Hey guys! I’m here to ask for a feature about turning on APPR automatically when pilots get ILS clearance and use “Reply & Automatically Assign”
I’m an IFATC Officer and have a fair amount of radar control experience. After this “Reply & Automatically Assign” feature appears, many pilots rely almost entirely on this system to adjust their autopilot. However, from my experience in radar control, due to “automatically assign” cannot automatically turn on APPR, many pilots forgot to turn it on can caused overshot. This causes our controllers to have to spend more time getting them back on the glide path like re-cleareance. To do this, it takes a lot of effort and can easily cause conflict. In my radar control in Paris and Dublin today, I dealt with at least 15 such errors. If we can also get it automatically, I think the probability of such errors will be reduced.
Are you assuming everyone is using APPR, or are you saying that everyone should?
I think there’s less people using it, than there’s people that using it.
Personally;
I never use it. I align with the ILS myself.
I asked a lot of my friends, and they have almost forgot about it even themselves. And I’ve asked a lot of pilots, and almost all of them use this feature. Obviously after this feature came out, the probability of this kind of thing happening increased a lot. Other radar controllers have had the same experience.
I see the point of this feature request, and from an ATC perspective, it’s understandable, given how many pilots fail to properly complete an ILS approach.
However, I’m more with Seb on this one. I feel like there are a couple of points to consider:
Not everyone may want to use APPR, as mentioned above, or not everyone might be able to use it. They could be overweight, and their aircraft might not have APPR at all, and so on. APPR isn’t a must when it comes to performing an ILS approach. Surely makes things easier, but I could very much perform it by using A/P only or flying manually, while still following LOC & G/S.
The responsibility and effort on the pilots’ side becomes almost absent when vectored/issued commands by ATC. If, even for a clearance, pilots get everything activated automatically, then they won’t need to do even basic things themselves (that I feel would be a bit of a bad habit, in general). If every command of this kind gets done automatically by the system and not the pilots, it also kind of loses the fun in flying completely, haha.
Just my two cents on this. I might’ve missed some points here or made them a bit vague, but I think what I meant is clear overall
So you’re telling me that I have to do a GPS approach on a 767 simply because it doesn’t have the APPR function, even though I can very much tune into the ILS and follow it manually?
Dunno about how y’all fly but it is possible to hand fly stuff too. I can still line up with the ILS while doin’ that.
Even if someone’s flying with autopilot, I think it should be on the pilot to engage APPR, it takes like 5 seconds. Automatically engaging it seems unnecessary. What happens if I’m manually flying a plane with APPR, and it tries to engage automatically? I feel that that’d cause more issues.
Maybe if it were n option to have it turn on automatically instead of a feature that affects everyone could help, but still I don’t see why it’s necessary when it should be on the pilot to engage APPR and land the plane themselves.
I hand fly most of my ILS approaches.. I’m with Seb & @Jinco on this one.
Even when shooting a visual approach, if the runway has ILS, I’ll tune to NAV1 and use ILS for lateral and vertical guidance. IRL, it’s standard practice to back your approach up with instrument be it ILS, GPS, etc.
If you want to use APPR mode, just hit the button.
while I recognize the frustration all those MAs caused, I don’t think the answer is to force adopt auto-APPR. There are a lot of folks scooting around the ‘Expert’ server that lack standard virtual aviation skills. On an average flight to a controlled hub you get a ‘please follow instructions’ like once a minute.
Then I suppose a better suggestion would be a different button altogether, one that assigns ATC’s vector to A/P as well as turning on APPR mode, nd one that only assigns vectors without turning on APPR, even if ppl miss the click somehow, it’ll stay on their mind that they must’ve misclicked, to go turn on APPR manually yea?
