OnCourse Software

I have too be honest about this, I have experienced more bad approaches with Pf3 than any software I have used for ATC. Yesterday, I had the half dozen runway changes in less than 5 minutes, with no wind, but today I had another approach which defies any kind of logic. I flew from KCVO to KAST, a very simple flight with only one turn up the coast on an airway. Around 25 miles away from my destination , while I was still on departure freq, because I had never been instructed to change freqs, I was told I should expect vectors for runway 8 at KAST. I was at 6,000 feet at the time, my cruising altitude. Gradually I got closer and closer to my destination still at 6,000 feet, and now I am thinking this is going to be another one of those bizarre approaches, but I am going to let it continue just to see what happens. Now I am 10 miles away from KAST, then 5 miles away, then 1 mile away, and now I am flying over the top of the airport at 6,000 feet. I am a licensed pilot and I have never had this happen on any approach to an airport that I have ever flown. So, I keep going waiting for ATC to say something, and pretty soon I am 10 miles away from the airport, going in the same direction, still at 6,000 feet.

Now I double check the say again log to make sure I didn't miss something, and I had not. I then decided to change frequencies on my own to approach control, and as soon as I did, I get a call from ATC to set my heading in the opposite direction, back towards where I had just came from, and descend to 2,000 feet. Now I fly back towards KCVO, and I fly and I fly past KAST, and now I am almost 20 miles away from KAST, heading back to where I was about 25 minutes ago. Now I get a vector, to turn left towards the shoreline where there are some nice mountains, that are higher than 2,000 feet, staring me in the face, and I get another heading change to turn me directly towards the highest peak, and I am still headed away from my destination. That's it, I give up, I ask ATC for clearance to land at pilot's discretion, which I was given, and flew back over the same 24 + miles to KAST and finally landed.

I have to honest, I like the voices in the program, some things work well, but approaching an airport with PF3 direction, is not something that I look forward to at all. On this approach, I was not told to change to approach freq , I was not given descent instructions or any vectors, after I was told my arrival runway and promised vectors to it. I even checked in with the frequency I was on with a position report, and all I got was a confirmation of my position, and still no further vectors for the approach. If I hadn't decided to switch to approach control without any instruction from ATC, I would still be flying away from the airport.

PF3 is event based, and yes, if your flight fails to trigger certain events, it is very unfortunate that PF3 just keeps silent. The good thing is, that usually there is a way to bring PF3 back on track, as you noticed by tuning to Approach yourself.

I only could take a short look at your log and don't know what went wrong, just some small bits and pieces I found:

Code: Select all 9/12/2016 8:07:44 PM: 400 - sWPAlt = 1000 iAltitude = 12000

The 1000 feet is from the calculated step descent, I feel that this is quite strange, as it is lower than the FAF altitude.
The 12000 feet are above the cruise altitude of 6000 feet. I'm not sure what's happening here and if this could be the bug that triggered PF3's silence.

Or it could be a problem with handling of uncontrolled airports for such short flights. I have never used these, so I don't know.

I think Dave needs to look at this to see if he can trace the bug. Until then, as in real life, expect ATC to make mistakes, too.

Hi Bob,
I too have only had time for a quick look at the log and clearly something seems strange, but I need to dedicate some clear time for an in depth investigation. Hopefully I will do that tonight and report back with some answers.

Hope this get's sorted out, because I really like this program. I will pay more attention to trying to switch frequencies myself, if it ever goes silent again.

Okay, as promised... I'm back...

This was a really tricky one but I believe I've found the culprit. It was a single missing flag that wasn't being set when departing from an uncontrolled airport and having to make initial contact with departure yourself. This also resulted in you never being handed off to Control and therefore never being handed off to Approach. Due to that you never received any descent instructions either! A fail-safe then kicked in when you were really too close to your destination and ATC attempted to correct things, which they may well have done had you waited... or that's the theory However, you should never have been in that position and I'm sure the forthcoming fix should prevent this from happening again.

The only workaround for now would be to manually make contact with Control once you reach the configured altitude (I believe yours is set to 4500) and then if you're not handed off to Approach shortly after reaching your last waypoint, make contact with them too.

I still have a couple of other things to do and then will hand off to the testers to see if I've broken anything else before releasing the next maintenance release.

dmarch wrote:

Okay, as promised... I'm back...

This was a really tricky one but I believe I've found the culprit. It was a single missing flag that wasn't being set when departing from an uncontrolled airport and having to make initial contact with departure yourself. This also resulted in you never being handed off to Control and therefore never being handed off to Approach. Due to that you never received any descent instructions either! A fail-safe then kicked in when you were really too close to your destination and ATC attempted to correct things, which they may well have done had you waited... or that's the theory However, you should never have been in that position and I'm sure the forthcoming fix should prevent this from happening again.

The only workaround for now would be to manually make contact with Control once you reach the configured altitude (I believe yours is set to 4500) and then if you're not handed off to Approach shortly after reaching your last waypoint, make contact with them too.

I still have a couple of other things to do and then will hand off to the testers to see if I've broken anything else before releasing the next maintenance release.

Thanks.... did three flights yesterday, and all were perfect..

Strange, I did the exact same flight this evening that I did the other day when I had the problem, KCVO to KAST, with the same exact flight plan, and this time it went perfectly. Everything was spot on. Go figure....

I'd like to see the log file for that one please

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dmarch wrote:

I'd like to see the log file for that one please

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Here is the log. By the way there was one anomaly at the very end of the flight I forgot to mention and it has happened to me before twice. After approach clears me for the ILS, I am told to switch to 1200 squawk and contact Unicomm ( not exact message, I am paraphrasing) . As soon as I switch the transponder code to 1200, I am told to check my transponder and to set it to the IFR code I had prior to switching to 1200.

Bob

Thanks... transponder problem has been fixed in the next release