Hello - new! Air Traffic Controller for work in the UK. Looking ng to get involved in ATC only. My time on the ATC training server doesn’t seem to go towards my total time. It also doesn’t log my operations - this morning I spent an hour and a half doing JFK GND/TWR (which was great apart from a TBM who just didn’t follow any instructions) and it hasn’t logged the operations for it. It still says 74 from when I was last on. Today must’ve been well over a hundred.
The requirements for IFATC also says I have to make sure my account is linked? I don’t know what that means or how to do it.
I want to get qualifed as soon as possible in IFATC. Please could someone make things a little easier to understand and tell me what I need to do to get there? I don’t want to have to fly for 500 hours because I’m only interested in ATC, because I do it for a job and want to bring that to simmers. Great set up on IF by the way, works very well generally. Enabling voice PTT for ATC would be amazing one day, who knows.
Hey there! To answer the first part, maybe just give it some time to log your time and ops. When it says to link your account, you need to make sure you are using the same account as this account you posted this on. Finally, there really is not any way to skip through flight hours, but we now have autopilot+, so if you want when you are not busy you can just do flights to gain those hours, while not having to worry about flying them or your device being used up. Autopilot + takes the flight off of your device and onto the infinite flight servers, so it’s almost like you aren’t flying.
Thanks. Do you have any idea how to make sure my account is the same? I’ve just logged in with Google on both but it does say I’m not linked. When I try to link,.it says I’m already linked. I’m not good at this kind of thing. I just logged in.
Thanks for the rest - so autopilot+ means I can set up a flight, climb to cruise and then exit the app for an 18 hour flight, then go back on and land it?
Also, how do you set up any approaches? I can only work out how to create a flight plan from scratch, manually, selecting every individual fix, navaid and waypoint by hand the entire way to the destination.
As for ILS approaches, there don’t seem to be any options to do that. I thought it would allow you to select a runway, and an approach. I’m not into flying, but if I’m going to do it to get the hours, I’d like to do it properly and actually sim it rather than just A to B with no flight plan.
For the approach, click on the airport and then click “procedures” on the bottom. If the airport has an ILS, clicking on the airport itself, and then selecting the gray bar with its name should bring you to a place you need to be. Let’s use KJFK for an example. Once you’ve clicked it, click runways and select which runway you’d like. From there, select to tune it to nav 1 or nav 2. Outside of the map, under the on screen “nav” tab, you are at the default source GPS mode, meaning your autopilot and other forms of navigation are all following your flight plan. Since you would have tuned the runway to nav 1 or 2, switch that source to one of them. You should only do this when you are near the approach cone on the map, and not from a distance.
As for the first part regarding your account, I’m not too experienced in that area so once you’ve tried what schyllberg suggested in the support topic, might as well continue the conversation there because Support is here for well, support! (Mostly with technical stuff)
Anthony said pretty much all that needed to be said based on your questions, Kane. However, if I can add something, it’s great to hear about you being an IRL ATC controller! I’m sure you could share some of your knowledge with us all when you join IFATC.
Of course, controlling from a mobile device on a flight simulator is nowhere comparable to doing it IRL. As for this simulator, I would highly suggest some of the resources you can find on this forum, such as the Guide on all Tower & Ground ATC commands, various useful tutorials in the Ground School > Community Tutorials and ATC categories (often for a specific airport or airspace), and most importantly, the ATC Manual:
When you apply for IFATC, you will be given a Recruiter, who is in charge of letting you do the written test, and run your practical one, by giving you feedback in the areas you may need it on. As the simulator replicates IRL, but not everything may be the exact same, I would suggest you to read from Section 1 to Section 5 of it. You can leave Section 6 for now as when you join IFATC, after successfully passing both Tests, you will become an Apprentice and then a Specialist, two ranks which allow you to control Ground, Tower and ATIS only, no Radar frequencies yet.
For the practical test, I would suggest you to take a look at this video. It is a bit old and things have changed a bit, but it should be good enough.
Any questions are welcome Hope to see you soon in IFATC, good luck with that!
Thank you! It now says I’m linked. And I’ve only had the app 3 days or something, so I’m just trying to hour build until I can apply for IFATC now. Thanks again
Thanks for that - I’ll definitely read the manual 1-5, avoid 6 for now until GND/TWR Validation. And yeah, I can see it’s not quite the same as irl, and of course options are limited but if pilots do what they’re supposed to, and are familiar with procedures then the options we have available should all be absolutely fine 95% of the time.
It still hasn’t logged my operations so I hope it starts to log them soon as I did a lot this morning which would’ve gotten me quite a bit closer to the 500 required.
Thanks for the advice and comments.
By the way, has voice controlled ATC been discussed? Like, a live chat type discord server thing linked to the game?
bro IFATC ops increase up so slowly in GT
nd pilots are also not able to use these simple commands nd it become so hard to learn irl
at then end they ret violations nd then came to dm’s how u can do this nd more
No worries at all! Always happy to answer any questions.
There have been various discussions about voice chat/voice-controlled ATC on this forum, but I highly doubt that will happen soon. There are around 800 IFATC controllers as of now, and many of us would need additional training and rules to be able to make everything related to IFATC and communication with pilots a voice thing. In addition, there is a vast amount of players on the Expert Server skies, and many factors have to be taken into consideration which could make the developers say “No” to this type of addition, such as the players’ age (which is sometimes a bit low/young age), maturity, expertise, level of their English skills, and so on.
To make it short: to have voice-controlled ATC, both controllers and pilots would require additional training, Staff members will need to find the best option to implement this, and there would be a need for moderators’ teams or similar to take care of that too. It seems too much work, hence why, sadly, I don’t see it coming for now.
Hope to see you soon in IFATC, good luck with that!