A350-1000 Autoland bad Wether

1st Official Post

    I wanted to do a few practice circuits today with the new A350-1000 over the Airbus site. I selected RWY 32L as the takeoff and landing runway and created a circuit in the navigation menu. The visibility was at absolute minimum. The wind was light and coming from the front, and the ILS frequency was locked in.

    What could be the reason that the aircraft drifted so far off course and ended up over the taxiways?

    Was it an error on my part, or are there still some minor fixes needed for the autoland system in poor weather conditions?

    Otherwise, I have to say the aircraft is absolutely fantastic, and I wouldn’t have had any hesitation paying 5 or 10€ for it. Really amazing work, dear IPACS team!


    I'm not sure, but the ILS app setting wasn't set. If you enter the ILS frequency and heading manually in the cockpit, it should still work.A proper screenshot of the cockpit instruments would have been an advantage, as you can't see anything.

    For a start did you actually intercept the localiser or did you let the autopilot follow a route very close to it but not actually crossing the localiser beam to allow the localiser to be acquired? and did you change the auto pilot from following nav, fmc, lnav etc. that is the route to follow loc or app before crossing the localiser beam?

    The ILS heading or track is as straight as a piece of string. In Aero the ILS track being followed will veer to the left or right as the instrument panel course entered is moved up and down and what is the ILS course supposed to be? In the years since the date of the Aerofly database the Earth’s magnetic field has changed so that a modern ILS inbound published course will often not match the exact course expected for use with the older information in the sim.
    Flying a no wind ILS in the sim will show you the precise Aerofly localiser track, the sim’s approach guides do not necessarily agree with the localiser course. The approach guides aim directly along the runway but the localisers can be several degrees offset to take into account the terrain in front of the runway. Remembering a favourite runway’s precise Aerofly course helps. Often adding three degrees works well for instance use the sim nav page’s 156 degrees at Salzburg instead of the published 153.

    In extreme cases the airport has been modified so that the older settings will take us over what is now a taxiway as with the current westerly runway at Istanbul or over fresh grassy lawn laid on the site of a removed runway as at Chicago O’Hare. The ILS frequency in use can also totally change with time.

    There are unfortunate hard to explain never corrected wild sim errors like the twenty degree false offset of the localiser at Telluride, a mountain hugging 073 degrees instead of the actual 093 degrees course.