[Switching airline from one unit to another (weight, and currency) - has anybody done it ?]

Hi all,

 

We have just started an airline and went with pounds and dollars to begin with because it made everything straightforward. We're considering switching to kilograms and euros though - and wondered if anybody else has switched - and what was involved.

 

I'm guessing we would need to take the airline offline while doing it, and run some queries to convert all of the weights, rates, etc across all of the affected tables.

 

As I said - wondering if anybody else has already done it in the past.

 

[dev console commands]

Never mind - just realised how

 

> artisan phpvms recalculate-stats

 

[dev console commands]

Just looking through the source code, there is a dev console with a raft of really useful commands (such as re-calculating stats) - I'm wondering if anybody has ever used it - and if so how?

[v7 Guide : How To Setup Fares ?]

I find it interesting that the flight distance or time doesn't factor into the fare calculation for a flight (unless I'm missing something obvious)

[Bulk Flight Generation]

While reading your comment "Star Alliance" came straight to mind.

 

Anyway... I have a stack of type ratings, subfleets and aircraft to populate - then I can open the doors to the first testers, and start writing a LOT of documentation

[Bulk Flight Generation]

Just found an interesting wrinkle in the system. You can add subfleets from airlines other than the airline a flight is for, in the subfleets for a flight.

[Bulk Flight Generation]

Next problem - quite a few airports are unknown to the lookup tool - so I'm going to have to cleanse the data on the way in - provide perfect data using reverse geo-lookups 😕  

[Bulk Flight Generation]

I have the programming working based on a few generalisations - doing hub to hub routes (40+ hubs - evenly spread across each continent) - and then hub to spoke routes (600+ "international" airports). The only problem so far is the number of flights it generates is colossal if all aircraft are allowed to operate on all routes they're appropriate for. I'm going to have to introduce some artificial "sharing out" of routes to aircraft to bring the numbers down.

 

I don't envy people working out the scheduling and routes in the real world - the "travelling salesman problem" is a famous programming nightmare

 

postscript - I've added an artificial "subfleet groups" construct to the flight generator - where it groups subfleets onto flights that are within a percentage of range and cruise speed of each other. I'll obviously have to test it, but the theory works

[Bulk Flight Generation]

Interesting... I've got the basic programming working - but have come up against an interesting issue.

 

A flight can have several subfleets associated with it - but subfleets are really designed to specify different aircraft types - therefore, the arrival time calculation will be out, because subfleets typically contain aircraft of a given performance specification.

 

It's not a disaster - it just means a flight will typicall only ever specify one subfleet - I just thought it was worth mentioning.

[Bulk Flight Generation]

Of course the temptation would then be to call the Simbrief API for each route, and fill in sensible routing information too - but that might be a "stretch goal"

[Bulk Flight Generation]

Some time ago I created my own program to bulk generate flight information (for VABase) - and have been thinking about doing the same for phpVMS - to work out for a given aircraft on a given direct route, how long it would take - which can then be used to auto-populate scheduled flights in one go (e.g. with 5 airlines, 10 fleet groups,100 aircraft, and 50 airports around the world, generate the thousands of sensible looking flights taking off and landing within sensible hours, with fairly accurate time calculations based on aircraft performance.

 

I just wondered if anybody else has done this - to save re-inventing the wheel.

[Airports cannot be loaded when creating flights]

Do you ever get max_connections issues with your template?  I've just been digging through laravel to see how it arranges mysql connections - to see if they're pooling their connections or not - still digging lol