Swift - Pilot client progress

[Sascha Steingrobe 880415]

Could we have the ability to import the ATC FP as a flight booking into VATSIM, and then into the new client. Then the ATC FP from my PFPX can be automatically be 'filed'?

 

Many thanks.

Hello Richard,

 

your ATC FP from PFPX can actually be filed with all information prefilled via the option in PFPX.

 

When we reach the FP section we will provide more information regarding this topic .

 

Regards,

 

Sascha

[Sasha Ivanoff 916136]

I just hope the client is light...FSInn might be powerful, but it gives FSX a headache. And more accurate AI aircraft matching.

 

AND BEFORE I FORGET: I hope to see a TCAS/radar function. One of the few things I like about FSInn.

[Jan Tore Elvheim]

Have huge trouble getting FSINN to work after I got a new pc I love that there now are 2 clients in the making

 

Since it is open source I hope that somebody will make an Android app/proxy so you can get either a "full" program on tablet or at least some sort of radar and atc list Makes it easier to step out of cockpit for a few minutes from time to time

 

Great work team and if you need a tester, I'm here

[Don Desfosse]

That is an excellent idea.

 

I'm sure Sascha's team is not looking for additional requirements at this point, but there was one additional thing that I thought of over the weekend that would be an excellent requirement for the new pilot client(s) -- have some sort of tone and visual notification for ATC online ahead.

 

A pet peeve of mine is when I'm working Center/Enroute, and pilots just blast into my airspace from uncontrolled airspace and do not contact me. There have been many debates on this on the forums, but the fact remains that it's the pilots responsibility to monitor for, and contact ATC prior to entering controlled airspace. This is covered, among other places, in the Code of Conduct (B3), the PRC, and pilot training material. The rationale is that the pilot has one controller to scan for (the next one), but ATC may be working 20 or more aircraft, may be giving approach clearances, landing clearances, clearance delivery, taxi instructions, etc. all at the same time. While not perfect, there are many situational awareness tools out there (e.g. Servinfo, VATSpy, vattastic, etc.) that let pilots know when ATC is online ahead. There are still several limitations.

 

I have been compiling data since the beginning of August of this year on pilot contacting ATCeither before entering CTR controlled airspace (or within 50NM of CTR controlled airspace) during my controlling sessions (CTP excluded), and, to date:

- 88.5% of pilots DO NOT contact ATC either prior to or within an acceptable time within controlled CTR airspace that I have been working, and

- 50.0% of pilots DO NOT RESPOND to ATC's attempt to contact the pilot over both the ATC channel in use AND unicom.

- 10.0% of pilots DO NOT RESPOND to ATC's attempt to contact the pilot over both the ATC channel in use AND unicom AND PM.

 

So my thought was this -- I mused/wondered if there would be a way for new ATC clients to sense when ATC were ahead and provide both aural and visual notification to the pilot. Here's the CONOPS I was thinking of:

 

Pilot is flying along a route (ostensibly one in his flight plan) and ATC is online ahead or logs on while pilot in the airspace ring (defined below) and vertical boundary suppression rule (proposed below) not tripped. Client sends both aural and visual notification to the pilot.

 

Airspace Ring: Defined as controller's airspace lateral boundaries, plus 80 miles for CTR, plus 50 miles for APP, or plus 20 miles for TWR)

 

Vertical Boundary suppressions:

1. APP controller notifications suppressed for aircraft at or above 18000 AGL (not sure if AGL is possible - if not, FL180) and destination not within Airspace Ring

2. TWR controller notifications suppressed for aircraft at or above 3100 feet AGL (not sure if AGL is possible) and destination not within Airspace Ring

 

Example Visual Notification:

ALERT: XXX_CTR ahead 199.950

 

Sorry for the long post, but this is a feature that, both as a pilot and controller, I'd love to see in the next generation pilot client(s).

[Ernesto Alvarez 818262]

personally i dont like the alert idea, and heres why

 

first, FSINN has this, but to my knowledge its not a VATSIM feature, was for other networks. FSINN however does tell you the distance from the controller, i [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ume its from their visibility center point? either way, its not very reliable and most of the time completely way off the mark.

 

second, while it would be great to make sure pilots are aware of the airspace, you have 2 side effects,

* the first being pilots will get too dependent on it, not a good thing as we see it happen already with the "contact me" messages.

* the airspace will somehow need to be defined in the client, and what happens if its defined incorrectly or not at all. now youll have pilots either refusing to contact or just add confusion to the mix. Distance is not enough for the alerts as we have large airspaces, and very small airspaces, some enroute airspaces are practically the size of south florida in some parts of the world. on the refusing to contact part, ive experienced that first hand while working Havana FIR and have encountered all sorts of excuses from not knowing Havana controlled the airspace thinking Miami or Kingston did, to just plain political reasons.

