Sids & Stars

[Turambar]

Hi Steve,

Been away for a while; everything's ok though. How about you?

As I download AIRAC into IF, it seems the sids and stars don't appear in the flight planner. Am I write or do I have to make certain menu choices to add them?

Thanks ahead & have a nice weekend!

KR Theo

[Steve Waite]

Hi Theo,

It is good to hear from you and that you are enjoying flight simulators.

In Ideal Flight SIDs and STARs are currently handled this way:

The AIRAC can be Integrated or Non-Integrated to use the SID/STAR procedures. With Integrated (set during the scenery and navigation indexing stage) only the Navigation from the AIRAC is used to make plans. With Non-Integrated index the simulator scenery navigation is used and supplemented with the SID/STAR from the AIRAC.

SID/STAR information is used when building a flight with Ideal Flight plans to ascertain which airway and which end or start waypoint on that airway is to be used when leaving or entering a SID/STAR area and is determined by the winds to determine the runway prediction, and by where geographically the route is coming from or going to.

So looking at a STAR, since Ideal Flight builds fictional plans from that data it will select the runway predicted due to the winds at the arrival airport area. Then it will select the FAF for that runway, then it will select the waypoint that most naturally comes from the airway heading into that area from your departure. Upon arrival we select that STAR in the FMS. The STAR selected is shown in the briefing. Similarly the SID is selected in the same way from the departure heading out to the arrival airport.

Many waypoints in SID/STAR are not flyover so they don't want to be in the GPS plan. Ideal Flight does not put those into the GPS plan. It is hoped that Ideal Flight can one day approximate that into a GPS plan for simple following GPS units. Otherwise we use the FMS to carry out the procedure for the SID and STAR by selecting during the flight.

So this way of things might not be what we want in real weather, traffic etc. So we can download a hand crafted plan from a website (e.g. SimBrief) and drop that onto Ideal Flight and that will build a flight with that plan incorporated. That downloaded plan will hopefully be using the desired SID and STAR for our route.

It is important to note that we only get the fictional plan between SID and STAR waypoints when we go to the top of the Flight Generator page and choose plans with Approaches and Airways, and on the Mission page Departure and Arrival controls we select SID and STAR there. Then we build routes with Ideal Flight fictional plans and those plans follow airways and will find the appropriate waypoints for exit and entry from SID and to STAR determined from the winds and runways. This works only where airports have SID or STAR information in the AIRAC, many airports do not have this information so Ideal Flight will choose the appropriate airway.

Usually AIRAC navigation data has a file for each airport containing the SID and STAR so we can search through those in explorer to see which airports are included in that AIRAC.

I hope that helps, there is more information in the html Help system (F1 key).

All the best
Steve