Hello everyone,

I have got the Captain Sim 757/767 for a long time now but one problem keeps accouring. The Top of Descent does not appear! Everything is set propperly in the FMC but still it does not appear. I have the 767 version 1.5. Can anyone tell me how to fix this? 

Thank you!

Greetings! 

Hi,

i have the �Version 1.5 and tried it several times but it does not work. �

Greets

I am at my wit's end with the 767 and the Top of Descent Bug.

I do the trick, and indeed the proper altitude (and speed!) shows for a moment, then switches back to no TD. I have tried waiting until I hit erase, changing waypoints... nothing works. What is really frustrating is that I can see the right values, but only for a second. And we're back to cruise just before the airport.

What a shame such an otherwise nice airplane is plagued with such a frustrating flaw.

You're lucky. The maddening thing is that you can SEE it switch to the proper altitudes, but it doesn't "catch," so it "snaps  back" to a plan without a TD. So clearly it "knows" what it is supposed to do, but for some reason it can't bring itself to do it. I confess I finally gave up on the 767 over this issue. It is character flaw in me that I find it difficult to shrug off things like this. An FMC that can't reliably do the bare minimum of handling a route with basic VNAV just isn't going to work for me.

Don't get me wrong, I like Captain Sim and have most of their products. But a TD bug that was driving me nuts nearly three years ago should really be fixed.

Where do you get your routes? Is it possible you are doing something different than other people are doings? If you fly much at all in the Captain Sim 757 / 767 then odds are you should have run into it, but you haven't. What's the difference?

I have the same issues sometimes with all three of them. Sometimes, when the fix does not seem to work, it helps to change to a different STAR and runway. Also it helps to first program the sid and departing runway, then the route, star name as last waypoint. Then go back to dep/arr section and type in proper runway from the given star in flightplan.

I use the freeware version of Routefinder.
Annoying bug, yes. But in the end I normally find a solution, one way or the other.

Br,
Anders

The difficulty in what you are suggesting, Raymond, is that the waypoints maintain the CRZ ALT, then you might see a waypoint with an Altitude Constraint, then the next waypoint display the CRZ ALT again. So you might wind up in a very shallow descent until you reach the airport, because it doesn't know where the T/D is. The T/D doesn't exist in the route, so can it know where it is? Still, it is definitely worth trying. I have not yet tried it, but it could turn out to be another "fix"!

The problem appears to be that the FMC does not know that at some point you want to reach RWY XXX at (lets say) 20 feet ASL, so even with Altitude Constraints in the latter part of the STAR, it still believes it has to fly at Cruise Altitude beyond the arrival airport (until END OF ROUTE is reached).

In my fix, I will try a waypoint to remove, then erase the change after anything from 10 seconds up to 60 seconds. If that fails, I try a different waypoint to delete, then erase the change. I can sometimes try doing that with ALL the waypoint in the STAR and TRANS!! Other times, I will remove the the altitude constraints that use the A (at or above) or B (at or below) until I get it to hold change and retain the T/D. In the end you can force it to accept the change. In the worst case scenario, I scrap the STAR and just select a runway to land on (i.e. 16, 34 etc.) without the ILS GPS or RNAV associated with the runway. I take note of the waypoints and any constraints in the STAR, and add them manually. In the end, I get my T/D on the route.

If you get impatient, do not expect to get a result. Having said that, if I get frustrated, I fly somewhere else where I get my T/D in the route. Or at worst, I change aircraft if I get p*ssed off enough with it. So that tells you that even I can lose it with the CS 767 (and the 757 which suffers the same problem). In truth, I get better results in the 767 than I do in the 757, so the 757 is worse for me, so I fly it a lot less.

Tim Capps wrote on Nov 18^th, 2013 at 6:52am:
Not necessarily. I may have switched to another CS aircraft. But it would be one that doesn't have an FMC!

Tim Capps wrote on Nov 18^th, 2013 at 6:52am:
MD 80? The only one I have from a long time ago, has a "Lite FMC", and I no longer use it.

This Sao Paulo - Santa Cruz flight is just cursed for me. It is an interesting flight if anyone wants to try it. Start off with a ridiculously short runway. As you speed toward the end, you have to have total faith that your VR speed and the laws of physics will get you in the air before you run out of runway. (Take a full load, said management. On paper that runway is long enough!)

