New AI Flightplan Analyzer tool

[sierraair]

Hi everybody,

I want to share a tool with you to help build great flightplans. I've been using a program like this for years, but since it wasn't mine, I couldn't share it. This one I built myself from the ground up so it's available to everyone!

AI Flightplan Analyzer allows you to look at your flightplans in-depth to find faults or errors, and to help make the best flightplans for FS.

Download Here (Updated to v1.3 01/24/22)
AIG Aircraft Speeds

When you open the file for the first time, you may be prompted to enable macros. If you need help, here's the Microsoft Help File to enable macros.

The program doesn't require much from you - just your flightplans.txt file - and the aircraft.txt file if you want some additional information (aircraft.txt not requried).
Keep in mind all times and days are UTC.

Flightplan Analysis

One the files are imported, you're presented with an overall analysis of every aircraft. Anything with a red arrow you can hover over for more information. The colored cells are possible warnings - a groundtime is really short, an aircraft utilization is low, an aircraft doesn't have many flights.

Utilization is more important than legs. In this case, I can see that most of the 747s don't have many legs, but the utilization is high. That tells me they're in the air, but for some longer flights.

The Active Days column is great because it shows you at a glance what days the aircraft is operating. It helps me figure out if could shift some flights from another aircraft to keep them all moving.

Aircraft Analysis
If you want to look at one particular aircraft in depth, use the Run Aircraft Analysis tool. It will prompt you to select an aircraft from your flightplans list. When selecting, only pick one cell in the "A" column.


From there, you'll be given a detailed breakdown of the aircraft. You may find that a warning from the flightplan screen actually shows up on an aircraft multiple times! To analyze another aircraft, run the Aircraft Analysis again.

Here, locating long groundtimes at outstation can be help in finding errors in your original data. Does the aircraft really sit at the outstation for 22 hours, or is there a typo for the return flight so it didn't get paired correctly?



Some Notes

Keep in mind, the warnings are informational for best practice. In the case below, I can see all my Rocky Mountain aircraft have a really short minimum turn time. This can cause issues in FS with aircraft not arriving and departing properly.

In this situation though, I can deep dive to that aircraft and see that that 9 minute turn is in Colorado Springs and part of a stopover of 0331 from ALS-COS-DEN.  Since it's the same flight number, I know the airline probably actually scheduled it like that, and since COS is a smaller airport, I'm not too worried. If it was a 9 minute turn in Denver, I'd do some balancing.

Final Notes
Overall, I try to follow AIG standards whenever possible. There's been a lot of time and thought put into those standards to simulate the real world in an imperfect flightsim world.

The main ones deal with utilization and groundtimes. Ideally, each aircraft should have fairly similar utilization. If one aircraft has a 70% utilization and another has an 8% utilization, there's probably some flights that can get move around to prevent one aircraft from taking up ramp space for multiple days. There's no magic number to aim for as long as they're all similar.  In both cases above, the aircraft utilization is faily even across the individual aircraft.

Groundtimes shouldn't be excessive, though it's up to everyone to decide what that is. For me, I try not to have anything sit for more than 24 hours. Sometimes it's unavoidable depending on the size of the airline and the situation, but overall, it's a good rule of thumb.

Give it a shot and let me know if you've got questions or suggestions. I've got a couple more features I'd like to add, time permitting.

Brian

[FSMuseum]

Now THIS is cool. Thanks so much for this unique tool!

[perficad]

WOW! Amazing - thank you very much. This will definately help my 79/80 Flightplan Project.

[777jafo]

Awesome, I know chase and other's in the past have tried to help me over these years, I'd love to help out with the 83 plans, I have a huge o.a.g. 1983 here, I can read airline timetables no problem, it jusr getting them into fs2004 mode to be used is where I have issues, but I will try this out, thank so much for it

[chasensfo]

Very cool. Thanks for this tool, very handy.

