Much of this is being improved but currently, “handoffs” from one controller to another are the only commands that you don’t HAVE to readback. You can and probably should readback “Contact Tower on 128.80” but you can also just DO IT and switch your radios to 128.80 and contact the new controller. If you tune your radio to the new frequency but don’t “checkin” the new controller will do his best to reach you and ask “are you with me” on the frequency.

It seems that I can get a response from the Tower without a response to ground confirming the second message repeat. The same situation seems to occur after the take-off sequence with the Tower and the switch over is made to center. The same problem exists here, but tends to be even more prone to repeats if frequency switches are taking more time than the ATC repeat periods and other interrupting transmisions of altitude and off course comments are also injected into the problem.
At switch to center time, I believe that one can get a response from the center controller without acknowledging the last repeat of the contact center instruction and this seems to place the ATC system in agreement with the flight plan… until you get to your destination.. at which point you get no notifications at all and it seems that the ATC has lost contact … possibly at the time you left the starting airport airspace?

Could you describe the expected sequence you expect in the transmissions, and what responses are expected in normal conversations with ATC in the situations that I have described. Also, what are the prerequisites for obtaining communications and instructions at the destination end. I normally set ATIS on the COM2 dials, and switch to COM2 to listen to the arrival airport data. This switch occurs only for the time necessary to obtain this information and I then return to COM1 and the current center frequency. Could this cause a problem in the detection/notification conversation of ATC at the destination end.

A bit more information about the normal sequences you expect and a conversation on the possible difficulties with out of sequence operation on the part of the pilot would be very helpful.

Hi Ben. Yes, it did occur to me that handling of the moment of a traffic pattern change would be interesting.

Hi Brian,
Aviation charts, including airport parking layouts, for most European countries are available through Eurocontrol’s EAD website. You need to register (free), then login-> Enter Applications -> Pams Light [AIP] -> search by country, chart type, etc…
http://www.ead.eurocontrol.int/publicuser/public/pu/login.jsp

Worldwide, aviation authorities of individual countries may or may not make their charts available through their own websites too.

Using some kind of computer vision algorithm is surely more expensive. You said you tried using the yellow lines, but you ran into problems. Can you elaborate a little what kind of problems there were? Did you get far enough to see actual results? Were the results bad? Or was the algorithm just too expensive?

Would it be possible to run the taxiway detection algorithm ahead of time? If not to provide automatic taxiway generation, at least to provide a baseline for creating real taxiways in WED.

You should not see that anywhere, it’s a known bug when taxiway names are missing however this should NEVER be the case at KSEA since all taxiways are named. If this is something you can reproduce, take a screenshot of the ATC text and submit a bug with the Log.txt (in the X-Plane folder) attached and submit it to http://www.x-plane.com/bugreport

This was addressed in the original blog post.

I’ve been taxiing around some airports (KSAN, KLAX, KSFO) as directed by ATC and some of the taxiways are really awful. I guess it’s better than nothing and somewhat works for the AI planes, but when taxiing around the airports, it’s not very nice to try follow the zig-zagging arrows given by ATC when the actual taxiway markings are clearly visible right beside you.

So here’s my feature request: on airports where there are taxiway markings on the pavement, build the taxiway network based on them if possible. This would a lot nicer for taxiing and AI but also could serve as a baseline for building custom taxi layouts in world editor.

If you’re able to pull off a good algorithm to build the taxi network, the user would only have to assign names to taxiways (and fix mistakes made by the algorithm) to build a realistic real world taxi layouts.

Cormac, might I inquire where you obtained this from and are there other airports available? This would be an awesome reference point for building the ATC system up.

Thanks!