 

now if it can be made to work as an addon module afterwards where it reads the info off servinfo and you can use that for the alerts, thatd be awesome and may even add to the ability to use voice unicom with limited distance

[Ross Carlson]

personally i dont like the alert idea, and heres why

 

first, FSINN has this, but to my knowledge its not a VATSIM feature, was for other networks. FSINN however does tell you the distance from the controller, i [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ume its from their visibility center point? either way, its not very reliable and most of the time completely way off the mark.

 

The fact that the feature doesn't work well in FSInn shouldn't be the reason why you don't support the feature in a new client. The whole reason to develop a new client is to improve on the status quo.

 

second, while it would be great to make sure pilots are aware of the airspace, you have 2 side effects,

* the first being pilots will get too dependent on it, not a good thing as we see it happen already with the "contact me" messages.

 

If the tool is done right, having the pilots depend on it is exactly what we want. Comparing that dependency to the "contact me" dependency is an apples to oranges comparison. We don't want pilots relying on the "contact me" message because the contact me message is just a backup in case the pilot doesn't do what he's supposed to. The tool being suggested here is a tool to help pilots do what they're supposed to ... it's not a workaround.

 

Of course this is all predicated on the tool being implemented properly, which you mentioned in your second objection:

 

* the airspace will somehow need to be defined in the client, and what happens if its defined incorrectly or not at all.

 

It would definitely need to download the airspace map from the network on a periodic basis, if not for every flight. (It's not a huge amount of data.) It would be fantastic if VATISM maintained an official map that apps like VATSpy and the new pilot client could make use of.

 

And remember that this tool would not be a VATSIM-only crutch without real world precedent ... real world navigation systems have these types of alerts already, for notifying the pilot when he's about to enter different cl[Mod - Happy Thoughts]es of airspace, restricted areas, etc. (And those types of airspace are depicted on charts much more readily than ARTCC/TRACON boundaries!)

[Don Desfosse]

Thanks, gents. I appreciate and had already considered many of Ernesto's concerns; Ross hit my thoughts on those spot on.

 

Yes, I strugged with the definition of Airspace Ring. I was thinking specifically of the alerts provided by various navigation systems. Ideally, I had originally thought of, and would love, the idea of a centralized database that was updateable and that could/would feed a pilot client and other tools such as VATSpy, vattastic, etc.

 

Alternatively, I thought about defining the ring as the lateral limits of the controller's .visrange plus the buffers that I stated. That introduces some variability, but the data is probably a lot easier to obtain.

[Roland Rossgotterer 104726]

Hi there,

 

ATC alerts are requested quite often and discussed even more often. However, there are some major reasons why we do not cover this feature in the first release.

Although I like the idea, there is at the moment no reliable sector data we could use. I'm not sure who from you is using Euroscope. Here in Europe we have a dedicated navigation department maintaining the scope configuration for different controller positions on a monthly basis (everytime a new AIRAC comes out). So as long as nothing similar is in place, we won't cover that.

Additional I don't think you can always say where the borders of a ATC sectors begin, just by parsing a configuration. Sometimes controllers login with a different callsign (in case of handover), sometimes, they cover only parts of an airspace or its even more complicated if two centers are online next to each other.

At my airport, I used to control there is a specific airport briefing and a lot code of agreements who is responsible for what in which case.

 

I agree with you, in lets say 80 % if one controller is online and serving the standard airspace, you can trigger the alert at the right position. But in at least 20 % the client has to just guess, what the controllers had coordinated between each other.

 

For me it would be too risky to let pilots rely on it - apart from the fact its damn difficult to maintain the airspace files.

 

Long story short: At the moment no. If somebody comes up with a super cool idea and covering all my concerns in a set of files, I rethink what I just wrote and we can talk about adding this in a later version. But creaton of sector files is far beyond the scope of a client.

[Ross Carlson]

I definitely agree, Roland ... this kind of feature can only work if we have very good sector definition files for the whole globe, and it would also rely on controllers consistently using the callsign patterns defined in the sector definition files. (This is how ServInfo and VATspy currently work.) I certainly think this would be a worthy pursuit for VATSIM, because it would allow not only for pilot client features like this, but it would also improve other tools like VATSpy, traffic management systems, etc. Like you said though, setting up the infrastructure (the worldwide sector definition files) certainly isn't the job of the pilot client authors.

[Don Desfosse]

What about the idea of when the flight plan and/or present route is going to pierce the lateral limits of a controller's .visrange, plus an additional buffer based on controller type (TWR, APP/DEP, CTR, FSS)?

