Approach plates and ATC

I enjoy navigation and like to use approach plates. However, it seems that in terms of realism using ATC is at cross purposes with approach plates. In FSX atc guides you right to the ils intecept point and all you need to do is plug in the ils freq - not much fun or interesting for me. However when flying into a busy airport particularly in low vis and with a fair amount of traffic it seems unwise to land with no guidance from ATC. Also in areas with mountains like Los Angeles KLAX or Salt Lake City KSLC. there are some mountains outside the defined MSA area so again possible danger there.

I'm wondering what other people do and if anyone has figured how to better integrate the use of approach plates with atc. In my case I use FSX so I don't know how other software like X Plane run in this regard.

When I flew the PMDG 737 in FS2004 I used FSBuild to create the flight plan from real world flight plans or I'd make my own. But you won't get vertical limits in the Sim like a real FMC has, only lateral. So just use LNAV if you have it. Now in VATSIM that's a whole other animal.

I used Flightaware.com for some real world flight plans and this page to create my own plan. Note: DO NOT FILE A FLIGHT PLAN ON THE WEBSITE! That's for real aviation.

http://skyvector.com/

Here's another great resource. http://www.airnav.com/

The approach plates are designed by ATC so that they know and can anticpate what a pilot will do during the approach. The plates are meant to free up time for ATC or better way to explain it, they were designed so that ATC could buy time if they get caught up with another pilot.

Sometimes ATC does not grant clearance to land until your 2 minutes out from TDZ but they get away with this because they expect the pilot to follow the approach plate..

Also - lost comm's. Unusual, almost impossible in an airliner or even a well equipped GA plane these days, especially when you could probably at least establish limited comm thru 911 on a cell phone to ATC in some fashion.

You would be expected to do the best you can in following your clearance and shoot an approach to the runway in use based on what the METARs said or an intermediate clearance update.

As a Navy aviator I lost my ONE and ONLY UHF radio in an A-4 one IFR night going into NAS Dallas. In those days Navy jets only had TACAN (UHF radial and DME coupled channels), no ILS (we used GCA, but that required UHF comm), so I had to shoot a high TACAN non-precision approach and broke out at about 500 AGL and 1.5 mi viz. Not much fun, but it can happen.