Electronic Flight Bag & FSInn

[felice52]

Hallo

 

When I am flying online on vatsim I have to submit my flight plan as ATS Routing. Checking the flight plan on VAT-Spy after connection with the network I see the flight plan as submitted.

 

After the selection and activation of the corresponding SID for takeoff or a STAR for landing and checking the flight plan again on VATSpy, I often see the detailed route with all the Navigation Fixes including all waypoints of the selected SID or the STAR.

 

Normally the ATC Controllers are not happy if they see such detailed routes. I am searching for a solution to that problem.

 

Any idea how to solve that? Has this something to do with the activation of the «Create Garmin GPS flight plans» option? Must I deactivate this option? As I often fly with the PC12, I am using EFB as main GPS navi-gation source on IFR flights. Deactivating the Garmin GPS option would pose some other problems for me to solve.

 

I am running FSX and the Data Provider on one PC with W7 Prof, the Display Unite on a second PC with XP Prof and on a laptop there is FSInn and VAT-Spy running (W7 Home).

 

Best regards

Felix

[aivlasoft]

Hi Felix,

 

can you post an example of what you currently get our of EFB and what you would like to get, so I can see what could be possible in a future release.

[GG_Flyer]

Hi Felix,

 

Could you also post what those pesky VATSIM controllers are expecting to see?? (I write this knowing that some "pesky" VATSIM controllers read here. Hello )

 

Are they looking for the .pln file details, or would they prefer the "route strings"?

 

Regards,

[wycliffe]

Hi being a pesky VATSIM controller let me see if I can help.

 

If your flying IFR basically we require a real world flight plan. The flightplans created by FSX are just not adequate enough as they dont take into account airways, generally they go from VOR to VOR. Totally useless.

 

Now being a UK controller I will use a UK flightplan to demonstsrte exactly what I would want to see in your flight plan.

 

Lets take one of my personal favourite flights EGFF_EGPF at FL280, using James Reynolds excellent SimSRD application here is the route from the latest airac

 

BCN N864 WAL DCT POL N601 MARGO LANAK1A

 

This is exactly what I would like to see submitted.

 

this is the plan found by Routefinder

 

BCN UN864 NITON UY98 NOKIN UY99 RIBEL UN601 MARGO

 

Which is also perfectly acceptable.

 

That said if you submit a plan and a controller thinks its wrong he will ask you to resubmit, if you have difficulty creating or ammending a plan most controllers will even offer to ammend it for you. Its at thispoint in efb you would need to edit the plan so that you follow exactly whats displayed on EFB.

 

i hope that answers your question.

 

Wycliffe

[GG_Flyer]

Wycliffe,

 

Would the addition of the "AIRPORT DCT" [route goes here] and the "DCT AIRPORT" as in the following:

 

EGFF DCT BCN UN864 NITON UY98 NOKIN UY99 RIBEL UN601 MARGO DCT EGPF

 

... be acceptable as well, or is the atypical VATSIM controller only keen to know the route?

 

(I'm certainly glad we aren't visited by the persnickety type of VATSIM controllers who undoubtedly care equally about the font face and size and colours.)

 

Regards,

[dts]

EGFF DCT BCN UN864 NITON UY98 NOKIN UY99 RIBEL UN601 MARGO DCT EGPF

 

in the route you file there is no need to put the airfields ie EGFF or EGPF as this is already filed elsewhere with your flight plan, and to be honest most controllers would probably delete it from your routing.

 

The DCT part is an integral part of flight plans so this is acceptable, however if an airfield has SID/STARs then these would be the expected departure routing rather than a straight DCT, they shouldn't be refused but you may have to wait for spacing on departures as the SID's tend to be there to separate traffic and ensure an even traffic flow.

 

the flight plan that Wycliffe filed has the 1st waypoint as BCN (Breacon), if you look at the charts for this, you will see that there is a number of different SID's available so just having BCN is the way that 99% of european flight plan are filed so there is no need to put the SID into the route, controllers can determine what SID you want by also knowing the departure runway as 1 goes hand in hand with the other.

 

For Info,

 

Many may not have installed controller clients to watch traffic but Euroscope utilises the information that the pilots enter to give the controller additional information based on what is filed, so having a standard routing helps them out especially when busy, so if controllers moan or say something is incorrect, then a quick question to them via text should get a sensible answer to what they expect.

 

but to be honest if you filed your flight plans as below you shouldn't get any trouble from any controller anywhere in the world, as it shows exactly where you want to fly.

 

BCN UN864 NITON UY98 NOKIN UY99 RIBEL UN601 MARGO

 

happy to answer any questions that people want to know,

 

Dave

[wycliffe]

Good morning

 

If I saw EGFF DCT and EGPF DCT in a plan I would ammend the plan and take it out.

 

The pilot would be given his clr

 

Clr to Glasgow BCN1A dep initial alt 600ft squawk 3601

 

Euroscope automatically assigns the correct SID and Initial alt with the handy plugin by Craig Phillips, UKAssistant, based on wind and runway in use. So a twr controller just doesnt need that stuff atthe begining of a flightplan.

