Arrival time increasing

[finnfit]

Hello

I am new to FSCaptin.

I am using with P3Dv4

On some of my flights my estimated arrival time starts increasing as I get closer to my destination.

Also the distance to my destination starts increasing as well.

The GPS in my aircraft knows how fat my destination is, but FSC seems to think I am flight the wrong way.

I still receive a cleared for approach message when I am close to my arrival airport.

I have not found a pattern it happens in all the aircraft I use.

could not find anything like this in the forum.

Thanks for the help.

[peter]

Hello Finnfit,

welcome to the FSCaptain forum. What you describe usually happens if you missed a waypoint. FSCaptain expects you to pass all your waypoints fairly closely (2-3 nm or so). If you miss one, FSCaptain will count time and distance to your destination as if you had to return to the missed waypoint and then continue from there. Hence, if you miss an early waypoint, your ETE and distance estimate could be almost twice the total distance of your actual flight when you land.

If that happens, you can go to your flight plan (the "PLN" button on the FCDU) and select the next active waypoint you are planning to pass. ETE and distance estimate will then be recalculated and should be realistic again. Generally, it is a good idea to check that the flight plan you filed with FSCaptain and the flight plan you follow in P3D are identical. When this is not possible (for instance, if you fly on Vatsim and get assigned a different SID than what you were planning for), the PLN trick will fix it.

Cheers,
Peter

[finnfit]

Thank you. I will give that a try and see how it works.

[Travis]

Hello Finnfit,

Thank you for your use of FSCaptain!!

Peter is correct - if you miss a waypoint in your PLN file, both the ETA and Distance Remaining values will be incorrect until you set the FCDU to what your "next real waypoint" should be.

How this happens is simple:  We calculate ETA and Distance Remaining by simply adding up the distance to your destination from the waypoint before the airport, and then add the distance from that waypoint to the waypoint before it, etc, etc.  Finally we calculate the distance from your aircraft to what it believes is its next waypoint.

So if you miss your "next waypoint" that distance to the missed waypoint will begin to increase.

There are two option settings (found in \FSCaptain\Config\Options.cfg) which you can adjust to make this issue more manageable in the future:

WAYPOINT_DISTANCE
WAYPOINT_MINS_COUNT

The first setting is the distance in NM you must reach from a waypoint in order to have that waypoint be counted as "passed."  My value for this is 1, so every month or so, I'm pinged that I've missed a waypoint - usually because of very strong side-winds.

The second value is how many "checks" you can fail before a message is sent to you from your Dispatch Office.  IIRC, checks are made every 90 seconds.  I get a message if I miss three checks.

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We currently don't give you a visual indicator on the usual FCDU screens, but I'm adding such now to several FCDU screens in 1.8.3 Beta 1 to serve as a notice that something is not correct.

(Yes we're jumping from Alpha 1 to Beta 1, as "no new bugs" were reported in Alpha 1.)

If you have any more questions, please feel free to post them here, or send them via email.

Best regards,