AI Flight Planner

PLEASE BE AWARE . . .

WoAI Always Installs FS9 Traffic Files

As noted on the "Issues" page, FS9 and FSX traffic files should not be mixed. If they are, any FSX traffic is suppressed. At time of writing (mid-March, 2009), MAIW packages include FS9 traffic files only. Even when you specify installation for FSX, a FS9 traffic file is installed.

Consequently, if you are running FSX and have any FSX traffic files that you want to generate traffic, your first step after installing a MAIW package should be to convert the new traffic file (usually located in the FSX\Scenery\World\sceney folder) for FSX operation using AI Flight Planner's "Files / Convert FS9 traffic Files to FSX" menu item. If you have trouble locating the new traffic file, use AI Flight Planner's "Files / Find FS9 Traffic Files" feature.

Prepared Flight Plans

Also as discussed on the AI Traffic File Issues page, if an AI aircraft is scheduled to arrive more than about 37 minutes later than departure time plus leg distance divided by the aircraft cruise speed, the aircraft will not materialize for landing. Instead, it will spawn in a parking spot at the destination airport prior to departure for the next leg.

To address this problem, some providers of AI flight planning add-on packages, such as Military AI Works (MAIW) and AIG Alpha-India Group, reduce the cruise speed of all jet passenger and other aircraft to a value (in the order) of 200 kt, thus ensuring that the AI-engine-calculated arrival time will be later than any reasonable user-specified ETA. This artificial cruise speed also causes the arrival times calculated by AI Flight Planner to be very late, forcing you to override ETAs in every case.

So, when using such prepared flight plan information, you should restore the cruise speed of all aircraft to the value in the relevant aircraft.cfg file. The Restore Cruise Speed item in AI Flight Planner's Aircraft menu makes this a single-step process.

Day-of-Week Encoding

In FS9, the day-of-week encoding scheme for weekly flight plans uses 0 for Sunday, 1 for Monday and so on to 6 for Saturday. For FSX, Microsoft changed the day-encoding to 0 for Monday and 6 for Sunday.

AI Flight Planner uses the FS9 day-encoding scheme for all flight plans, letting the compiler handle the different schemes.

Compilers

There are three different AI flight plan compilers in widespread use:

• TTools, a compiler/decompiler for FS9 and earlier versions of MSFS,
• AIFPC, a TTools-compatible compiler/decompiler for FS9 and FSX (AI Flight Planner includes the AIFPC compiler/decompiler), and
• Traffic DataBase Builder (TDBB), Microsoft's AI traffic generation utility for FS9 and FSX, available in the SDK.

and now, AI Flight Planner.

The source data formats used by TDBB are very different from those used by the others.

There is a common misconception that flight plans for FS9 must be in TTools format and those for FSX must be developed using TDBB. And, often, you will hear "FS9 flight plans can't be used with FSX". But, the reality is, TTools flight plans compiled for FS9 are compatible with FSX. And TDBB, to the surprise of many, was available in (and generates traffic file compatible with) FS9 as well as FSX.

We welcome your questions, comments and suggestions regarding AI Flight Planner and this website. Please feel free to contact us at aifp@shaw.ca. AI Flight Planner's support forum is located in the "Tools support" area at http://fsdeveloper.com.