Then it's a perfectly straight line through intersections with lovely names like "MUCUS" ("sorry, all the good names have already been taken, Brazil"). Then a crazy-complicated (for me) procedure at the end.

Once I ran out of fuel fooling around trying to follow the procedure. Another time I tried to show my son my 727 and managed to change my 757 into a 727 in mid-flight! With no engines! That didn't end well. Another time I just bailed out of frustration. ("This is your Captain. I'm leaving. Good luck.")

"The Curse of Flight 812." But break it will I. And, Mark, yes, that was a nice-looking but lite MD-80. It still tempts me once in awhile, but it is just a pretty model bolted onto the default autopilot.

I am hoping really hard that they will get the FMC lined out. From my perspective, the 757/767 are perfect and don't need anything new. Just FMC fixed.

Yes, they do things well, which is why I bought their new (? everything's new to me) DC-9. The Super 80 Pro is one of my all-time favorites, and to me the graphics are just clean and functional (and easy on frame rates!) Love flying around South America in my Juan Valdez livery lol

I finally completed the SBSP-SLVR flight. I'm not sure exactly what I did, but one thing was deleting the last waypoint in the route, giving me 120 miles to the 5000' hold over the airport. Even then, there was all sorts of strangeness: wandering off course, overspeed on VNAV descent, and, much to my passengers' entertainment, a barrel roll when I turned off AP. Eventually I just went to Heading Select until I could get it to "stick" to LNAV, and used VS with manual throttles to idle. In the end, while on LOC it was about 100 meters to the right of the runway, so I just cut out all the automation and flew it in myself.

While I like things to be "perfect" it is good advice to see automation as a tool that may or  may not help you complete your flight. And, up to a point, I'm willing to do that.

Some of that might be my problem, since I was goofing around showing my son the toilet and the like  So it all goes into the database between my ears, and maybe I'll sort things out.

I will say the Captain Sim 757's FMC is in-depth enough to let you create and add fixes to your flight plan, and does holds well. I have a support question in over at another forum about these issues, and haven't had a single answer yet. (Yeah, I fly other airplanes than Captain Sim sometimes. I'm not proud of it. Right now there's a cute and sophisticated European model I'm seeing quite a bit of.)

There was a discussion at AVSIM recently about support. For some unknown reason, people delight in crying about Captain Sim support. Maybe years ago, but it looks to me like the perfect system has fallen into place here. There is the KB, but knowledgeable -- I guess I can use the word fans, right? -- handle most of the support. And you guys to it so well, too. I just wish I was smart enough to help more. At yet another support forum, I don't even want to ask anything because the question might be in a 250 page manual or discoverable on the forum if you happen to hit upon the right search string. In other words, there are some people who act like support is such a bother, and delight in making you feel stupid. That doesn't go on here. So keep up the good work!

I love the response, "This has been answered a million times!!!" Well, then, maybe there's a reason for that, hmmmm? By and large most folks are civil. It seems like the more "realistic" products are perceived to be, the less patience one may expect.

Why bother worrying about adding a STAR in the ARR, if you end up using the ATC for the arrival? As you said "enter the destination ICAO as the final leg and add an altitude restriction of the airport elevation" work's for you, and the ATC doesn't use STAR's, and it doesn't care where the TD is in your flight plan, as it will tell you when to descend when it's ready.

Okay.  I know that the STAR/TRANS part of the FMC, doesn't always (almost never) work in the Captaim Sim 757, and 767, which is very annoying. The work around doesn't always work either, but it works most of the time for me, and sometimes it takes a lot of attempts to get it to work (sometimes I even give up).

However, if you use the ATC for an IFR flight, which is when the ATC guides your flight, once you get on your route, and altitude, everything is fine until you arrive near your destination. Once that happens, the ATC gives you altitude, heading, and eventully a runway that you will land on. It will not follow the STAR/TRANS that you might enter into a flight plan, so why bother adding it. Also, the ATC doesn't care when the FMC tells you it's time to descend, the ATC will tell you to descend when it determines that it's time to do so. So if you're using the ATC for guidance (IFR), I don't see the point of adding a SID, or STAR/TRANS to a flight because the ATC doesn't guide you by them. I never use SIDs, or STARs when doing an IFR flight, guided by the ATC.