SID & STAR: KATL → KMIA

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📍 Route: KATL → KMIA — SID + STAR practice⏱ ~6 minutes📊 5 steps🎓 Line Flying

Same drill, fresh city pair: departure out of Atlanta, arrival into Miami, both from real FAA procedure data.

What this scenario covers

Repetition on a different pair is the point. The DEPARTURES and ARRIVAL pages work identically everywhere, but the procedures do not: different naming, different transitions, different constraints, and a different-shaped flight plan when you are done.

Atlanta is one of the busiest airports in the world and its departures reflect that — the procedure does a lot of the separating that would otherwise be done by radar vectors.

How it applies in flight ops

Transition selection is the part crews get wrong when they are new to a region. A procedure often has multiple enroute transitions, and picking the one that matches the cleared route is what keeps the flight plan continuous rather than leaving a discontinuity where the two halves should meet.

The habit that scales: after loading any procedure, scroll the whole flight plan and look for gaps and surprises before accepting it.

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Step-by-step: SID & STAR: KATL → KMIA

  1. Enter the route. Type KATL/KMIA and press 1R.

    KATL (Hartsfield–Jackson, the world’s busiest airport) to KMIA is a Delta/American workhorse. A medium-haul leg with real terminal procedures at both ends — good SID + STAR practice.

  2. Set the cruise level. Type 370 and press 6L.

    The cruise level anchors the vertical profile the SID climbs into and the STAR descends out of; here it is just the setup before the procedure work.

  3. Open the departure. Press F-PLN, then press 1L on the KATL row to open LAT REV.

    LAT REV at the origin is the only place on the MCDU to select a SID — the DEPARTURE prompt lives here.

  4. Press 1L (<DEPARTURE). Pick runway 08L, then CUTTN2, then its HANKO transition, and 6R to INSERT.

    Choosing the runway first is not ceremony: the departure's first fixes are the runway branch, so 08L and 26R give the same procedure two different starts. After INSERT the F-PLN carries that branch, the common route, and the one transition you picked — the route you built, not every branch the procedure has. Each of these is a real Atlanta departure from the FAA's coded procedure data (CIFP), the same cycle airlines fly — the FAA does not code every departure Hartsfield publishes.

  5. Now the arrival. Scroll down with the ▼ arrow to the KMIA row, press the LEFT key next to it for LAT REV, then 1R (ARRIVAL>), pick an approach, then a STAR, and 6R to INSERT.

    ARRIVAL> is 1R on the destination’s LAT REV, and the page asks in the order the aircraft asks: approach, then arrival. INSERT then puts the arrival, its feeder route onto final and the final approach itself into the plan before KMIA, completing the procedural skeleton from runway to runway.

What to take away

  • The pages are identical everywhere; the procedures are not.
  • Choosing the wrong transition is the classic way to leave a discontinuity.
  • High-density airports lean on procedures instead of vectors.
  • After any procedure load, scroll the whole plan and look for gaps.

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