[Suggestion] Use FAA aircraft types (H/B747/L) rather than B747/M-SDE23F.... on ASDEX

[Nicholas Camperos]

Hello. A quick suggestion for vStars (and vEram if it applies as well).

On the ASDE-X displays (and I think some other views as well, it shows the full aircraft string/equipment of the aircraft. For example, the screenshot below shows an aircraft at the ramp.

Their name tag is very generously taking up the entire screen with their equipment information. This can be resolved by going into their flight plan, changing it to your heart's desire, and moving on, but I noticed on the vatsim data json, the following fields exist:

```

            "aircraft":"A321/M-SDE3FGHIRWY/LB1",
            "aircraft_faa":"A321/L",
            "aircraft_short":"A321",

```

Is there any chance that the displays could just show the aircraft_faa field, which makes it far less intruding on the screen?

[Ross Carlson]

Radar clients do not use that data feed. Radar clients only get a single aircraft type code field which includes the full string. When VATSIM started using ICAO equipment codes in the flight plan prefile system, it broke vSTARS, vERAM, and VRC in this way. This needs to be fixed on the server side. A fix was proposed and tentatively accepted, but hasn't been implemented yet.

[Nicholas Camperos]

14 minutes ago, Ross Carlson said:

Radar clients do not use that data feed. Radar clients only get a single aircraft type code field which includes the full string. When VATSIM started using ICAO equipment codes in the flight plan prefile system, it broke vSTARS, vERAM, and VRC in this way. This needs to be fixed on the server side. A fix was proposed and tentatively accepted, but hasn't been implemented yet.

That's unfortunate. Hopefully the server's get that upgrade in the future then. Thanks!

[Robert Shearman Jr]

In the meantime I've just been amending the aircraft type manually -- an extra step for each such aircraft, but, it gets the job done.