AI Flight Planner Altering AirportXX.txt File

[dwitek]

After several years of producing flight plans by hand using Notebook I am learning quickly how much faster and more accurately I can produce plans for customized GA traffic using this great software. I have several questions the first of which I will put into this thread.

I've noticed that upon saving my flight plans the longitude designator gets changed from W (all my airports are in the Western Hempisphere) to S in the Airportxx.txt file. The Airportxx.txt file is fine when I decompile the traffic file via TTools. What I've had to do is save a copy of my Airport_XX.txt file before bringing up AI Flight Planner so that I don't have to manually change them all back. I then compile the flight plans through TTools. If I don't change all the S's back to W's TTools rejects the Airport file and will not compile the data. Once I change the longitude designator to W, TTools compiles the plans normally and they work fine.

I use FS9 and am using the latest AI Flight Planner that I just downloaded and updated this past weekend (1.6.02). I store my Aircraft, Airport, and FlightPlan files in a directory other than where I installed AI Flight Planner.

Any thoughts on what is causing this?

[bobbyjack]

dwitek

The first thing I do with a new version of AIFP, or after adding an airport, is go to "Find/Collect Airports" in the Airport pull down menu. I do not use the provided data base, in case I have changed coordinates. I never have changed anything, but there it is. Actually, done it both ways, seem to work OK. Anyway , let AIFP build and save an Airport DAT file. That will be the file AIFP works with.

I don't use FS9 any more, so I don't know if there is some problem compiling FS9 plans. I've never seen that with FSX.

When everything works, there is no reason to even think about Ttools again.

[dwitek]

That was my next step, to let AIFP do the compile. Thanks, I'll give it a try.

[gadgets]

dwitek, the only use AIFP makes of the airport.txt file is to get positional information for non-stock airports that have not previously been collected (as Bob noted). The only reason the airport.txt file is generated is for backwards compatibility with TTools. But, since AIFP includes a compiler, I suspect few make use of this facility - which is probably why the problem has remained undetected for so long.

I have confirmed I can reproduce it and will fix it in the next release.

Don

[dwitek]

Glad to help but now that I have worked a bit this evening with AIFP doing the compiling I see that it is much easier to do it that way. I found that if I wanted to save the .txt files for whatever reason I can just decompile the .bgl file when I want to.

I even used the function of adding a new plane to the aircraft list and using it in a flightplan.

Thanks for your support and for the great tool.