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What is - most likely - included in FV 1.16


pellelil

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Beside a few bug-fixes, database-updates and naturally a bunch of updated flightplans, the theme for version 1.16 will be filters. In version 1.15 I introduced the flightplan filter in the main form. Once I had made this filter I felt the same feature was missing in the search-leg form to filter the content not only of the flightplan listview, but also the airline and aircraft -listviews. But as you can see from the screen-shot below many other changes have been added to the search-leg form (some of it is still work-in-progress):

 

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The 3 filters in the top, simply filters what is displayed in the 3 listviews and makes it more easy to select the flightplans, airlines and aircraft to include in the search. In this example screen-shot the airlines listview is filtered to only show airlines from Netherland, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. Likewise the aircraft listview is filtered to only show freight aircraft with a MTOW (Maximum Take-Off Weight) greater than 190000 lbs. Below the airline and aircraft listview you will see two new entry field. Here you are able to enter a filter-text which allows you to only include flights with certain flight-numbers and/or serviced by aircraft with certain registration-codes. I don't think many of you would need this feature, but if you want to, it will be there 🙂

 

As you can see the right-most part of the form have been made wider. This was done primarily to have room for the new "Which airport(s)" combo-boxes for each of the 3 items: Size, Rwy-length and Elevation. These combo-boxes lets you choose which airports to include in the criteria (Either, Both, Departure or Destination). If "N/A" is selected as seen here, these 3 items are not active.

 

Making the screen wider allowed me to add something I have wanted to add for some time, and that is criteria for Departure- and Arrival-time. In this screen-shot the Start- and End-times are identical meaning this criteria is currently not active. However if you want to avoid flights arriving in the day, you could set the Arrival time to be in the interval between 21:00 and 03:00. For each time-interval you can specify if the entered time is in UTC or in Local-time (it will default to whatever you have specified in the settings form). This is one of the features still pending, so nothing is set in stone as of yet.

 

In the Airport-1/2 group-boxes the eagle-eyed among you might have noticed the text-entry field have been replace by a (MRU) combo-box, and in stead of only being able to enter a comma separated list of ICAO-codes, you can now enter a more complex filter-text. The Country-, Region- and Sub-region combo-boxes are still in use, and as you can see in the screen-shot for Airport-1: "Europe" have been selected as the Region. However these combo-boxes only allow you to pick a single country, region or sub-region. If you look in the Airport-2 group-box, you can see in the airport filter that the text "country=usa/can" have been used to select both USA and Canada (which would be impossible using the country combo-box). I still have some even "wierd'er" ideas to add to these filters, perhaps not for the 1.16 release - time will tell 😉

 

Last but not least, if you look in the Action group-box (in the lower/right corner of the form) a new button with a question-mark have been added. Pressing this button will launch a brand new filter-manual, that only contains information about the filters. The first pages of this manual contains general information that apply to all filters, and then there will be links to sections with the specifics of each filter (Flightplan, Airline, Aircraft, Airport ... ). This manual can also be accessed from the menu on the main-form.

 

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For those who might want to browse through the filter-manual in its current form use the link below. Nothing is set in stone, and I still have a few ideas I would like to implement into some of the filters:
http://www.liljendal.dk/portals/1/files/tmp2020/FV Filter Manual.pdf

 

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Just found and fixed a nasty bug in the "Legs" tab-page of the Airport-info form, that I am surprised no one (including myself) have noticed before. I am currently implementing and testing the new criteria in the leg-search form to only include flights departing and/or arriving within a specified time-interval. However this feature appeared to not work as it should, and I kept looking for a bug in the filtering-algorithm that eluded me for hours. In the end it turned out the bug was not in the filtering-algorithm, but in stead in the code that generate the lines shown in the In/Out-bound list-views on the "Legs" tab-page of the Airport-info form. When configured to show the departure- and destination-times as local times, it used the same time-zone for both departure- and destination-airport even if these airports were located in different time-zones.

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In the runways tab-page of the Airport-info form I added 2 columns showing the head- and cross-wind for each runway based on the 2 wind-values above the list-view (Wind-direction and Wind-speed) and the heading of the runway. The values of wind-direction/heading can be set manually, but are automatically set whenever the METAR message is updated:

 

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So if you are manually picking the runway for take-off/landing you should ideally pick a runway with a positive head-wind (negative values are naturally tail-wind), and a small value for cross-wind.

 

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The Generic randomizer form already had a button to pick a random flight (picked among the flights of the selected flightplan, or active search). To this form I added an additional button that allows you to pick a random route.

