Dan77 wrote: * | Mon Oct 08, 2018 11:00 am |
I took a quick look at the logs. Your flight plan was fine; in fact I flew KSTL-KMDW with exactly this flight plan a few months ago. Your last waypoint (STKNY) is 29 miles out which is fine, and PF3 has 9000 for the altitude at that point which is as expected for about 30 nm out. The only thing I see is that you initially were descending from cruise at about 1400 fpm and later increased your descent rate. I think you probably did not descend fast enough and likely had a tailwind, which increases the rate at which you must descend to hit your crossing altitudes. At MMEGG the altitude on the PF3 waypoint profile page is FL190 and you were at about FL220; at ENDEE the altitude on the waypoint page is 14000 and you were at about FL180. You were still at about 15000 at STKNY. One thing you can do is have the PF3 Display utility running during the flight (pf3_display.exe which is located in your PF3\PF3_Displayer folder). After PF3 is connected, the utility will show the next waypoint and the crossing altitude for the waypoint as listed on your flight plan profile page. If you have a tailwind you will probably need to descend at a steeper rate than planned in order to hit the crossing altitudes. Also, you can change the waypoint altitudes if necessary before the flight (hover your cursor over the waypoint names on the flight plan page and the distances will appear, which will help if you want to make adjustments).
Thanks Dan however I am pretty sure I changed the descend rate to -2,000 relatively early after noticing I did not set it correctly. From the logs it makes sense I got a 6,000 feet delta?
Do you have a preset you recommend to use for airliners (737,A320 etc..) which works best with PF3?
Thanks for the explanation
I am away from my PC these days, so cannot look at your logs.
Nevertheless some thoughts:
Regarding ATIS: The sim's weather report which PF3 uses via FSUIPC is only reliable around about 50nm. If you are further away from the destination ATIS will most probably be wrong.
Try to search this forum for more details, it has been explained several times.
So better use the Active Sky weather report.
Regarding your descent:
If you feel ATC does not descend you in time you can always ask for a lower altitude. If necessary do that when you passed your calculated TOD (which PF3 does not know of).
Apart from that I don't see that 24000 ft in 90 nm should be a problem for a 737. The profile setting does not mean that you should keep that descent rate all the time. It's just an average value for internal calculations.
Rather start your descent steeper. You can always decrease your descent rate as appropriate later. The other way round you might run out if distance.
Thanks this makes sense! By active sky weather report you mean tuning to Active sky built in ATIS frequency?
Regarding the descend rate - I was actually cleared to descend from FL260 to FL240 right in TOD when I got the automatic simulation pause (btw I note the descend clearance happens exactly on TOD pause every flight) but when leveling off at FL240 there were no further instruction to descend for a significant amount of time which I think was a waste of time due to the steep descend profile required manually afterwards.