Question about a takeoff...Nexus

[jrpilot]

Hello,

When you takeoff on a sid or departing on a star...do you fly the sid/star with instructions from ATC or do you let the FMC fly the SID/STAR?

[Nexus]

I usually never listen to the ATC commands, they have no clue about the real world approach routes anyway so I disregard them as much as I can (quite the opposite what you'd do in real-life)

It's not rare that real world ATC will tell you to divert from the STAR or put you in a holding pattern so they can have a smoother traffic flow

[jrpilot]

I was watching a video of a cokpit flight and after departure the pilot flew all commands from ATC by hand that seems weird...I understand flying upto a few thounsand feet but this pilot flew way up to 10,000 feet....I would think he would use the autopilot to fly the ATC headings

[Craig.]

why?  some pilots like to fly manually as much as possible. Others will hit the autopilot button asap. The whole point of autopilot is to reduce pilot work and fatigue.

[Nexus]

What Crag said

Also, some airports don't have official pre-determined departure routes so all departures has to go via ATC

[jrpilot]

O.....I just thought it would seemed to be hard to hold a certain heading....because of such factors as wind.

[Craig.]

nah these things tend to be easier to fly than some light aircraft apparently. gonna be a while till i find that out though

[Nexus]

You don't have to correct for wind when flying ATC vectoring, they'll account for wind-drift for you

So if ATC say "Speedbird XXX, turn left heading 185", you'll rotate the heading knob until it reads 185, it's THAT easy

However things gets trickier if you're flying under ICAO regulations and you are flying a published route with a