Just beginning to explore AI flight planning and have a very basic question that is best illustrated by a simplified example:Suppose you had a light AI aircraft at Airport A and you wanted to set up a weekly flight plan in which the aircraft departs Airport A at 8:00 (local--for simplicity here) on Tuesday morning for example, flies a couple of hours and arrives at 10:00 at Airport B. Waits over night and departs Airport B again the next morning (Wednesday) at 8:00 and returns to Airport A at 10:00. Assume the aircraft with the registration is not used in any other flight plan. In this simple example, that is all the aircraft does each week.If you were spotting, when would that aircraft be visible at Airport A and at Airport B? In other words, how long before departure do aircraft appear and how long do they linger after they arrive. If you departed Airport B Tuesday night, for example, would you find the AI aircraft at the airport waiting for its Wednesday morning departure?I suspect there is just a small window before and after a flight leg in which the aircraft is visible and after these it just simply vanishes.The reason I ask is that I am making a flight plan for an AI GA aircraft with a real registration and I want that flight plan to reflect what I actually know about a representative, actual "week in the life" of the real plane. If I work this out I'll share it here. But just curious whether the plane would be spotted at airports between flights. It is common for charters and Medical evacs to fly a leg, hold over a few hours (or overnight), and then return. Thanks all.

Providing you've got an appropriate parking space for it, it should be visible at all times that it is not flying. Other things to take into account are: How much other traffic have you got, that might displace it if you don't have suficient parking spaces. What percentage you have set in the flightplan, and of course you must have the correct settings in FS. That is, an AI percentage equal or greater than the one set in the aircraft's flightplan and you must, in this particular case, also have GA traffic enabled in the FS settings. If you read the 'Help' in Lee Swordy's AFCAD, if my memory serves me correctly, he provides a hierarchy of criteria that FS uses to decide which aircraft to display and when. I might have missed something here but I'm sure others will fill in any gaps.

Excellent points. Thanks. For simplicity sake, I didn't address them in the example. I was assuming the percentage was above threshold and the parking was adequate and abundant. My main questions was whether AI aircraft "live" while laying over between flights versus being created at some suitable nterval before they are required to depart. In my example, whether you would see the parked aircraft on sunday, for example, as it waits for its tuesday departure each week. Do I understand correctly that your answer says "yes, you would", provided it is not "snuffed out" by aircraft with sufficient parking priority if space becomes limited. is that correct? I will also re-check Swordy's hierarchy--nice tip. My recollection was that it was about where aircraft are parked, if at all. I don't remember whether it addressed what happens to the aircraft as they sit during layovers (especially extended ones). But I will re-read it.

yes the airplane will sit idly at the airport until its next departure time

As Big Al confirms the answer is yes. When I first got into AI I asked myself the same question amongst others, and I wrote some 'test' plans just to see what happened. It was a good way to learn the ropes.good luck

The practical effects listed above are correct.AI aircraft don't "live" and don't actually follow a flight plan.The traffic database file is structured so that Flight Sim queries the database:"At time XX:XX:XX UTC on day DDD starting at point Nnn.nnnnnn Wnn.nnnnnn - list all aircraft which should be within the active grid cells near the reference point grid cell."Initialize all aircraft at the proper location which should be active at this time and list their next flight plan leg."The grids usually are up to 108 nm from your aircraft location.The flight plan is only used to calculate the grid cells where the aircraft should be located at certain times. There is some fine turning when the aircrft is actually initialized in FS.But "time" does not really exist in FS. It starts from scratch building everything fresh when you start a flight or change the time or change airports outside the active AI zone - and ends when you end the flight session.Anything else does not matter.

Thanks Reggie! As I have expressed before, I appreciate your thorough answers (and those of others). I was of course aware that the aircraft don't actually "live" or maintain time across sessions. My question was more about the functional appearance: If you initialize a flight with the time set to (say) 20:00 UTC on Saturday at a specific airport, would you see an AI aircraft that was set to depart that airport on Tuesday morning if the aircraft had no other flight plan obligations between Saturday and Tuesday? It sounds like you would, which makes the little flight plan I was planning to create and upload a bit more interesting.As I recall, you are an AI guru of considerable skill. If you are interested in learning more about what I am up to, PM or email me and i'll fill you in. I could use your input or assistance. No need to outline it all here, but it should be fun.

"would you see an AI aircraft that was set to depart that airport on Tuesday morning if the aircraft had no other flight plan obligations between Saturday and Tuesday? It sounds like you would" Correct.One of the tricks we use in the AI community involves 'static' AI aircraft. I have a special traffic file just for these. My PHNL is an example - with Bill Melchar's scenery I have two Dash-8's which park head into a maintenance hanger, I have a B767 using the ARNZ-AIS system with all the associated ground equipment. I have another airliner parked in a maintenance hanger.Rather than add these aircraft as scenery objects - they exist in a traffic file - with special parking codes for each and a special fltsim.x section. The flight plans are one flight from PHNL to PHOG at 0130-0330 local time once per week - a different night for each aircraft.So whenever I go to PHNL any time but 0130-0330 - the 'static' aircraft are all in their proper place.I've got about 200 similarly configured statics at various airports around the world. Some are models which don't fly worth a #### which I haven't gotten around to fixing.Some are display aircraft actually parked at spots not connected to the runways - I'm working the the Dyess AFB beautiful static display in my spare time right now.