Creating AI flightplans

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 they're flights change more or less every week.

So if you found a timetable and you're not sure, if it provides all the info 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 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)