Creating AI flightplans

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Introduction

It's a typical situation for offline flyers. You arrive at an airport, which is very busy in real life, but in FS there are only a few aircraft there. So there's two ways to solve this, either you go and download some, if there are flightplans available or you make some yourself. I'm going to explain how to do the latter.



Step one: Tools

You need to download following tools to create AI flightplans.

- MRAI Compiler by Arnt Helge Haland

- Editor, or any other tool, which can create .txt files.

That's it, let's start!

Note: Vista users need to ensure, that they have comctl32.ocx installed!

Step two: Information

This step can be tricky, as well as easy! While most airlines with scheduled flights provide timetables, there are Charter, ACMI and Cargo airlines, which can't provide any timetables, since their flights change more or less every week.

So if you've found a timetable and you aren't sure, if it provides all the information you need, you can use following checklist.

- Flight number

- Origin and destination

- Departure and arrival time

- Frequency

- Stops (not so important)

- Aircraft

It's still possible to develop flightplans, if one or two things from the checklist above are missing, it may just not be as easy.

Step three: Converting the information

Now it's time to open Editor etc. and to start typing all flights, which are shown on the timetable. Usually each flight number has one leg, but if it's not the case (meaning, that the flight has a stop), you'll need type one entry per flight leg.

You should use the following format:

ZZ;123;LHR;GLA;10:50;12:15;1234567;772


- Flight number including airline code

- Origin

- Destination

- Departure time

- Arrival time

- Frequency (1=Monday, 2=Tuesday, 3=Wednesday, 4=Thursday, 5=Friday, 6=Saturday and 7=Sunday)

- Aircraft (ICAO code)

Once you're finished, save your work.

Step four: Compiling your work

Now open your .txt file, using MRAI Compiler. Now check or uncheck if you're flightplans use GMT and/or daylight saving time. Then enter the minimum turnaround time and the compile the flightplans to a directory (For example your documents folder).

So, now open the directory, you've saved your flightplans in. There you should see a text file with New1_ followed by the name of your uncompiled flightplans. Rename the New1_ to Flightplans_. Then open the file and add numbers to the AC#'s (One number for every aircraft type), then replace the aircraft codes with the appropiate registrations (like G-ABCD).

After that, create a text file named Aircraft_, followed by the name of your uncompiled flightplans. Then add for every aircraft a line looking like this:

AC#1,480,"Boeing 777-200"

480 represents the cruise speed.

For every number you've added to an AC# in the flightplans file, you need to add an additional line.

Then create a text file named Airports_ followed by the name of your uncompiled flightplans. After that, open the flightplans file and cut the airport codes with the coordinates and paste them into the newly created text file. Save everything and you're done.

The last step is, to install the AI flightplans.