Several suggestions for Plan-G

[gordon1295]

Hi there,

I'm amazed by the Plan-G. Right now it's my favorite flight planner and tracker for X-Plane. Thanks to the developer who have decided to make it free for simmers!

I have several suggestions made for Plan-G and I hope to see these new features in the future version.
1. Add ETE indication, ETE (Estimate Enroute Time) is the total airborne time for a flight, remaining time to the next leg.
    Add total block time which is the time from off-blocks to on-blocks. (Gate departure to Gate arrival)
2. Fix ETA indication, current ETA indication serves similar to the ETE. But ETA should be hh:mm:ss, it's not the block time. You can take UTC time for the ETA. If possible, I wish to see local time indication for ETA as well. The reason is time written on the charts are always local time. It would be easier for us to determine the local time at the destination for flight planning. Without checking it online.
3. Ask users to input STD/STA/CTOT. It would be better to make Plan-G records the actual time of ATD/ATA (Gate departure/Runway departure/Runway arrival/Gate arrival)
4. You can put these options in the information overlay so users can toggle it.
5. I also wish to see Plan-G reads weather from Active Sky.
6. If Plan-G exports flight logs as pdf format. It will be awesome!

That's all for now
Cheers,
Gordon

[tim arnot]

Hi Gordon, thanks for your comments.

Time to the next leg and time to the destination is shown at the bottom of the main window.

There's no easy way to calculate block time in advance - it depends on the layout of an individual airport, where you're parked, what route you use to taxi, whether you're queued behind AI etc. Plan-G records the time from your first movement until the time you stop, that's the closest I can get.

Time format and UTC/Local can be set in the Options-Units panel.

Plan-G gets its weather data from US Government public servers. This should be accurate to within about 15 minutes, and ultimately comes from the same reporting stations as Active Sky. The servers may have been affected by the recent shutdown, but they should be back up and running now. My understanding is that Active Sky injects data directly into the sim, and doesn't provide a file that other tools can reference.

Flight logs are written in IGC (International Gliding Commission) format. This is a standard format for recording flight trails, originated by the gliding community. There are many tools and apps for viewing and displaying IGC files, but I can certainly look at converting them to pdf in Plan-G.

[gordon1295]

Hi Gordon, thanks for your comments.

Time to the next leg and time to the destination is shown at the bottom of the main window.

There's no easy way to calculate block time in advance - it depends on the layout of an individual airport, where you're parked, what route you use to taxi, whether you're queued behind AI etc. Plan-G records the time from your first movement until the time you stop, that's the closest I can get.

Time format and UTC/Local can be set in the Options-Units panel.

Plan-G gets its weather data from US Government public servers. This should be accurate to within about 15 minutes, and ultimately comes from the same reporting stations as Active Sky. The servers may have been affected by the recent shutdown, but they should be back up and running now. My understanding is that Active Sky injects data directly into the sim, and doesn't provide a file that other tools can reference.

Flight logs are written in IGC (International Gliding Commission) format. This is a standard format for recording flight trails, originated by the gliding community. There are many tools and apps for viewing and displaying IGC files, but I can certainly look at converting them to pdf in Plan-G.

Hi Tim,
Glad to hear from you!
I understand the block time situation now and thank you for the explanation.

I was trying to say add ETA indications. ETA indicates a specific time. The current "ETA Dest" is actually the EET (Estimate Enroute Time)
For example. If the current time is 2:00 PM (UTC), the EET (flight time) is 2 hours (2:00), the ETA will be 4:00 PM (UTC). ETA Dest should indicate the time predicted at arrival. In this case is 4:00 PM.
Same for the ETA Next, if the current time is 2:00 PM (UTC), the remaining time to the next leg is 5 minutes (0:05). The ETA Next should indicate the time predicted at the next waypoint. In this case is 2:05 PM (UTC)
I might have told you wrong information in the last post. It might be easy to do because you only need to do simple math. (I assume, it doesn't involve accurate time prediction)

For the local time indicated. I would like to see it appears next to the UTC time. I would be grateful if you can make it look like this: ETA Dest: 21:09 UTC (16:09 Local)

Thank you!

Regards,
Gordon

[tim arnot]

Ok, I'll add that as an option.