies. You must use 6 digits for frequencies (this is to fit the frequencies format in X-Plane, even if in most of the planes, the last digit is not used)
Altitude
On the
Altitude column, let the cell blank. That means that the
ATC will not expect any altitude (but you could type here the cruise altitude you expect to fly at)
Speed
On the
Speed column, type the maximum speed allowed in the
waypoint. There is thousands people living here and there is some speed and noise restrictions in this place! Type
180.
Heading
On the
Heading column, type the heading of the runway. Always think about the point of view of the ATC: you are expected to take-off with the 203 heading! So enter
203 in this cell.
Latitude/Longitude
DME distance
NavAids identifiers and frequencies
We don’t use any navaid when taking-off. Our only navigation objective is to keep our heading to 203 until the next
waypoint. So we don’t fill any of the
NavAid1, Freq NavAid2 and Freq columns.
Actually, these fields are not used by the
ATC yet.
Extra message
On the
Extra message column, you can add anything you would like to hear from the
ATC at this
waypoint and that cannot be processed with the other values.
Linked checkpoints
On the
Linked checkpoint column, you can enter the identifier of the
waypoints the
ATC can give you as direct flight as soon as you will have left this
waypoint. The
ATC will pick randomly among the available identifiers and the probability to pick-up one of the alternate
waypoints can be edited in the
Constants (20 % is the default value).
In the case of our take-off from LFKJ, we can enter in the cell “AJO07;IS;LONSU” for example. I’m pretty sure it does not happen in real flights since the plane would be too close to Ajaccio city when flying from the runway directly to LONSU or even IS. But you can add all the links you want. Note that those links don’t need to be in this chart, and will be ignored if they cannot be found within the following charts of the flight plan.
Now you can fill the three following
waypoints,
AC015,
AJO07 and
IS the same way...
Auto-complete...
- Select all the waypoints rows and clic on Helpers/Auto complete/All columns. The auto-complete looks for the waypoints identifiers into the airports, navaids and fixes X-Plane data. Each time an identifier is found, the auto-complete fill some of the fields.
- For the navaids and the airports, the auto-complete ask you to confirm the identifier is really the one you need.
- For the airports, he asks you to choose the runway. This is used when there is several charts for a given airport: there is usually one chart for each runway direction. This allows the ATC to pick-up the right chart depending on the wind direction.
Save...
- Click on Chart(s)/Save and give a name to save the chart file.
- The chart is then saved and reloaded to update the colors of the rows. The green rows are there to highlight the first and the last waypoint of the charts. It is especially helpful when editing a full flight plan!
Flight plan...
Now the chart is ready to be integrated into a flight plan.
- Clean the grid by clicking on Chart(s)/New and then create the IS to NERAS chart the same way we did for this LFKJ to IS chart. And after that you can do the same for the third and last chart, the STAR NERAS to LFMN.
- When the three charts are saved, clic on Chart(s) (or Flight plan)/New and clic on Chart(s)/Add three times to import the three charts into the grid.
- Pay attention on the current selected waypoint (the blue line) before adding a chart: an imported chart is always added AFTER the selected checkpoint.
- Clic Flight plan/Save, give a name and save the flight plan file. This way, the flight plan is saved in the DATABASE_FlightPlan folder. But the flight plan is not the active flight plan yet
- Clic on Flight plan/Save as active flight plan. This way, the flight plan text file is duplicated in the ACTIVE_FlightPlan directory.
You can now close the flight planner (or not), move the plane to the Ajaccio airport, enable the
ATC and request for take-off...
Note that for a full realistic flight, you can now insert one or more
taxi charts!