[Aleksandr Irshinski 123569]

Hi,

 

Could you please make better syncronization between airplanes to fly formation in VATSIM. Im from military VATSIM organization and FSINN unfortunately does not allow to fly formation.

Of course if possible...

[Ernesto Alvarez 818262]

FSINN does allow for formation flight, see 3.2.2 in the FSINN Manual. you just have to have your peer to peer setup right and increase the refresh rate to 40hz in your peer to peer settings so the refresh rate is much smoother.

 

remember the network only updates the aircraft positions about every 3 to 5 seconds, the clients try to smooth the motion in between those updates as much as they can. using the peer to peer option should give you much more fluid updates.

 

works for me when i do AAR operations with SIMAF

[Karl Mathias Moberg]

This might sound like a silly thing, but one thing that would be wonderful to have, and one of the things i LOVE about FSInn/FSCopilot, is a small option in the FSCopilot options to "Sync Real time". For people like me, who enjoy flying across the pond, and like flying real-time, this thing is a life saver! The FS9/FSX clock has a tendency to drift and after a few hours it might be in extreme cases almost half an hour off, which is a bad thing when flying with required position reports.

 

Not sure if it is AS bad as it was in the FS9 days, but I do remember having trouble with the clock in FSX as well, before enabling the option.

 

Is there a hope of this being implemented in the new client?

[Chad Black]

This might sound like a silly thing, but one thing that would be wonderful to have, and one of the things i LOVE about FSInn/FSCopilot, is a small option in the FSCopilot options to "Sync Real time". For people like me, who enjoy flying across the pond, and like flying real-time, this thing is a life saver! The FS9/FSX clock has a tendency to drift and after a few hours it might be in extreme cases almost half an hour off, which is a bad thing when flying with required position reports.

 

Not sure if it is AS bad as it was in the FS9 days, but I do remember having trouble with the clock in FSX as well, before enabling the option.

 

Is there a hope of this being implemented in the new client?

 

There are a ton of programs that already do this. FSUIPC being the most popular.

[Romano Lara]

I currently use FS Realtime. You just basically have to donate to get the full version. But I do get it, it would be wise to incorporate this functionality into the client, just to make sure pilots are on real time when they fly online. I can't tell you enough how many times I've gotten position reports 6 hours ahead of actual GMT.

[Wycliffe Barrett]

Hi all

 

i have been a little busy of late what with my conversion to xplane and airport building, just managed to catch up on the thread, good to see its still alive, (never thought this project would fail) and people still seem to be contributing requirements. I like the idea of the alert system but as Ross and Dan have identified Ithink there are to many issues re airspace that make it not a viable option. Whilst reading I was thinking about the London Control Area, and how yo would split that, impossible.

 

It would be nice for the future, the distant future, but i say hold off on that idea right now.

 

All the best Team.

 

Wycliffe

[Don Desfosse]

What about the idea of when the flight plan and/or present route is going to pierce the lateral limits of a controller's .visrange, plus an additional buffer based on controller type (TWR, APP/DEP, CTR, FSS)?

 

Won't be perfect, but will be a million times better than now. Worst case is you get some controllers saying "Nope, not me, monitor unicom (or contact ____)", and best case 90+% of the non-contacts go away....

[Frank Otero]

A non-contact is a pilot problem, not a client problem. if a pilot wants ATC, he will be on the lookout for it and will certainly not disregard a contact me.

 

Why don't we keep it as simple as possible. Ability to connect, communicate, and see actual models out of the window without the problems some experience with the current clients.

[Brian Pryor 810138]

For the folks working on this, a suggestion from my side of the world!

 

If a message is received from a ADM/SUP rated login could you have it pop the message up with a different color tab or something to that effect. Maybe a different sound?

 

A lot of times a pilot gets a message from us but doesn't see it and it would help us reach the newer pilots who may just jump-in with both feet and not be up to speed on how to see the chat function (FSINN comes to mind)

 

Thanks for the hard work!

[Oliver Gruetzmann]

Keep it simple: If a pilot enters your sector, send a contact me message and fine. In RL there would be a handover, so why do you expect more from pilots here than in RL? They simply cannot know the controller's airspace, at least not everywhere.

 

I prefer pilots waiting for CM, since the guessing is usually wrong and the search for the aircraft distracts me from my other duties.

 

For me, the CM is the handover they would usually get. The "lookout" for ATC should be fulfilled as long as the pilot is around in areas where he can expect to enter a controlled sector.

 

Don't expect them to know YOUR airspace.