 

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The important difference between the two is not so much that one pick a flight, whereas the other pick a route. The major difference is the statistical chance of a route being picked. Today I wanted to take my (Aerosoft) CJR Professional for a spin. Its bin a while since I flew it the last time, and I did a search for all flights among my 3rd party airports serviced by the CRJ-700/900/1000 (as visible in the map-view above). I then opened the Randomizer form and pressed the "Pick random flight" button a few times. However I noticed that even though there was not as many routes served by the CRJs in "the States", these routes were picked more often that the European. Lets say you perform a search that reveals 2 routes where one is served by 50 different flights, and the other is only served by a 2 flights. Hence every time you pick a random flight, there will be a MUCH higher chance the picked flight will be serving the first route (the route with 50 flights), and naturally is MUCH lesser chance that the picked flight will be serving the 2nd route (with only 2 flights).

 

Hence I decided to add this new button (selecting a random route). Pressing this button (as seen in the screen-shot) a random route will be picked no matter how many flight are servicing that route. Hence in the previous example there will be equal chance to pick the first route (serviced by 50 aircraft) as picking the 2nd route (only sericed by 2 aircraft). In stead of opening the Leg-Info form, the Route-info form is opened in stead. This form shows (based on the selected flightplan/active-search) all flights servicing that route. Here you can simply double click one of the legs in the list-view, and that leg (flight) will be displayed in the Leg-info form, form where you can transfer data of the selected flight into SimBrief to start preparing your paper work for that flight.

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The new filters have also been added to the Re-process Flightplans- and Choose favorite aircraft-types -forms. Additional columns have been added to the latter:

 

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The "Copy to clipboard" buttons on the Leg-Info-, and the METAR/TAF-decode -forms have been replaced by a "Show as Report" button that opens the Result-viewer form from where the text can be copied to the clipboard if you need to:

 

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In the report-viewer I have added at "Top-most" check-box. When checked this form will be shown "top-most" (on top of other forms, including forms of other programs). This allows you to have the report-viewer window shown on top of the flight-simulator or a flight-planner window in case you need to enter data from this form into other programs (remember to un-check the check-box or close the window, when you don't want it "top-most" anymore). Here in this screen-shot the Report-viewer is showing info regarding a selected leg (flight), in case you need to enter some of the data into the FMC/MCDU:

 

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The METAR/TAF-decoder form is now allowing the user to enter a METAR/TAF-message and then having it decoded. Also the main-menu now have a menu-item to open this form directly, in case you need to decode a METAR/TAF-message obtained elsewhere. Here below its shown decoding the example METAR-message from Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METAR.

 

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A filter have been added to the Gate tab-page of the Airport-info form. When just entering a simple filter (as in the screen-shot below) it will filter both the list-view and the map to only show gates that contains the filter-text in the name/number or list of airline-codes. The default airports in FSX/P3D don't contain an airline list for each gate, so searching for airline-codes will only work for 3rd party airports that contain this list. In this example I searched for "RYR" (ICAO-code for "RYAN AIR") to find all suitable gates at EKCH (based on the newly released FlyTampa EKCH V2):

 

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Implementation of this filter is WIP (Work-In-Progress) and currently it only works with the default filter searching within the gate-number/names and the airline-list. However I will expand this filter to also search for Category (Gate, Parking, Dock), Type (e.g. GA, RampCargo, GateSmall, GateMedium, GateHeavy), Radius of the gate (e.g. "Radius>=30") and so on.

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For those of you who download and install AIG flightplans yourself things will be a little more easy from version 1.16. It is still WIP, but the basic functionality is implemented:

 

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Top-most in the screen you select the the season to import from. It will automatically default to the latest season (hence in this example Winter 2019-2020. Looking at the values in the (right-most) status column the program will automatically detect and select flightplans you have not installed or flightplans that are availble for a new season or in a newer revision (e.g. the name is postfixed by "v2", "v3" or whatever). When you click the "Download" button you will be asked which folder to download the files to, on once you accept the selected flightplans will be downloaded.

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Fantastic features coming up I see! I'm excited about 1.16 :) I've imported quite many older AIG flightplans to pick some older flights to fly so it's great to see a built-in feature to be implemented.

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The build-in download feature is limited to year 2018 and later. The reason for this is filename structure used before 2018 was less "structured", and the program needs a structured naming convention in order to be able to extract: season, year and revision (version) from the file name. It uses this information in order to populate status-column which tells if the flightplan on the server is newer/older than the one already installed. So if you need to install flightplans older than 2018 or fligthplans for other sources that AIG you are still on your own, to download these.

 

However the pre-imported flightplans bundled with Flightplan Visualizer still contains a fair amount of flightplans from 2015(2), 2016(7) and especially 2017. Over time as AIG releases new/updated flightplans for the airlines in question these older flightplans gets replaced with newer ones. I had planed to include the defunct flightplans in the installer for 1.16 (as some people might want to fly these still), but I am in stead thinking of making these available as a separate download (as I guess only a few wants them).

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Oh okay, still a nice feature regardless! What about Eric Steinmetz's Summer 2017 business jet plans from Avsim? I noticed it has a lot of operators that are not included with Flightplan Visualizer's business jet package. 

