Flight Plan Resources

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

The push to make our flying environment even more real is increasing. Little known, but great tools exist that can assist you in using the programs available to us to make your flying enviornment even more realistic by using airline timetables direct from the lines themselves. These you can place on your desktop and reference as you build scheduled services from any of those served by the real airlines.United's: http://www.ual.com/site/primary/0,10017,1891,00.htmlAmerican's: http://www.aa.com/content/aboutAA/AAProduc...chorEvent=falseNorthwest's: http://www.nwa.com/travel/timetable/KLM's: http://www.klm.com/nl_en/plan_book/timetab...dable/index.jspand I am sure there are many many others. So, if you want things to be "as real as they get", then these are excellent places to start. Oh, and if you do create flightplans, do upload them to AVSIM to share with your fellow AI enthusiasts!

[XWRed5 0]

Tom,I'm going to chip in here because by parsing these timetables with a computer program is exactly how I generate many of my AI flightplans.People will also find timetables at...http://www.startimetable.com/StarAlliance.pdfhttp://www.britishairways.com/travel/ba.js...gb/public/en_gbhttp://www.alaskatimetable.com/AS.pdfhttp://www.frontierairlines.com/pdf/072602TT.pdfTake care,Ian

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

I was wondering about that. I took a look at the download version of the UA schedules and couldn't find a convenient database file to work with. I assumed that if I were to use any of the UA stuff, as an example, that I would manually have to do the conversion from the timetable via yRoute. Are you saying that you could parse the entire UA schedule, as an example, and come up with a replicate plan for inclusion in the flightplan.txt?

[XWRed5 0]

In a nutshell, yep, that's what I do in all of my uploaded plans.UA is a bad example, but take AA (that was my first and one of the easiest). I convert the timetable to raw text, parse it to produce a list of every flight listed in the timetable. Then I go through and remove the duplicates (flights that leave on a different time on tuesdays and fridays) match up flights and push them together (to optimise aircraft usage and minimise aircraft sitting at gates).I need a fair bit of conversion data, IATA airport code to ICAO, timezones and longitude (to work out the flight levels). I had to get a whole load of new airport data and I can automatically add aircraft to the aircraft.txt file.I then found that I could compile any flightplans providing I could get the schedule data in my own format. Then a friend gave me a load of data from where he works (it was a bit old though) and I was able to use that to create WorldAI.Since then I've been tweaking away at it and WorldAI2 is on the brink of completion.Ian (Webber)

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

Ian, well, I will be looking forward to that! When do you anticipate releasing it?

[XWRed5 0]

Within 2 weeks, maybe sooner. I'm on final testing and writing the readme's.

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

Sounds great! Have you aircraft suggestions or inclusions to go along with the plans?

[XWRed5 0]

Unfortunately not, this process generates (about) 1100 required aircraft to fully realise the plans. Obviously you don't *need* all of them, just the ones you want. I personally have a spread of heavies from around the world and a load of smaller aircraft for the European and US regions. However, if one wanted to concentrate on the Far East then the plans are there and waiting for aircraft.PAI work great, as do default repaints. Some of the aircraft types are quite esoteric and not widely available (Aurigny Trislander anyone?, I'm using an FS98 model that looks awful and flys like a yo yo) so I've offered advice but not much more.In time, as PAI models get repainted and others start simple AI traffic model GMax aircraft I'm hoping things will become even more interesting.I'm a Software Engineer so writing programs to parse timetables is no problem but repainting and designing aircraft models is completely out of my league. :-)

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

:-lol Well, at least you can claim to be a "techno-weenie-geek-a-zoid". I can't lay claim to even the "techno" part of that. Okay, am looking forward to your efforts. BTW.. the PSS 320's work as great AI a/c!

[Guest H_Kev55]

Forgive me for asking, but hasn't PAI already done alot of this work for us?Kev

[Guest RONVKING]

Hi Ian,Look forward to the results. I got as far as using the first set of plans, stripping them to single legs and weeding out the duplicates but have got stuck in trying to working out a way to put them back with minimum ground time and not exceed any limits (ie dont have a return trip lasting 25hrs for a 24hr repeat).What I did, as not a software gingerbeer, was to use dbase as that has a "RONKING" friendly editor.Rgds Ron

[XWRed5 0]

"techno-weenie-geek-a-zoid" - my mother would be so proud.:-)