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New AI Flight Planning Tool

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That would do it! Since others are liable to do the same thing, perhaps I should use the "Starts At Airport" field for advisory purposes only and enable the "From" field on the first leg of a new flight plan only. I need to think about this some more.

Re distance/duration/ETA, all I do at the moment is divide the distance between the two airports by the cruising speed of the designated aircraft and add 15 minutes. As you've noticed, that's very crude. (Lee Swordy's method is not documented in the TTools source code he released.) I'd be pleased to hear your ideas on predicting arrival time.

Don
 
Hi Don,

As you've raised the topic now I was curious as to how you calculate the distance between the two airports as the flightplans I am putting in come from the website of a small carrier in southwest England and on their website they say 'Flying time is 15 minutes' refering to one of their destinations. As AIFP is calculating a 31 minute flight time it doubles the theoretical time. So I used an orthodromic calculator (available on Avsim) to work out the distance between the two airports and to calculate the time it should take. The results were quite surprising as the OrthoCalc made the distance 26NM whereas AIFP made it 39NM. As you've now told me how the flight time is calculated it explains the doubling of the time but the distance still remains an enigma. I don't know how you could fit adding a varying time depending on distance, perhaps, as it would make the calculations much more complicated but, as you can see, on a short flight it could be quite an issue. I love writing flight plans for island hopping carriers and some of them are quite short. Just some thoughts to ponder, as I said earlier it's probably best to get AIFP working well before addressing these sorts of refinements

Colin
 
gadgets said:
That would do it! Since others are liable to do the same thing, perhaps I should use the "Starts At Airport" field for advisory purposes only and enable the "From" field on the first leg of a new flight plan only. I need to think about this some more.
Click to expand...

Don,

A good way would be to disable the field after the first leg is saved, but add another button to allow "Change Origin Airport". The functionality would stay, but it would need an extra action and so the chance to do it by error is reduced.

As for the date field error: this was on Vista 32. Again, I entered four characters in the field, then went to the next. I was able to go back into the date field with Control Tab key, but not with the mouse. When I tried with the mouse, I get the error message and ended up in the same field.
 
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Colin, I'm happy to put in any reasonable calculation.

My distance calculation is purely great circle distance, so I don't know how the orthodromic calculator managed to make the distance less. I'll download it and run some comparisons.

As for the 15 min increment, airline schedules are gate-to-gate, so I added an arbitrary amount to account for taxi time. It usually gets to within ten minutes of the scheluded arrival times for the flights I've programmed so far. Maybe I need to add an option to include taxi time.

Martin, sounds like a "Vista-special" to me. I assume the error message you receive when you attempt to position the cursor back into the erroneous field with the mouse is the same as the earlier message (and not one related to the second field). To which field do you move the mouse when you get the error message the first time? If to the other time field (which, if also erroneous would generate an identical error message), try going to, say, the altitude field instead and see if you get the same result. In any case, I hope it become a non-issue in the next release where I reposituion the cursor to the erroneous field automatically (assuming Vista accepts it). BTW, thanks for the suggestion on how to handle the "Starts at Airport" field.

Don
 
Colin, I've now confirmed that my great circle distance calculator is "sick". Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

Martin, earlier you suggested that I disable "Add Leg" once the cycle was complete. I can't do that, because a given flight plan may include more than one cycle, e.g., A -> B -> C -> A -> D -> C. Yes, as soon as you enter fourth leg, the Starts-at Airport will change to "D", but it will change back to "C" when the fifth leg is entered. (This may not be what's happening now, but that's what should happen.) To avoid the C-D-C switch in start-at airport, I'd have regard this entry as "gospel" and make the user either confrom the flight plan or change the starts-at airport. I need to consider the ramifications of doing this.

Don
 
gadgets said:
I assume the error message you receive when you attempt to position the cursor back into the erroneous field with the mouse is the same as the earlier message (and not one related to the second field). To which field do you move the mouse when you get the error message the first time?
Click to expand...

Just discovered your question....

Your assumption is right. I was going from "Departure time" to the "To" field (I am doing this by heart - the next field to the right). It is no time field.
 
I think I've found a way to implement use of local times for arrivals and departures. So, I'm going to spend the next couple of days exploring it.

Fortunately, this won't involve major surgery; the time zone processing is confined to only two routines. Keep your fingers crossed guys.

Don
 
Local times are now useable. I also took the opportunity to make the coding more robust in some areas - which is why it's been a week without a new release. I expect to complete testing of the new release later today.

You'll like it!

Don
 
A new beta release (0.6) has been uploaded.

This new release contains some very significant changes - both internal and external. So, please read the "Notes for Beta Testers" included in the release before installing the new version.

I'm hopeful that we are now very close to release. While I wouldn't say my regression testing has been exhaustive, it certainly has been comprehensive. The release seems well-behaved.

As always, thanks for your efforts.

Don
 
Hi Don,

Have downloaded and run your latest beta.
I've used the same flight plans as before but have upped the aircraft count to five and the flight plans cover the entire summer schedule for the carrier for 2008. I'm pleased to say that everything went perfectly. Not being able to save the leg data till all all boxes had been filled was a notable improvement and your distance calculator is also much improved. Unfortunately I won't be able to do more testing for a week or so as I will be away for that time but my first run through gives AIFP an emphatic thumbs up.
Thanks for your continued work on a valuable piece of software.

Colin
 
Don,

I will give it a test ride today evening. I had a very quick look at it and this is what happens when I click on ETA:

Departure Airport: EDTG
Target Aiport: ETAR
Departure time: 10:00

ETA produces an Arrival Time of: -7479:-27+1 (which in consequence leads to an error). Since Colin has not seen it, might this be related to comma/point as the separator?
 
Thanks, Colin. The problem with distance/duration was that I was feeding the lat/lon to the great circle distance calcultor in the wrong order. As well, I have confirmed that I'm using the same algorithm as TTools, i.e., (distance/cruise speed) + 15 min.

Martin, I can't duplicate the problem even using a comma for a separator in time. Please chack that the airport name as well as the ICAO code is filled in automatically in the airport fields. My system reports distance as 92 nm and calcualtes duration and arrival time correctly. What, exactly did you type for departure time? What is the repeat period? What time zone are you using? If local time, please check that the correct UTC offset is shown in the Airport List.

Don
 
Don,

I neither :o I realize that this is the second time we have this problem. Only last time I lost track of it because there was another release from you.

What is happening is that it works beautiful on my German language Vista Flightsim PC with regional settings for German.

It does not work on my notebook where I sometimes happen to look into this forum from work ;) That setup is and English XP with German regional settings (if I am not mistaken, I confirm tomorrow).

So the good news is here it works. Still it is strange, because it should to so no matter what OS and regional setting, right?
 
Martin, next time it happens, please record exactly what was entered for time and see if the distance and duration values are reasonable.

Thanks,
Don
 
German XP with German regional settings produces the same error.
 
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Don,

The screen shot from my last post was from my home laptop (German XP with German regionla settings).

The identical failure occurs on my work laptop (arrival time string is -7479:-27+1), which is running an English XP with German regional settings.

I have no error on my desktop which is running a German Vista Professional with German regional settings.

Aside from that the main difference of these machines is that on the desktop FSX is installed. But your program is not depending on any other installation, right?

If you are following the discussion on the current release of ADE you may have noticed that we as well face a regional setting problem which only happens under special conditions. So maybe you want to have a chat with Jon if you feel this might be related.
 
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Thanks, Martin. I've now managed to duplicate it using German settings with XP. It's a general (in AIFP) time formatting problem. Now, I've got to find it.
Don
 
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