Great Product, A Few Questions

[Deltaguy 45]

Hey Luke,

 

I just completed my second flight with this great product.  I have a question in regards to filing this flight with a VA.  I am a member at DVA as well as a few other Virtual Airlines.  I flew this flight for DVA and selected Delta Virtual Airlines from the drop down tab before starting my flight.  Once the flight is completed, how do I send it to DVA?  I know I could just use their ACARS, but I wanted to test this feature out for one of the other VA's I belong to.  Great work as always, good luck on your new endeavor!

 

Mark

[Luke 782]

I'm glad you like it! If you see a Virtual Airline in the drop-down list, that's great - it means the flight is associated with that virtual airline and will get submitted. You don't need to do anything special for it to be sent to the virtual airline - simFDR will automatically handle that for you!

 

Right now, there's an approximately 15 minute delay between when you submit the flight log entry to simFDR and the flight report being submitted to the virtual airline. I'm pretty certain I can get that interval down to around 10-15 seconds but it's rather down the priority list in favor of getting all of the flight parameters recorded and everything working right.

 

The challenge is that I don't control the VA's systems - they might be down or have a transient error that prevents flight report submission right away. simFDR will save the data and periodically retry it; once it does get submitted successfully your flight log entry will have a link to the virtual airline flight report URL, and when it was submitted.

 

(Your flight took 18 minutes to be submitted. If everything is working, it should take 18 seconds. We'll get there. )

 

I'm looking for virtual airline partners. I'm slowly working through the API documentation and I hope to have something ready soon. To integrate with simFDR just takes a little bit of XML or JSON processing.

 

Cheers!

Luke

[Deltaguy 45]

Thank you Luke.  My flight did get approved and recorded like you said, in about 20 minutes.  The system seems to be working great on my end.  The problem I had trying to close it has been fixed it seems.  I noticed a new update the last time I used it, so that was probably fixed in that update.  My other VA is extremely interested in using this program along with our custom ACARS.  Most of the staff have been testing it out this weekend, and I have heard nothing but great reviews.  I will have our technology team contact you to see how to code this into our website.  Thanks again for a great product!

[Luke 782]

Glad everything is working well and the word is getting out. We've released our API documentation today:

 

https://www.simfdr.com/va_api.do

 

Cheers!

Luke

[Luke 782]

I've just added some code that will attempt to submit the flight report to a virtual airline or other third party while your flight is being submitted to simFDR and providing feedback to the client. It has some pretty tight time tolerances, but in most cases the flight should be submitted and a link provided by the time you open your logbook entry.

 

Give it a whirl!

 

Luke

[Luke 782]

We should have online flight tracking on the server side implemented. Let me know if have flown an online flight in the last day or two so I can test an updated data rendering module.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke