Military AI Works

Can someone tell me what is the lowest altitude AI traffic can fly at. I want to have a helicopter flying at 500ft VFR. If I put in 50 in the FP it becomes 5000ft, I put in 0005 and flies at 1500ft.

TIA

If I remember right, I've already answer to this question recently...
BTW, 50 is 5.000 ft, so 5 is 500 ft. I used this in many of mine FP writing them manually, or using the old good RPP_FPGen_v1.0

In theory 0005 should be good. Are you sure that the FP with 0005 is not a IFR flight? In that case (IFR) the aircraft doesn't fly lower than 1.500 ft.

Giorgio

Well I used AIFP and ticked the vfr box, however I'll check the file.

OK boring ATC stuff.

A flight level is a layer of 500' in height so a true flight level always ends in a 0 or a 5.
The simple way to turn Flight Levels into feet is to multiply by 100, i.e FL120 = 12000'
So the reverse is true to turn feet into Flight Levels divide by 100. So 12500' becomes FL125.

In FS terms it takes whatever altitude you program so the flight level can end with any digit. However for the most part if you want to be realistic stick to that principle.

There is one other real world factor. The pressure is different allover the world so FL120 in one place maybe FL140 in another causing a lot of confusion and potentially some nasty crunches.

So when you travel in airways everybody uses the same pressure setting all over the world all the time. It was called the Standard Altimeter Setting (SAS) and I believe it is now called the International Standard Atmosphere (ISA). Basically if you are entering or inside an airway your altimeter pressure will be set to 1013.25 mb or 29.92 in.
Therefore all aircraft at FL80 anywhere in the world will be 1000' below any aircraft at FL90 anywhere in the world.

I will spare you all the transitional altitude, quadrantal and semicular rules but if you want to fly with a virtual airline I would suggest you look them up.

VulcanDriver wrote: ↑27 Feb 2018, 18:59 Can someone tell me what is the lowest altitude AI traffic can fly at. I want to have a helicopter flying at 500ft VFR. If I put in 50 in the FP it becomes 5000ft, I put in 0005 and flies at 1500ft.

TIA

John,

I have successfully flight planned VFR flybys of aircraft carriers at 200 feet above the water with a 002 flight level setting in the flight plan. But keep in mind that this is over water, so there are no obstacles other than ships that the AI could collide with. I have also flight planned similar flyby's at airbases, but only where the surrounding terrain is very flat.

I also normally have my AI helicopters fly 500 foot patterns around my helicopter runways in order to not interfere with my AI fixed wing pattern traffic around the airbase.

Hope this helps.

Found the problem. The pattern altitude for the helped runway was 1500ft I changed it to 500ft and the copter flew at 500ft for its search pattern.

Good!
Is that copter the new model for Italian Merlin? ...
Giorgio

bismarck wrote: ↑01 Mar 2018, 20:34 Good!
Is that copter the new model for Italian Merlin? ...
Giorgio

No its the Just Flight model. Merlin is still proceeding.

On this subject of low level AI flightplans, if I'm not mistaken if you set a VFR plan at low level and there are obstacles near by the AC will fly in to them.
If you set it to IFR at low level then ATC will tel the AC to fly higher till it clears the obstacle then it will return to the lower level again.

Col.

That is 100% correct.