I've read in several places of the Air Traffic Control (ATC), or FARP, bug.
This issue causes a flight of helicopters, upon returning from a mission, to circle endlessly, resulting in their unavailability for successive missions, ever.
From what I understand, the problem is as follows:
Each helicopter in the group is issued a landing pad at the FARP. The leader (1-1) lands and shuts down, signaling 1-2 to land and shut down, signaling 1-3 to land, and so forth.
So, what if 1-1 can't reach the landing pad's "waypoint"? What if that waypoint were underground? The result would be that the lead would never send the "land" signal to 1-2, and the mission would not be ended properly. Thus, you are left with a circling helicopter squadron that cannot do anything to advance the campaign, aside from offering the enemy target practice.
The critical thing to understand, is that this bug affects player controlled gunships as well as AI. You'll notice, that if you land your helo perfectly at an airbase or other non-buggy FARP, with your final waypoint W selected, you will lose control of your helo and have a mission debrief. If you do not do this, and quit the mission, the AI will take control of your chopper, and land it for you. The AI will fall into the same pit at a buggy FARP.
I've been observing this effect in Cuba, where it appears to be a campaign-breaker for blue team, ie, basically completely impossible to win.
Solutions? it seems to me that the only effective way to remedy this is to use a map editor to modify the FARP pads to be perfectly level, and to unbury the waypoints.
I imagine the experienced modders have already taken a look at this bug, what was the consensus there?
