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Mike T

Utility for adjusting AI Traffic for DST?

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Does anyone know of a utility that will make a bulk change to the flightplan.txt file to compensate for DST changes?Thanks,Mike T

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I don't know of any, but that would be a cool utility. It's also not a trivial project.Just thinking about it, it would need a worldwide database for coordinating time zones with airports and tracking which airports observe DST. To maintain it, the database would need to be flexible so changes like what occurred in Venezuela and Argentina recently could be adjusted. Then there would be the problem of how to cope with ICAO/IATA code changes and also user installed airports.The question is why would a utility like this be needed when most airlines issue new timetables when DST occurs? If it's to make schedules perform "on-time", one would have to question if it really matters since the schedule is not accurate anyway. :-)Bruce

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Hey Bruce:For the most part the schedules will remain "mostly" accurate through the DST changes because most flights and flight numbers will remain the same. Sure, over time it will become less accurate as airlines adjust for sping and summer flight schedules. But, right now with all of my AI Traffic leaving an hour ahead, it's better to have a quick fix instead of waiting for thousands of flight plans to get updated to spring / summer.Regards,Mike T.

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Hi Mike,File in the library:ai_flight_time_changer_188326.zipI use it and it works great. You can change one file or the whole bunch at once.Hope this helps.


Gerald

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Gerald! You da man! Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for your help.Warm regards,Mike T.

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Mike,A simple 1 hour shift utility is a nice hold over until new schedules are available.I know you are aware of the shortcomings of ai_flight_time_changer_188326.zip and I'm just posting this so others reading this thread won't think ai_flight_time_changer_188326.zip is the "magic bullet" solution for fixing their schedules. A more sophisticated utility like I mentioned in the previous post is needed.For everyone's benefit, if one shifts all times in an AI schedule and airports are located in Arizona, Hawaii, or many international tropical locations that do not observe DST, then those locations will be off by one hour in the schedules and an inverse time problem will exist that the utility was suppose to fix.Bruce

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Hey Bruce:There IS a huge shortcoming with that utility and that is the fact that it cannot update large flight plan files. The limit is very, very small so it won't be of any use to the majority of custom AI users. Instead of having a bunch of traffic .bgl files, I have large file which breaks out into a 22mb flightplan.txt file when extracted with TTools. The limit for ai_flight_time_changer seems to be less than 500k!I did find a utility, CiAN text replacer, that easily handles large files (all that ai_flight_time_changer does is look for and replace specific text strings). I defined the strings that I wanted to change and ran the utility and bingo I'm it did a bulk replace and accomplished with AI time changer could not.Yes, it is a stopgap measure but gives me greater than 95% accuracy for the DST change in the area I fly. Better than 95% inaccuracy at this point until DST updates come through.Mike T.

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