Mark_Hazeldine

Quick update. BATC have now come back to me and said that they actually think this is an airport elevation issue. I quote their support person: "I did try to reproduce both issues and can see it happening - that didn't use to be the case - so looks like a bug has crept in somewhere - looks like the issue is the elevation for the airport is being reported as 5 feet - rather than the 75ish it should be - that messes up all the takeoff calculations. It will also be why they are landing too early at EGLL ini and the flare doesn't happen......it may well be an issue our side at this time - i will investigate further - we also look at the actual ground alt at the airport given by the sim because the values in scenery are often not accurate to what the sim shows."

Just to weigh in on this. I also get some bad stutters in the Heathrow area in MSFS2020 (with Orbx London Landmarks also installed). I originally had the Marketplace version, but transferred it to the iniManager version, and updated to the latest 3.1.1. It did improve things, but I still get 2 or 3 massive stutters in the area between the City of London down to runways 27L/R. The biggest one happens somewhere around The Shard area as I manoeuvre onto the localizer. Then I get a couple of smaller ones on the way down, especially one usually below 500ft. I have an i9 13900K, 64GB RAM, NVMe hard drive, 4080 GPU and fibre internet. I have tried turning all traffic off, and reducing scenery right down to low settings and turning photogrammetry off. It's pretty bad in the Fenix A320, but I've noticed it even happening in GA aircraft. I don't have such a problem at other busy airports like Gatwick or Stansted. I could be wrong, but it seems like at certain distances, the LOD is changing and the sim is briefly having to load in a ton of stuff and causing my CPU main thread to max out. I am hoping that 2024 will reduce this, but I still think it might be a scenery optimisation issue.

In addition, some planes aren't taking off properly on 27L. They start to lift off, then they flop back down, and then finally lift off right at the end. BATC said they'd need to investigate this, but I haven't seen it happen at your Stansted scenery, so I'm thinking it might again be due to non-standard implementation of extended thresholds at EGLL.

With Beyond ATC's new traffic injection feature, planes are landing early on 09L (right at the start of the runway, instead of at the touchdown zone - see below). I spoke to BATC support, and they claim it's an issue with your scenery. I quote their response to me: "they put the start point of the runway at the end of the extended threshold then also specific the threshold length - that is not a valid configuration per the SDK. This is all done because they work around limitations of MSFS for the user flights - but it always breaks traffic"

In MSFS 2020 there is a missing texture when at a far distance or zoomed out wide in drone camera view from out of the buildings on the west side of the runway. It goes bright white. See screenshots attached

Being aware is good. Are you able and planning to fix it though?

I've also just witnessed 2 planes crossing 27L as an aircraft was rolling down the runway on take off (near miss) and then the same plane (a Flybe Dash 8-400) taxied THROUGH a 787 that was taxiing. I assume this is MSFS#'s bonky ATC and AI implementation, but I wonder if it might also be related to the airport AFCAD file?

I have version 3.0.2 of Heathrow, with the latest update for FS Traffic. I've noticed that the way the aircraft are parked at the gates doesn't seem right (this also happened before the update too). I'm seeing a lot of British Airways planes at terminals 3 and 4. In real life, BA is almost all at Terminal 5, with a few from Terminal 3 and they don't go to terminal 4 at all anymore. I've also seen: American Airlines planes at T5 and T4 (should be T3 only) Emirates A380 at T4 (should be T3 only) Iberia at T4 (should be at T5 only) Eurowings at T4 (should only be T2) Basically, a lot of planes are parking in the wrong place. The FS Traffic FAQ says that if this is occurring, it's because the scenery developer has not set up the gates correctly to work with traffic addons (I presume they're referring to the AFCAD file). Is this something that can be fixed in a future update? It's quite immersion breaking when you know an airport really well and where planes SHOULD be parked. I imagine this would affect other programs like FSLTL and AIG too, as they all rely on the airport's AFCAD file or whatever it's called in MSFS2020 (I believe).