Don & Jim, (and/or others):
I'm happy to report that after 2 months of sleeping on this and also combing through multiple variables to see what I could come up with, I finally found the "magic bullet" that alters the (IFR) (VFR) moniker on the AI aircraft labels. And it was actually a lot simpler than I thought. I completely overlooked the most obvious thing, and what threw me were the somewhat unrealistic flight levels I had set high and low (all over the board) for each leg. All the while, never realizing that somewhere there's a threshold flight level that strictly divides IFR from VFR status. It took some experimenting to find it, but it's a line drawn between FL 180 and FL 181.
To be more specific, let me display a quick 4 square matrix to illustrate my point:
So long as the global flight rules setting (in the upper right hand corner of the AIFP edit window) is set to IFR, all legs will be IFR regardless of the flight level set for each individual leg. This is because global IFR status trumps everything else-- as in these two edit windows below:
However, if one selects the VFR global flight rules setting in the AIFP edit window, this now opens up the possibility to subdivide flight rules type between the two-- for each individual leg within the flight plan-- depending upon whether the leg has a flight level 180 and below (VFR), or 181 and above (IFR).
If all the FL's are at or below 180, VFR status will prevail:
The plane will go through its day with all legs labeled (VFR):
However, if all the FL's are at or above 181, IFR status will prevail (even though it's globally set to VFR):
The plane will go through its day with all legs labeled (IFR):
The conditions to yield the change were not that complex, they just weren't easy to spot. Where I went wrong was that I set my flight levels for each leg at such random levels, I would have never spotted a pattern based upon threshold-- as seen in this first test sample from late December:
When globally changed to VFR, my 4th, 7th, and 8th legs were the only ones stuck as IFR legs simply because of their altitudes over 18,000'. And it took me nearly two months to spot this.
The levels were all over the map where I had no due regard for flight above or below 18,000 feet-- nor did I think it would make a difference when I went to change the global flight plan from IFR to VFR.
My original intent was to only run this flight plan as a global IFR. It was only after I noticed some runway selection inconsistencies at KSMX (Santa Maria, CA), that I tried changing the FP to global VFR,
and as an unintended consequence, discovered the inconsistency with the flight rules label. Which is what started this whole post back on New Year's Day in the first place. I believe this now sufficiently closes the case.
Finally, I had inadvertently tied KSMX ILS issues into this post. I want to eventually address my findings there as well, but will address them separately, in a few weeks, in a new thread.
I hope this has been helpful to some, and proof that despite my long absence from the thread, I did not give up in finding the answer.
-- John