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Regarding the year (2018) it is listed in the settings-file, so by manually altering the settings-file (there is no GUI for this value) you could download older flightplans using FV. But if you do alter the settings file for this purpose, you should know that you can then not "trust" the value displayed in the status-column.

 

With permission from Eric Steinmetz I imported all his Bizz Jet flightplans (except a single made for a chopper) that was available at the time (as I recall it was 386 BizzJet flightplans). For a few releases these were bundled with the FV installer, but at some point I removed them from the installer and it stead made a a separate package that can be downloaded from AVSIM (using the link below). I don't know if Eric or others have released any new/updated flightplans, nor do I plan to (as I regard this as niche with few interested). So to import more/new BizzJet flightplans you are on your own ... The same goes for military flights 🙂
    
Link for BizzJet package for FV:    
https://library.avsim.net/download.php?DLID=211011

 

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The package in question is this: https://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=fsxai&DLID=202061

Was just wondering why it was left out of the bizjet package but I understand it's certainly a niche. I've imported them myself to Flightplan Visualizer and noticed a couple of things: Sometimes Hawker 700 and 1000 types were not being detected automatically so I had to manually set the aircraft type. Also, one of the plans used a Cessna T303 which was not found in the aircraft database. One neat little feature would be to also show the airline's callsign in the leg info screen (maybe below carrier & operator?).

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I am not aware of that package. When I made the BizJet package for FV I manually downloaded all the flightplans that was available via Erics website. However this website now appear discontinued.

 

I will look into the detection of the hawkers, and the Cessna, to see if something can be done, but not sure it will be for the 1.16 release. But as you have realized since version 1.15 you can now manually pick aircraft-type if it is not automatically being detected. There are no data in the AI traffic-files that directly contain the type of aircraft in use (i.e. no IATA/ICAO-code). In stead the type have to be determined from the name given to the aircraft, and all those who make the flightplans does it differently. AIG is faily constistent, but flightplans from other creators might be more difficult. So even though FV (in my own opinion)  does a good job detecting aircraft it is not perfect (the reason the before mentioned feature was added in 1.15).

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Yes, the dummy aircraft feature is super useful since I don't have to modify the aircraft file before importing if it's not being detected. 99% of the time my imports have been painless anyways and it's easy to set the aircraft type even if it's not being detected :)

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Aucery thanks for pointing out the aircraft that were not being detected (correctly). I ran through all the flightplans from the package you mentioned (just to verify aircraft-detection), and there were a few issues. In one of them "Piaggio" was misspelled as "Piaggo", so there is a good reason why that was not detected - it still won't be 🙂 The Hawker 1000 was already added to the database, however there was a bug in my aircraft-data, so it was not being detected while it should. That was fixed and the Hawker 700 was added as well. The "Mitsubishi MU-300" is now being detected as the "Hawker 400". The "King Air 200" was changed into "King Air 200/250" and the "King Air 350" was changed into "King Air 300/350", and aircraft named accordingly will now be detected as such. All variants of the King Air 90 (e.g. "E90" and "F90) were detected correctly, however to indicate this, the name was changed from "King Air (C90/B100)" into "King Air (65-A90/B90/C90/D90/E90/F90/G90/H90/A100/B100/C100)" - I know its a bit of a mouthful, but it reflects the aircraft being detected 🙂 Regarding the Cessna I came by a "T210" and "T303" that was not detected. Likewise "Dornier Do-328JET" was not being detected as "Dornier 328-300 (Jet)" (it was the "Do-" part that threw the algorithm off track).

 

For those of you who import your own flightplans, when you have installed version 1.16 you should execute the "Re-process flightplans" menu (found in the "Flightplan" menu), and set "Aircraft redetection" to at least "Re-detect all automatically assigned". This will go through your active flightplan and redetect aircraft types once again and correct those that might have been wrongly auto-detected in the past. If you in stead choose "Re-detect all" it will also try to redetect those where you have been forced to choose a substitute aircraft because the correct aircraft was not available when you imported the flightplans (e.g. the "Mitsubishi MU-300"). If you have flightplans in sub-folders that are not activated be sure to activate these first, so the flightplans in those sub-folders gets updated as well. I will make sure that all flightplans bundled with the 1.16 installer will be updated, so no need to manually update these.

 

Should you (or others) come across flightplans containing aircraft that are not being detected - or not being detected correctly - please put flightplans aside, so you can provide them for me to improve the aircraft detection.

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In version 1.16 when you import a flightplan containing aircraft that can not be automatically detected, these will automatically be selected in the Aircraft list-view so if there is only a single, or they are all of the same type, you can simply click the "Change Aircraft type" button to assign a (substitute) airline-type (without having to manually select these):

 

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The video with changes in version 1.16 is now available:

 

I still need to import new/updated flightplans and build the installer. Once build it will be uploaded to AVSIM and then it usually take a day or two before it becomes available. So if all goes well the new version should be available within a few days.

 

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