 

If for example after receiving their clearance the pilot reports bact to TwR, "unable to comply with SID, request vectors to BCN"

 

The plan still would stand as BCN blah blah but now if only twr is on, the instruction would be.

 

"after dpearture climb runway heading 3500 ft the turn right track BCN"

 

It is now the responsibility of the pilot to get himself to his first waypoint BCN.

 

Seemples

 

http://www.comparethemeerkat.com will explain seemples.

 

Any further questions just holler.

 

Wycliffe

[wycliffe]

Mr Saunders beat me to it. But between us you get the picture.

 

Wycliffe

[GG_Flyer]

Felix,

 

So once you have your route set in EFB, go to the Route Setup screen, and press the "Copy" button to copy your route string into your PC's clipboard.

 

Then you can paste it, and edit out the AIRPORT DCT and DCT AIRPORT tokens.

 

EFB Version 1.3.0 will include the ability to include/exclude the SID and STAR names in the generated route string, as well as to include/exclude the airport ICAO code.

 

[attachment=0]ATS_2.jpg[/attachment]

 

Regards,

[felice52]

Hallo again

 

Here are an example what I trying to express in my first post.

 

Today I flew from LIRP to LSZH. The flight plan I took from VATrout using the facility provided within EFB.

 

The flight plan from VATrout reads as follows: FRZ UL995 CANNE UZ657 KELIP

 

This is what I see on the ATS Routing window in EFB

 

[attachment=2]EFB_initial.jpg[/attachment]

 

and what I am submitting via FSInn (2) on connecting to the VATSIM Network.

 

[attachment=1]flugplan fsinn.jpg[/attachment]

 

Checking VATSpy (3) the route looks the same.

 

[attachment=0]vatspy 1.jpg[/attachment]

 

more on the next post

[felice52]

After activating the Flight Plan in EFB the routing is getting more detailed (adding all NAV Fixes) as needed to fly that route with help of the GPS. But this information is also forwarded to the VATSIM Network. After selecting and activation of the SID for LIRP this changes to (4) an on VATspy (5).

[attachment=1]Flugplan mit SID.jpg[/attachment]

[attachment=0]vatspy 2.jpg[/attachment]

 

What the Controllers want to see is the route string plain out of VATrout or equivalent (e.g. Vroutes) as on Print Screen 1,2and 3. I have to add that there was no controller online to add the SID to the flight plan on the VATSIM Server.

 

For me it seems that EFB is writing something into FSX and FSInn is reading that information and pushing the changed information onto the Network Servers. Maybe Wycliffe has more information on the internals of FSInn and what is happening here?

 

Thank you for your patience.

Regards

Felix

[aivlasoft]

Hi Felix,

 

I don't know much about FSInn and the automatism that is "built-in", so I can't give an advice on that behaviour.

 

One must distinguish between a detailed route (which is used by the GPS system to fly as accurate as possible along a predefined route) and an ATS route description, which is in fact a more or less compressed route description. EFB provides both of them.

 

a) if you press "Activate", a detailed flightplan (as detailed as possible, it depends whether a SID, STAR, Approach is already defined) will be written as an FSX flight plan file. This "flightplan" contains all the waypoints like in your screenshot 1 (with [icpt] etc.). This detailed flightplan is used by the GPS system.

 

on the Route-Setup dialog you will find a button named "Copy" beside the ATS route description. Pressing this button you will get the ATS description into the clipboard from where you can paste it into a pilot client software to upload your flightplan to the ATC service. Using this way you wont get a lot of waypoints from a procedure instead of the "clean" route.

[wycliffe]

Hi

 

I have spent a little time thinking about this and whilst not haveing an indepth knowledge of the inner workings of FSinn something did occur to me that might help.

 

My thoughts have lead me to the simple fact that there seems to be some confusion re the construction of flight plans. we need to remember that we might be dealing with svereal flightplan construction routines all of which are valid for their specific use but not in certain instances.

 

Lets think about an FSX flighthplan created using the FSX flightplanner. This wont have all of the fixes and waypoints that we know exist on an AIRAC. So when one creates a flight plan in flightplanner it will have some limited fixes waypoints and plenty of vor's.

 

The main issue with the flightplanner is that it does'nt have airways in it.

 

An FMC in say a payware aircraft such as PMDG or Leveld will have uptodate AIRAC data from navigraph if the pilot has got an account or at the very least an airac which came with the payware aircraft. This will contain all waypoints and fixes in the world.

 

Not only that the airways will also be in that AIRAcC

 

When one creates a flight plan using payware aircraft one normally inputs waypoints and then an airway as in our famous EGFF EGPF route

 

BCN UN864 NITON UY98 NOKIN UY99 RIBEL UN601 MARGO

 

All along the airways there will be numerous waypoints but there is no need to input each individual one into the FMC as it knows where they are along the airway. This is a way of lessening the workload on pilots.

 

VATSIM would expect the flight plan with waypoints and airways and not the whole route string as has been mentioned.

 

So the question is does efb getting it's route from vatroute or route finder cause an issue. Not really but it's not required to put all of the route string in your flightplan submission to Fsinn ofr Suawkbox.

 

Hope my meanderings have helped a little.

 

Wycliffe