Noobie question

[Trace Lewis 970532]

I have been flying VATSIm for about a month now, and have been trying to figure out one thing -

 

Is there a way to know when which CTR,APP,etc will be up?

 

So I can say schedule a atlantic hop when the transatlantic centers are up, and maybe even my european destination?

 

Mainly because I want to fly KSAN-PHNL saturday (N291BA) and I would rather just sue FS9 ATC if I can talk to anybody for the long ride. I did see on the visual map thing a few days ago the HI-west US airspace was under control, as well as PHNL APP and TWR. So basically, how will I know when to fly? Are the ATC positions scheduled? Or does a controller just show up and pick a sector?

 

Thanks in advance, and sorry for all the questioning

[Steven Rogers 901202]

I think some ARTCCs have an ATC booking system, however, the best way is to just use ServInfo. Unforunately, this ony gives you a snapshot of current traffic conditions (if it works ).

 

Otherwise, you might try posting on the forum with the date and time of your flight, asking if anyone wants to ATC for you, most people would open up a fairly unused sector if they can be sure of traffic.

[Jay Hsu 926068]

Jeff Clark made a post about this same thing. The answer is that in servinfo, on the top you see two buttons ("VATSIM" and "IVAO") but there are also two small up and down arrows. Click on the arrows until you see the graphic logo for "EUROBOOK". Click it, and it will give you the advance times that ATC has been scheduled. Only some ARTCCs in the U.S. use this, but almost all of Europe uses it.

[Steve Ogrodowski 876322]

VATUSA has a booking/scheduling system that we are trying to get everyone in the habit of using. Even if you just sign up on it once you decide to come online, we ask our controllers to sign up on it so that people can see they are online. http://www.vatusa.org/atcbook/index.php

 

Craig (VATUSA2) has been working on networking capabilities so that ARTCCs can transfer information between these systems and the ARTCC websites. VATUSA's present booking system sends its data to the EUROBOOK server, so that all bookings made through VATUSA appear in ServInfo.

 

There are only two ARTCCs that I know of that have the booking system on their individual sites; however they cannot presently send their information to VATUSA's database. [Once we can get some data-sharing programs going, though, this won't be a problem.]