For the sake of the newer flightplaners who may be reading this, I'm just going to add a little bit to AI ground time. We are simulating entire airlines, which technically goes beyond the flight schedule and extends to the 24/7 whereabouts of each individual aircraft during the week. When you fly into SFO for example and see 12 United planes by the hangar and another 8 on remote spots in the middle of a weekday afternoon, that is a real moment in the life of an airline. A lot of airlines will leave you with planes sitting 24 hours up to even 6 days, but that is the case in real life, as aircraft need A, B, C and D maintenance checks and larger airlines may have a few dozen aircraft down at one time to do them. The checks can take days, weeks, or months and accordingly large hubs (or even smaller ones) will have lots of idle airplanes. If you guys wish to change that in your sims, go right ahead, but just remember a portion of the fleet will be gathered at an airport with a mx base (which isn't always a hub, such as AA in TUL and AS in GSO). When planes aren't spending the downtime at a hub, it could still be realistic if it's a small number of planes in the fleet due to mechanical issues and cancelations, but this would be unrealistic with more than a few planes doing it. One solution is to create ferry flights to the nearest or largest mx base, which happens all the time in real life and always has. For airlines that also did charters, it's a good opportunity to take planes spending serval days at some random airport and letting them enter the charter network from there and then return to re-join the weekly scheduled flights. AI Flight Planner is the best tool for that step once you've compiled the airlines by the flight schedule.

This is all personal preference, Brian and I do ground time differently but we both include charters, others only do scheduled flights. Whatever you want to do is your choice, but like Brian said, a lot of people have put a lot of effort into making the AI world realistic, so of course, it's always a good idea to make your flightplans realistic, regardless of what route you take and if you add off-scheduled flights or not. That way the AI world stays as real as can be for everyone to enjoy.

[sierraair]

Fairly big updated file in the first post.  ----^

Analysis Update

First, as part of the overall Flightplan Analysis, I added two additional columns for Max flight time and Minimum flight time. I find it incredibly helpful in locating errors with time zones. A 5 minute minimum flight could make FS mad, and if the max flight time for a 737 is 15 hours, something's not quite right!

Aircraft Detail Update

On the Detailed Aircraft Analysis, there's two new columns for Estimated Flight Time, and the difference between scheduled and estimated. There's a bunch of math and conditionals that go into the estimate, including segment length and aircraft type. It is by no means exact, but it should show within about 20 minutes. Anything beyond that could be suspect.


Carl - using this, I did see there's a time zone error with Georgetown (GEO) in the Pan Am flightplans. The flights should be about an hour, but one is two hours and the other is 0.  There may also be an issue with Munich, but I didn't dive into it deeply.

The Exception to the Rule

While this works for most situations, it works best for short to medium haul flights. For longhaul flights, there may be a bigger difference between estimated and actual, since it doesn't take into account direction of flight. In almost every situation, eastbound flights will be scheduled significantly shorter than westbound flights. Heading east, they can catch the jetstream and shave off and hour or two. There may be nothing wrong at all, but it's always a good idea to check.

!!IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT!!

If you want to use the estimated flight time, you MUST use the aircraft speeds form the AIG Aircraft Speeds table (included in the first post).  Psst...This is also a good idea overall.

There has been a lot of work, testing, and thought by the AIG guys and AIFP's Don Grovestine to reach that decision.  FS and AI work much much better with realistic speeds.  In fact, AIFP is completely built around the idea.

I look forward to hearing how you're using it and if I can add any features!

Brian

[FSMuseum]

I've been playing around with the analyzer and I have to say it's very interesting, definitely one of the most unique FS utilities I've ever used.

In the recently released Delta Connection plans for the 1998 project, the analyzer shows a few flights with very short ground times (0:05-0:10). What is the correct/easiest procedure to correct this?

[chasensfo]

Jan 25, 2022 12:28:17 GMT -5 FSMuseum said:

I've been playing around with the analyzer and I have to say it's very interesting, definitely one of the most unique FS utilities I've ever used.

In the recently released Delta Connection plans for the 1998 project, the analyzer shows a few flights with very short ground times (0:05-0:10). What is the correct/easiest procedure to correct this?

