The @ symbol.

[col1948]

I was reading a thread on another forum where it said not to mix flight plans that have the @ symbol with plans that haven't.
Have any of you heard of this before, I know for a fact I've mixed them but not noticed any problems?

[Firebird]

I honestly don't know whether you can mix them or not. To be honest I always dislike @ plans as they override the cruise speed.

I do see the point of it, as I once followed a BA flight over the atlantic that had an AA flight going to the same destination. The AA plane started behind the BA flight and overtook it purely due to the fact that the arrival time of the AA plane was earlier. In reality they would maintain their separation as they would be flying the same speed under Oceanic control.

To be honest I never use the @ symbol for military plans as they don't have timetables to work to, but I can conceive a situation why you might want to use it.

[col1948]

Hi Steve,
I don't write the @ symbol in my plans mainly because I never think of it to be honest but I have copied and pasted plans that have it in, sometimes I edit them out.
One of the things that does bug me is for example if the arrival time says 10.00 on most occasions the aircraft arrives later, I juggle the speed in the flight plan but it makes no difference, so do I change it in the aircraft.cfg and if so will that effect it's flying?

[Firebird]

If you use AIFP then it can be very useful to get the time right.
Firstly, load a flightplan up.
If you then double click on any flightplan line you get a pop up window which shows the entire schedule plan for that aircraft.
You will notice that on that panel you have two windows one called 'ETA' which is unselectable and one 'Override ETA' which is selectable.
If you select a leg and the 'ETA' is later than the 'Override ETA' then the aircraft will not arrive at the scheduled time. The ETA is worked out using the aircraft cruise speed.
If the 'ETA' is earlier than the 'Override ETA' then the aircraft is either set to do TNGs or it was planned inaccurately.

Now you can either overwrite each 'Override ETA' in each leg, in each flightplan, to match the 'ETA' time, or you can blank the field in each leg you want to alter and save the flightplan (AIFP will then automatically save the ETA time) or you can use an option under Flight Plans, Adjust ETAs to Reflect A/C Cruise Speeds, to automatically adjust all the seleted flightplan lines.

There is one drawback here. It does not take into account any TNG legs in as much as it doesn't know for how long you want to do approaches for. So it also substitutes all ETA times for these legs as well and you will have to manually add time for each TNG leg.

Now on the aircraft speed settings what you should do is always set the aircraft text speed to the same as the aircraft cruise speed in the aircraft.cfg.
If you alter the speed in the aircraft.cfg file then there may be nothing that happens. What I mean here is that if you set the cruise speed for a C-130 from 330kts to 500kts the fde that it has will physically not be able to reach that speed so it will not be able to match the time that you set for it.
Most fde designers these days tend to produce their work so that the aircraft will be able to match the published real world cruise speed.

To get the accurate times you are best off altering the plans.

[swp53]

My personal take on the @ symbol is that it is not very realistic compared to the real world because of various factors that can influence arrival times and departure times for that matter. Look at any airport arrivals board and compare the ETA against actual times and very few are on time sometimes early sometimes late.
As for military as Steve (Firebird) said @ is not realistic at all. When I make plans I always use the cruise speed from the CFG. If you read the manual that comes with AIFP it explains why @ can cause some problems in the sim.
Regards,
Steve

[hschuit]

I get the impression from watching AI traffic that at low level they do not exceed 250 kias (most of my military AI flightplans have altitudes set below 10,000 feet). AI Tornados always fly with the wings swept forward because they do not reach the speeds where the wings would sweep back.

[Firebird]

You are correct. Below FL080 the aircraft are limited to 250kts.
The ATC model does not go as far as to model accurate ATZ or controlled airspace so you can't model LL fast jet training which is very frustrating. The ATC model just assumes everything under FL080 is controlled airspace.

[col1948]

I've noticed that at low altitude the speed is lower and as the aircraft climbs so does the speed then as it levels off the speed increases again.
As stated the aircraft arriving early or late is realistic, could be any reason, ground handling at the departure airport, weather or a technical delay.
I wish we could have a diversion parameter thrown in from time to time but I know will not happen, I did speak via email to the guy who programmed the 'Super Traffic Board' for FSX and asked him if diversions could be programmed and he said it could be done and may be in future versions, I stopped using FSX so I don't know know if he ever done it.
As for using the AIFP, I did try it for a while, probably something I did but it deleted things all my aircraft folders and luckily I had backups but if I hadn't I would have threw the PC through the window.
I read on a few forums of other people where that happened to them too so I stopped using it and I know it's old but I still use TTools.
I thought of trying it again but will it convert all my traffic file to it's format, I read somewhere that any plans written with TTools will make nay plans written with AIFP not work, if I did decide to try it again I would backup all my plans first so I could revert back in case of a tragedy lol.

[phantomfreak]

I use AIFP to build my plans, but I use TTools to compile the plans, as AIFP uses that half speed feature if you use it to compile.

[col1948]

@phontomfreak, So I can build a plan with AIFP then where is it on the PC to transfer over to TTools, I don't have TTools in the sim by the way it is outside in a separate folder?

[Firebird]

AIFP will quite happily load and compile ttools plans. I keep all my raw flightplans and I have never had AIFP delete anything. It does have a lot of got features including error checking and a timetable function.

Also if somebody supplies a compiled flightplan only you can load that and save the individual files and they are the same format that ttools uses.

When you make amendments to flightplans in AIFP and save them to the txt files it will wipe out comments in the aircraft.txt file so I tend to use it to find the errors and then make the changes in a text editor and then reload the files in AIFP. I find it easier than adding all my comments back in later.

As to where it saves the plans it is quite simple. I created a folder cunningly called 'AI Flightplans' and you can place it on any drive. The first time you load the raw flightplans you get a requester up and you simply go to that folder and select the flightplan file you want. AIFP then stores that folder in its cfg file. From then on when you select open Flight Plan. The requester opens to that folder. It also automatically saves all your files and de-compiled files there as well.
So now all you do is set ttools to point to the same folder and so both proggies are using the same folder. No need to transfer them over.
Plus you can set an option so that AIFP automatically keeps backups as well. So you can undo any problem it creates.

[col1948]

With reference to flight plans I recently saw some that had an aircraft fly the same route every day at the same times, but the plan was a weekly one and it had the same times for each day, so why not just do a 24Hr plan instead.

[Firebird]

You can do. It may be that the author wanted some future flexibility.