Why is there no flight plan export anymore

[aivlasoft]

I will try to explain "the big picture" why there is no flight plan export anymore for PMDG and other data formats.

 

Reason one ...
According to the well known saying "as real as it gets" we decided to no longer develop a wealth of flight plan exporters, simply because in real world an EFB is not the source for flight plans which shall be imported by an FMC.

 

In real world the FMC gets the flight plan from the dispatch office (via data transfer). The FMC is the 'master' and any route changes which are made therein (using the CDU/MCDU keys) will automatically be reflected by a built-in EFB. This is the basic idea that we would like to follow.

 

You might have already experienced that EFB v2 is introducing the possibility of 'uplink a flight plan'. The uplink feature is the basic feature for realizing the idea mentioned above. Currently only new flight plans can be uplinked into EFB, but with one of the next versions it is planned to expand the uplink feature to allow changes while a flight is in progress. As soon as this is working properly we want to encourage the developers of the aircraft which are having FMCs (Airbus, Boeing etc.), to write any route changes to the EFB uplink folder. If they will support this idea, all will work like in real world where the FMC is the master and the EFB will be updated "automagically".

 

Reason two ...
Since a few years PFPX (as a desktop solution) and SimBrief (as a browser based solution) are established as the 'standard' programs for flight planning. They allow to save flight plans in almost every available flight plan format. Both of them support many more data formats than could ever be provided by AivlaSoft. Due to the fact that all these 'exporters' are already existing and because of having limited resources in programming I decided to better focus on the 'uplink-strategy', instead of "re-inventing the wheel" by programming countless flight plan exporters.

 

However, for technically interested people who are capable of programming in C#, or VB.net, it is possible to write a flight plan exporter themselves. On request, we can provide the necessary information about the interface definition and the required code to anyone who is asking for.