Hi,
I am very new to VATSIM and haven’t yet adjusted to it. In other words, I’m just not fully comfortable and educated on everything and so I need to straighten out this question I had.
Today I was doing a flight, and I’m not going to say where to where or what controller as I don’t mean to get anyone in trouble, but I typed to the center (there was no ground, tower, approach, etc online in my airspace), requesting clearance. I am right now a text only user as I haven’t become comfortable enough for voice, and the controller at first didn’t reply. Knowing he is probably busy, I waited around 5ish minutes and typed again, which he then replied that I wasn’t in his airspace. Having planned for this flight, I could clearly see on VATSIM radar that I indeed WAS in his airspace, but being new, I decided to just go along with it. Realizing I’d have to be on unicom for the whole flight I made a new flight plan, and my departure airport was deep inside of his airspace. I called him up and again was ignored for 10+minutes. Called him again, still no response for 20+ minutes. I ended up cancelling my flight.
Any thoughts, or anything I should know? Did I do anything wrong?
Welcome to VATSIM! Not all CTR-stations cover “top-down” and not all airspace that you can see on “map applications” is actually the area that some CTR-stations cover. Did you have a look at the “controller information”? In case that you are using vpilot, you can select the ATC-station from the list and then get further information. ATCOs sometimes mention what airspace/airports they cover etc…
It has happened that because voice is the primary means, some ATCO miss text that comes to them. It has happened to me. My suggestion is try on their frequency with text, and if no response try a PM.
I’d highly recommend you use voice for communication. If you don’t have a microphone, you should at least use receive (i.e., you are listening to ATC and they can talk to you via voice, but you are using text). The CoC also says that you should avoid using text only communication when you are able to use receive or - preferably - voice.
Text communication comes with a bunch of problems for controllers: writing text messages requires significantly more mental capacity than talking, reducing the amount of multitasking ATC can do, and can also take longer than voice comms, even when controllers use shortcuts for default instructions as they need to ensure things like the cleared level, taxi routes, etc. are entered correctly. Text comms also don’t really allow for time-critical instructions as the response time is generally much higher than with voice comms.
All of this means that text pilots will often be one of the lowest priorities for controllers, especially if they are already quite busy on voice (also a reason to use at least receive: you will hear if they are busy). Likewise, you will also often find that controllers, especially busy ones, will reduce the communication with text pilots to the bare minimum, meaning they won’t acknowledge a clearance request, let alone inform you of any expected delay until you receive your clearance; instead, you will simply receive your clearance when ATC has the time for it, even if it takes half an hour.
In addition, it can be easy for controllers to miss text messages (both frequency messages and private messages) in at least some controller clients (Euroscope, e.g.) as there is only a very quiet, short notification sound that can easily be overheard if there is a simultaneous voice communication or even if the controller is simply mentally focused on something else, and the text frequency window is usually not open (and when it is, it only displays - in the case of Euroscope - four lines of text, so if there are other text communications taking place, they can quickly move your message out of the window).
As for the sectorization, Andreas said pretty much everything important already, but just to drive the point home: essentially all VATSIM maps are 2D while the actual airspace is 3D, meaning that the covered area can differ quite significantly depending on the level. On top of that, the managers of the database used by these map tools don’t allow vACCs to implement overly complex datasets, so only the largest bandbox positions will show on maps, sometimes even without their full coverage, and the data itself uses the login to identify the position while controller clients also use the frequency, which means that controllers logging in with a different login than the normal one for that position (e.g. when they have taken over the position from another controller) or on one of the less frequently opened positions are not recognized by the system and instead shown as covering the entire FIR.
There is one map tool that has a 3D dataset, VATGlasses, but the website seems to be broken since a couple of weeks - still something you could take a look at, maybe it will work again soon.
Everyone else answered the core question, but I wanted to pop in and address the microphone shyness…
Speak and be heard. Many of the controllers get plenty buried just trying to deal with the voice traffic and text gets missed. Some just don’t seem to notice text, and some (rules or not) seem like they ignore it entirely.
Don’t worry about how you sound, just write down what you’re going to say before you make the call… Start with simple VFR stuff at a quiet but towered field and work your way along from there. You don’t need to be perfect and if you start on a quiet frequency, the controller will generally be happy to help you get the hang of it, and you can do it there without having 60 pilots waiting.
While getting it all perfect is very helpful for the controller, and should be your goal eventually, at first just communicating who you are (Type and Reg), where you are (gate or ramp, etc), and what you want to do (departing to the E)… is all you need to say to get started.
If the field is quiet, let the controller know you’re new, they will probably be happy to help. But if you show up at prime-time in JFK in an A380 and don’t know what you’re doing, you might not have a fun time.
Walk before you run, take small steps… Its not hard. But trying to avoid voice makes it much harder than it needs to be.