Flight plan duplicates

[Guest kencr]

I used to keep all flight plans which had been processed by TTools or MRAI in the scenery folder. However I found that this method created duplicated, or triplicated, or even more identical flight plans, each with the same flight number. This meant for example that trying to land at London Heathrow, or any other busy airport, was almost impossible due to so many duplicated flights landing at the same time.I came up with the idea of storing sets of flight plans for different seasons in separate zip files, and only keeping those plans for one particular season at a time in the scenery folder.My question is this, if a flight plan has been associated with a particular aircraft, will the association be lost if or when the flight plan or set of flight plans has been moved to a zip file ??

[RFields5421 1]

I'm a little confused here.Flight plans are text files used as source files to create scenery files that display AI traffic. Traffic_xxxx.bgl files are the result of compiling flight plan files - and what FS uses.When a new flight plan is released, the first thing necessary is to remove the old Traffic_xxx.bgl scenery file for the old flight plan for that airline from an active scenery folder. This is normally SceneryWorldScenery.The easiest way to store flight plans and traffic files is by airline. If you have only one British Airways Traffic_xxxx.bgl file - then you don't have duplicate flights - provided the source files were done accurately.Since there is not a full/ complete set of airline flight plan files for any single season, each airline is best managed individually.The flight plan source files have an aircraft identification - in the aircraft.txt file which must equal the title= line of a repaint in the fltsim.x section of the aircraft.cfg.That information is compiled into the Traffic_xxxx.bgl file.As long as you do not change the title= line in the aircraft.cfg, you can move the Traffic_xxxx.bgl file in and out of your setup as you please.Some people have multiple traffic setups. Such as one for the days when propliners were the main airline traffic. Another with four engined jets like Comets, B707 and DC-8, another present day.Since the aircraft.cfg fltsim.x title= entries are not changed, these folks do not have to worry about having missing aircraft when they use different Traffic_xxxx.bgl files.You can use ACA2005 to find aircraft on your system not used by any Traffic_xxxx.bgl file. That is very useful because most of us end up with bloat of a lot of aircraft not used in any flight plan after a while.ACA2005 - http://aifs.pvdveen.net/

[Guest kencr]

Thanks for your comments, Reggie. I should have thought about the line title=, so that answers my main query.As to what I was saying about the zip files, I've come up with this idea purely for realism when flying at a time other than the present.Suppose you have a number of flight plan sets, for different airlines (British AW, Lufthansa, KLM, and so on), each of which was created using airline timetable data for a particular season in a particular year (e.g. summer 2001, winter 2004, etc.). Create a separate zip file for each season, and use it to store all the .bgl files representing sets of flight plans for that season only, for any airline, whether British AW, KLM, Transavia, Delta, United, etc., etc.)To use this, all you have to do is decide which season and year you want to fly in, then delete ALL the flight plans in the scenery folder, and extract all the .bgl files in the zip file for that particular time into the scenery folder, and away you go.As for the text files which created those .bgl files, I hold on to all the original downloaded .zip files containing those text files, back them up to CD-RW and delete them from the hard disk to conserve space.