Hmm, I didn't compile those myself. I usually just find the shortest scheduled turn in the schedule and use that as the minimum for compiling. That said, sometimes it IS 5 minutes. It isn't supposed to be 5 minutes in this case, but I can tell you Delta Connection does have several scheduled 10-minute stops on "tag-on" routes where the plane flies to 2 airports en route. So 10 minutes is correct depending on the route for Delta Connection. Northwest Airlink even has 10-minute stops with 37-seat DHC-8s.

The idea is if you are doing say MSP-PIR-ABR-PIR-MSP, nobody will board on PIR-ABR (usually no local tickets sold on these kinds of stops with 15-35 minute legs), so people will only get off, then the plane can go. On the way back, nobody who boarded in ABR gets off in PIR, so a few people hop on to go to MSP, then you are on the way...in a perfect world. Obviously, they could care less about being on time, but I guess they just wanted people to think that the stops were super short LOL. No room for error at all, even a runway change en-route would easily take up the entire turn time as would having to wait for a few GA planes to land. In other parts of the world, many DHC-6, BNI, Metroliner, Twin Cessna, etc operators do have 3-5 minute scheduled turns, so you'll find a ton of them in the project. Hell, in the 1990s, MarkAir used to run 737s doing stuff like LAX-LAS-DEN-MSP-MDW-CVG-DCA with 10-20 minute turns the whole way! Imagine what happened next. Spoiler alert: cancellations and missed connections that bled the airline dry.

To correct it, you'd have to use AIFP or something to redistribute flights to an aircraft that will have a longer downtime in the "problem" city. If a plane lands at CVG at 1000 and is scheduled out at 1005, you'd have to hunt around for a plane that has a better ground time in CVG for the 1005 departure BUT then it's a domino effect on the other flights for both aircraft to make sure there is room. Another option is to keep recompiling with the MRAI Compiler, run this tool before you bother doing the registrations and stuff, and see if you get a better result as it'll always be a bit different.

No easy fix that I am aware of, if it even needs to be fixed at all, that is. I don't care if it's "unrealistic" in real life to say a Metroliner will land, offload, board, and take off in 5 minutes if that is what the schedule says. I wouldn't make a charter plan like that if I were inventing the flights myself, but hey, if that's what the airline printed on the tickets, that's what I'm going to include since that is the schedule. In this case, nothing bigger than an E120 should have 10-minute stops, tho the ATRs do have some 15 min ones. Also, they should only be on multi-stop routes, not on hub turns where the ground times should be longer than at the smaller outstations for many reasons (taxi times, pax loads, transfer pax/bags, gate availability, more likely to pushback than turn out of the gate, etc).

[sierraair]

Jan 25, 2022 12:28:17 GMT -5 FSMuseum said:

I've been playing around with the analyzer and I have to say it's very interesting, definitely one of the most unique FS utilities I've ever used.

In the recently released Delta Connection plans for the 1998 project, the analyzer shows a few flights with very short ground times (0:05-0:10). What is the correct/easiest procedure to correct this?

I have to admit, I use a different tool for compiling but since it's not available for everyone (yet?) I won't go into details.

For the MRAI compiler, here's some tricks I've used. They tend to be multi-step but usually produce something decent.

-Compile the flightplans as normal. This will give you your full aircraft list and airports file. Then, compile aircraft type individually since a 747 might have a 40 minute minimum turn, but a Fokker would have a 15. Copy each of those individual flightplan.txt files into one main flightplan.txt file. Then you'll have more dynamic turns based on aircraft type.

-In places you know you're going to have a short ground time for either a thru-flight or an outstation, you can also do a little editing in your raw file before compiling. Change the departure of the connection by 5-10 minutes so it fits within your MRAI turn time. Then after the plans are compiled, change the departure in the flightplans.txt file back to the original departure. If you've only changed it by minutes, it should be easy (thus avoiding having to do a full GMT conversion)

Jan 25, 2022 13:38:27 GMT -5 chasensfo said:

No easy fix that I am aware of, if it even needs to be fixed at all, that is. I don't care if it's "unrealistic" in real life to say a Metroliner will land, offload, board, and take off in 5 minutes if that is what the schedule says. I wouldn't make a charter plan like that if I were inventing the flights myself, but hey, if that's what the airline printed on the tickets, that's what I'm going to include since that is the schedule. In this case, nothing bigger than an E120 should have 10-minute stops, tho the ATRs do have some 15 min ones. Also, they should only be on multi-stop routes, not on hub turns where the ground times should be longer than at the smaller outstations for many reasons (taxi times, pax loads, transfer pax/bags, gate availability, more likely to pushback than turn out of the gate, etc).

