If you don't want to interact with an ATC add-on i.e. fly your own way/style that's fine. But if you "do" want to use an ATC add-on you must also accept that ATC instructions have to be followed. This also includes creating a decent flightplan.
Thanks for your comprehensive reply, Volo. Somehow, looks like I was misread; sorry for not being clear. I usually generate my flight plans as follows:
- Get in SimBrief a route, with SID and STAR
- Remove the SID and just leave its exit point. Sometimes (specially for terrain-constrained airports like SKBO, SKMD and VHHX) I don't remove the SID.
- Remove the STAR and just leave its entry point. Same as above.
- If there is oceanic or Siberian airspace, remove all but the oceanic entry/exit points, the point before entry and the point after exit. If no oceanic/Siberian airspace, I remove all waypoints between SID and STAR.
Thus, the majority of my flightplans have only 4 waypoints: departure airport, SID exit point, START entry point, arrival airport (intercontinental flightplans would be having 8). This approach to flight planning may not be realistic, but helps me a lot during accelerated cruise (the effect of time acceleration on LNAV and VNAV is minimized this way), specially with aircraft such as the iFly 744 (the one I have seen the most sensitive to time acceleration). With PF3, this is how I fly the flight plan:
- For departure and arrival, I just let PF3 issue me vectors and I follow them. Actually this is where I see PF3's greatest value. No issues here, except for the one I reported for SKBO-SKCG.
- Climb after resuming own navigation: depending on mood and aircraft, I climb at 1x or 4x.
- For cruise, I understand there are only handoffs. Since it's usually a straight, horizontal line, I enter either 8x or 16x. This is what I actually meant when I said "my cruise flying syle". Here is the issue: until version 3.6.0, PF3 rarely requested me to check position and almost always handed me off where it should do so. After 3.7.1, I'm requesting Direct to the next non-XXX waypoint almost every flight, because almost every flight I'm requested to check position when I'm actually on course.
- After TOD I'm back to 1x (sometimes 4x, depending on mood). Usually by then I'm cleared to descend at my discretion. No issue here.
Hope things are now clear.
I'm afraid your problem is your flightplan not PF3.
Attach your logs in zip form including the FPP directory within the Flight directory.
Maybe this is true. For the SAEZ-SKBO flight, the FP is attached to the first post. For the SKBO-SKCG flight I mentioned after, please see it attached. It's not build as described above, but just downloaded from SimBrief. Part of the issue may lie there also...