Ideas for creating data for a virtual airline.

[LesJar]

Given that one of the hardest jobs in setting up a virtual airline is sorting out schedules that work well , alongside the subfleet and aircraft to fly the routes.

Now if you have MSFS 2020 and the FS_TRAFFIC add-on it comes with a good set of schedules that you can copy and use with some coding to make all the data for your airline.

The Departures folder can be found in the following place Community\justflight-fstraffic-module\Data\Schedules.

The Arrivals folder can be found in the following placeCommunity\justflight-fstraffic-module\Data\Schedules folder\Arrivals folder

 

An example of the schedule for EINN is attached and you can see from the data that all the information is there for example -:

 

0=DT:0605,ICAO:EYKA,CA:RYR,AC:73H,FLTNO8822,CS:RYANAIR,DAYS:7*. this is a flight departing  from EINN 0605 on a Sunday  using an aircraft type 73H to goto EYKA.

 

The 0= is just a sequence number 

DT:0605 is the departure time

ICAO:EYKA is where the flight is going to 

CA:RYR. is the carrier RYR or Ryanair to be precise

AC:73H is the aircraft type 73H being the Boeing 737-800 aircraft

FLTNO8822 is the Fs-traffic internal Flight Number which can be matched to arrivals 

CS:RYANAIR id the Ryanair callsign

DAYS:7* is the days of the week for this flight 7 being Sunday and probably need to be converted for PHPvms data of the week.

Yes it is missing the departure time but things like that can be worked out using calculations.

 

The good thing is also that if you want to model a real world airline then you can get all the schedules that you need for that airline as at I think summer 2020 but FS-TRAFFic is said to have a schedule update soon as well.

 

I already built my airline on something similar using the AIG text files and the schedules from World Traffic in X-plane 11 as these again were text files , but looking at these they are the simplest to decode but missing a departure time which may not be good but can be worked upon.

 

This is just an insight of where to find schedule information to build your own airline from scratch and input csv files rather than input every single flight.

 

Because I have not yet done the schedules using these text files there is no code that I can post on here to help you yet.

The code I used was PHP and MYSQL but I think it could be done with Visual Studio and other databases as you are reading in text files storing the information, processing the information and then creating the output csv files to input to PHPVMS.

 

I might open up a community GITHUB for this so that everyone can get the code to do this , but it will be PHP and MYSQL so that it can work alongside PHPVMS

 

any comments and suggestions are always welcome  

Edited March 20, 2023 by LesJar

[LesJar]

Actually you do get the departure time by matching the flight numbers in FS-TRAFFIC

 

0=DT:1015,ICAO:FIMP,CA:MAU,AC:AT7,FLTNO121,CS:AIR MAURITIUS,DAYS:1234567*

7=AT:1155,ICAO:FIMR,CA:MAU,AC:AT7,FLTNO121,CS:AIR MAURITIUS,DAYS:1234567*

 

This is from the departures at FIMR the sister island of Rodrigues to my home airport FIMP

DT:1015 is the departure time from Rodrigues and the arrival time in Mauritius  is AT:1155 so the flight time is 1 hour and 40 minutes in an ATR 72 aircraft 

Edited March 20, 2023 by LesJar

[LesJar]

First Part of this Project in Github is to define the Mysql Tables and to use a PDO library to make use of Pdo in PHP as it is supported better in more upto date versions of PHP.

The files this will create in a Mysql Database will be as follows-: 

[1] The master subfleet header table , based on what schedules are used in this project.

[2] The master schedule table that is build from the FS-Traffic Tables.

 

What you need to do is create a CSV of all your Airline Airports that you need for your project as the base airports for PHPVMS.

Any flights in the same country with the same airport codes like EDDF EDDM or ED for Germany will be classed as Domestic Flights 

Any flights to other airports in your CSV file of airports in your group will be classed as Group Flights.

Likewise you need a csv of the ICAO designators to include specific other countries. like E for northern Europe or L for Southern Europe etc.

These will form the basis of regional/international flights.

 

All flights will either arrive or depart from one of your airports in your CSV file as you do not want 100's of thousands of flights.

You will need a csv file to hold the basic flight numbers for each category Domestic , Group and Reginal/International. suggest 1 to 2999 for domestic flights 3000 to 5999 for group flights and 6000 to 8999 for regional/international flights.  

 

The process will also use names of towns from geo-names to give each of your aircraft that is built a local name maybe Hamburg if it is a based in ED i.e Germany or Glasgow if based in EG and so on.

The build csv file as I call it is a config file which will have all the values in it for you to edit and use , several factors apply such as number of aircraft given the count of flights using that specific subfleet. 

 

NOTE THIS PROCESS WILL NOT BE PERFECT FOR EVERYONE AS EACH HAS THEIR OWN IDEAS BUT IT IS EASY TO EDIT CSV FILES BEFORE UPLOADING TO PHPVMS  IF YOU NEED TO DO SO OR JUST RUN THE SOFTWARE AGAIN.