Ability to enter in a Flight # on Charter Page

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Captain K-Man
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Ability to enter in a Flight # on Charter Page

Post by Captain K-Man » Wed Jan 26, 2022 3:56 am

Hopefully this would be easy to implement.

On the charter page where you type in the destination you are chartering too my entire VA would love to have another box where we can type in our flight #. We have certain fleets that are charter based and certain that are route based but we always have flight #'s regardless of what kind. Right now all of our Flight #'s read as CHARTER. We would like to be able to enter a flight # and have it show in our logbooks as that # rather than the word Charter.

We moved our cargo division to charter because after I finished programming in 5800 routes I could not upload them as we were at our limit. So what I did was make a searchable database for our cargo pilots where they type in the airport they are leaving from and it will show them where they can go with the cargo flight #. Unfortunately they can't enter this number on the charter flight screen. Lot of us fly on Vatsim and we use flight #'s there even on charter flights.

For admin records and promotion consideration we need to be able to match our flight # with the Vatsim flight # our pilots enter off our database.

How hard would it be to add that one entry on the charter page?
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joefremont
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Re: Ability to enter in a Flight # on Charter Page

Post by joefremont » Wed Jan 26, 2022 11:56 pm

I have purposely tried to keep the charter flight page as simple as possible, not adding anything that was not absolutely necessary. It seams to be adding flight number is not going to be useful to very many pilots but what do others think?
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brazvo
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Re: Ability to enter in a Flight # on Charter Page

Post by brazvo » Thu Jan 27, 2022 11:15 am

Hi

I think it'd be useful but it's a workaround for route number limitation. Maybe, It's better to solve this with raise the limit. Anyhow, workaround for that workaround is to insert the flight number into the comment for the flight in the client.

Bruno
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Cat
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Re: Ability to enter in a Flight # on Charter Page

Post by Cat » Thu Jan 27, 2022 2:45 pm

I think Charter Flights should be kept "as is". They were supposed to be on-demand "one off" type of flights to go places the VA's normal route system does not service. Just out of curiosity, what is the limit of routes a VA can have?

Perhaps the big 5800 batch load can be broken up into two sections and uploaded in that manner if the overall limit has not been reached? I think the batch upload limit was raised to 4000 awhile ago, but we never had any issues with an overall maximum limit and at one point we had about 5000 flight routes. We have since downsized dramatically as 99% of those routes had never been used. There is probably a max limit to prevent bots from crashing the system with infinite looping batch uploading - always have to protect the integrity and security of the system.

Using the pilot comment section post flight is an excellent idea as the flight route will save in the PIREP in that field. Pilots can enter something like VATSIM Flight #3435 if that type of information is needed in 3rd party VA accounting records. The pilot would already have to know his/her flight number anyway to enter it in the charter preflight booking page if a field was added there.

If you look at the flightlog, there is no quick flight number reference, only a departure, destination, date, pilot, etc. You have to open the PIREP to see the flight number anyway. How many charter flights will be using the same departure, destination and date?
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joefremont
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Re: Ability to enter in a Flight # on Charter Page

Post by joefremont » Thu Jan 27, 2022 4:40 pm

The limit routes is set at 20,000 and this limit is more to prevent airlines from bloating up the database than anything else. The limit only applies when you are importing a list and you can always enter a route manually using the form and then there is no limit.

As to the original question of 'would it be hard', no it would not be hard but its more the discipline of trying to keep that page simple to use, we add this small thing, then someone else asks for another small thing and so on until we have a giant form. I was wondering if there was some automatic way to generate the flight number but we only allow 8 letters to play with so not sure I come up with something that would be meaningful.
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