[Gary Tekulsky 1134195]

Honestly Oliver and Frank are correct about this. The real problem here may be simply that some pilots dont know that a contactme has been sent or how to read it. Maybe they are new and have no idea how to use the software, dont know the alert sounds, or just jumped on and expected it to work. So, one thing we could consider in the new client is that when a contactme is sent, maybe we can make a popup appear in the game with a certain color saying something to the effect of ATC station XXX_POS has sent you a contactme. Please tune your com1 radio to FR.EQ and establish contact.

 

Brian, your suggestion sounds like a good one and definitely doable. It shall be considered when we get to the point where it would be implemented. It could also possibly include an in-game popup on the initial message stating A Supervisor, XX_SUP, has sent you a private message. It is strongly recommended that you open up your chat window, read the message, and reply if necessary.

[Don Desfosse]

ATC use of a contact me message is simply a crutch that some controllers use when pilots are either inadvertently not aware of a controller's presence, or have been culturally conditioned to expect the contact me message, thus disregarding their responsibility to monitor for ATC presence and contact appropriate ATC when in controlled airspace. Though I certainly respect those that have the opinion that ATC should always use the contact me, I do not agree with it. There have been many debates on this on the forums, but the fact remains that it's the pilot's responsibility to monitor for, and contact ATC prior to entering controlled airspace. This is covered, among other places, in the Code of Conduct (B3), the PRC, and pilot training material. The rationale is that the pilot has one controller to scan for (the next one), but ATC may be working 20 or more aircraft, and may be giving approach clearances, landing clearances, clearance delivery, taxi instructions, etc. all at the same time. While not perfect, there are many situational awareness tools out there (e.g. Servinfo, VATSpy, vattastic, etc.) that let pilots know when ATC is online ahead.

 

Though I certainly support the notion that the new client should make contactme and PM messages clearly visible (including aurally), I still see a lot of merit in an "airspace ahead" notification, particularly one that's based on the controller visibility range, and would love to see that considered seriously for the first, or second, round of software release. I'd code it myself, but as many will attest, I can barely spell code, never mind commit the act.... Right now something that's 80% accurate is a lot better than nothing at all. I'd take handling the 20% of pilots who call asking if they should be with me, and they should not, over the 80% of pilots who don't call at all any day of the week.

[Michael Benson]

There have been many debates on this on the forums, but the fact remains that it's the pilot's responsibility to monitor for, and contact ATC prior to entering controlled airspace. This is covered, among other places, in the Code of Conduct (B3), the PRC, and pilot training material.

 

When SATCO first started this was a reasonable request; with the advent of more and more complex splits of airspace I think it's unreasonable for pilots to be expected to hunt down the VACC website, spend an age find the split of the airspace on the website (which may be contained in some random PDF), work out where they're and then contact the relevant controller.

 

For example coming into the Uk airspace depending on the split in operation you may have to contact EURI_FSS, EGTT_CTR, EGTT_S_CTR, LON_CTR, LON_SC_CTR, LON_C_CTR or LON_NE_CTR. This information is contained in a random download and nowhere to be found on the pilot pages. Now imagine doing that for the 20 or so FIRs you may fly over as a pilot and I think it's unreasonable to ask a pilot to hunt all that information.

 

Oh and it seems to be the form to change all the logins and AoR for London sectors every 6 months so even if you found out the information it'll all be wrong the next time.

 

The rationale is that the pilot has one controller to scan for (the next one), but ATC may be working 20 or more aircraft, and may be giving approach clearances, landing clearances, clearance delivery, taxi instructions, etc. all at the same time.

 

I would say it's easier to ping a PM to someone entering you're airspace than to spend 30 seconds attempting to find someone calling you who isn't in your airspace anyway.

 

While not perfect, there are many situational awareness tools out there (e.g. Servinfo, VATSpy, vattastic, etc.) that let pilots know when ATC is online ahead.

 

Invariably these tools are wrong in the airspace they display.

[Bradley Grafelman]

And how much time does it take to make your best educated guess as to the right controller, tune to his/her freq, call up and ask if you're inside his airspace, wait for a "Negative, contact XXXX on YYY.ZZ", acknowledge with a "g'day!", change freqs, check in with appropriate controller?

 

[Mod - Happy Thoughts]uming neither frequencies is highly saturated, my guess is 30 seconds or less. Not to mention the added bonus of it being more realistic.

[David Saunders 818672]

depends how many pilots the controller is dealing with, the last thing he needs is a pilot who has no idea who to call,

 

for example EURI- logged on for 22 mins so you think you have it sorted and then all of a sudden he is logged off so back to square one, damn just missed my TOD, damn who do i call, damn missed my airport, oh well may as well call tower, thats easy