The only problem with compiling with overall short times is that it's going to give those times at the outstations and the hubs. A 10 minute turn at ORD in FS is impossible, let alone a 5 minute turn. Especially since airlines schedules are gate to gate, while FS schedules are gate to "approximate" touchdown. What works in the real world will almost never work well in FS - it's just a limitation of the engine. That's why I like using the AIG methods - they're extensively tested in a FS environment. I'll always use as few aircraft as possible to take up as few parking spaces as possible, with "realistic" turn times that also function in FS.

[chasensfo]

I agree about the hub turns, yes 5-10 minutes at any hub is crazy and wouldn't work out. Compiling by aircraft type is smart, I forgot that I've done that before with carriers like MAS that have the DHC-6 and 747 all mainline. But, if there are legitimate 5-10 minute turns all over the schedule and I set the min turns to 15, the only way to not have the compiler dump tons of extra airplanes is to "pad" the flight times by 5 minutes here and there which adds up a lot by the end of the day and throws the aircraft off schedule by the evening. An example was Pacific Wings of Hawaii which has 3 minute turns in JHM, MKK, and a few other airports. I didn't want 3 minute turns in Hawaii, but I also knew that the flight schedule was so compressed being aggressively built around these short times at the "outstations" that by setting it to say, 15, I'd have the throw the schedule out of whack to where it basically just becomes representative. So I always figured just "sticking to the book" and typing them out as is while trying to manually edit unrealistic hub turns in AIFP the best that I can. It is interesting to have these discussions, as I know we have different styles. For what it's worth, I don't ever notice anything funky related to these quick turns outside the hubs. Planes park, call for IFR clearance right away (same as real life in those situations) and quickly get going.

Once for the hell of it I non-reved on a Horizon Q400 SJC-SMF back when that was a thing. The flight was a through flight to BOI, and was running almost 2 hours late. After a 19 minute flight runway to runway, we pull into the gate in SMF after maybe a 3 minute taxi, myself and 1 businessman get off the plane and select our gate check bags with everyone else staying on to BOI, maybe 10 people were lined up on the ramp ready to board for BOI. Within 10 minutes of the engines shutting down, the 76-seat Q400 was started up and whipping out of it's parking spot for a fast taxi to the runway. I looked it up after and the total ground time was under 20 minutes from landing to takeoff. SMF isn't a small airport by any means, so I get how on an ideal day this kind of aggressive schedule would work out on these stop-over flights, and I don't want to remove these interesting quick stops entirely from the sim.

I also now use AIG standards for my plans as far as cruise speeds/altitudes and I am slowly editing my older plans to reflect this. I agree that the community should try and follow those standards.

As far as the "fewest" aircraft possible, do you mean you don't include the entire fleet, just what is needed for the flightplans? I make it a point to include all known remote parking in all my scenery\ADE files since I expect a lot of schedules to have big ground time, like how South Pacific carriers like Fiji, Qantas, and Air New Zealand tend to sit 10-14 hours on the ground in the US before they fly home, or how some airlines do same-crew long haul turns with a 30 hour ground time like SAS has been doing at SFO recently. To each their own, but I think full airports is a good thing as long as it's realistic and the planes would likely be hanging around for days in real life.

[perficad]

--
Carl - using this, I did see there's a time zone error with Georgetown (GEO) in the Pan Am flightplans. The flights should be about an hour, but one is two hours and the other is 0. There may also be an issue with Munich, but I didn't dive into it deeply.
--
Thanks for this - the SYCJ timezone data has now been updated in my Db. The flightplans have been corrected on my Onedrive. If you spot any other errors please let me know

I love this new tool!

Carl

[darrenvox]

Cool