Suggestion: Better ETA times and "supervisory" mode

[Bernardo Reis]

Nowadays, I would say that the majority of the pilots will use a flightplanning system capable of providing a good time estimate for the flight. (Thinks Simbrief, PFPX, etc.)

 

I think that VATSPY currently takes into the account the remaining direct distance to the airport and the groundspeed to calculate the ETA. My suggestion would be to use the flight time provided by the flightplan, taking into account the ETD when the plane is on the ground (this could create issues because not everyone fills a correct ETD, so maybe only show ETA when the plane is in the air) and the ATOT when the airplane is in the air. For example: A flight is planned to take 02:32. If he departed at 14:07, the ETA would show 16:39. 

This would need to be backed by a sanity check against the current ETA calculation method (have a buffer of something like +/-10min) and if a discrepancy was found in excess of the defined limit, it would show the legacy method ETA.

Aditionally, a "supervisory" mode could be created where you could define the maximum arrival capacity for said airport and VATSPY would tell you which planes are in excess, on a first come first served basis. This would be extremely useful for event coordinators or flow managers (there are already two big iniciatives on this, one in North America, one in Europe) to anticipate periods of high arrival demand and plan for solutions more eficiently. 

 

Future developments on this could be something like: I want this plane to land at YY:ZZ time, taking into account the flight plan flight time, this equates to a CTOT of xx:yy.

 

ETA - Estimated Time of Arrival

ETD - Estimated Time of Departure

ATOT - Actual Takeoff Time

CTOT - Calculated Takeoff Time

[Ross Carlson]

Hi Bernardo, thanks for the suggestion. I considered doing something like this back when I first wrote VAT-Spy, but unfortunately the flight plan data just isn't accurate often enough to make it worth it. I opted for a simpler solution that only relies on actual observed data (ground speed and distance remaining) and does not rely on user-entered data.

Another issue is that the data feed does not contain the actual time of departure.

Regarding the supervisory mode, that is definitely beyond the purpose of VAT-Spy. It was never intended to be any sort of TMU/metering tool. I know that some controllers use it that way, but I won't be adding any functionality specific to that (unintended) use case. I feel like a TMU solution would need to be designed and built with that specific purpose in mind.