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Route Strings in v3

Started by NikkiA, August 16, 2012, 08:56:00 PM

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NikkiA

I had previously ignored Plan-G due to the lack of support for route strings from services like rfinder and vataware, but decided to give v3 a go and was suprised to find it supports them on the 'direct plan' dialog.

However, there are a couple of issues that stop this from being overly useful.

1) If the start/dest airports are in the route string, they end up duplicated in the output plan.

2) rfinder strings include 'SID' and 'STAR' as placeholder waypoints for inserting the relevant departures and approachs. SID is ignored by Plan-G v3, but STAR resolves to a VOR somewhere in south america (looks to be somewhere around brazil - checked, just outside Sao Luis in Brazil).

If there is any chance of these being addressed at some point it would make the program vastly more suitable for flying these types of routes. The first issue should be a simple matter of ignoring the first/last waypoints if they're duplicates of waypoints that they're right next to - and this might be a useful way of approaching 'generated' plans anyway), The second issue could probably be handled by ignoring the STAR waypoint in the route string when it's the 2nd from last waypoint and the flight doesn't terminate within 100nm of Sao Luis :)