Flight generation filter - runway lighting

[Steve Waite]

...I've been looking into it and you are right I too would prefer to stab a checkbox. So I'm adding features to the filter with Soft Runways (grass etc.), Water Runways and Runway Lights with those included/excluded checkboxes and a few other improvements. The work on subsets has been good and the additional prebuilt subsets can stay in... Should be ready when you get back from holiday Brent!

[Brent]

That's fantastic!

Cheers
Brent

[Brent]

Hi Steve
I don't want to nag you but have you been able to make some progress with these changes?

Brent

[Steve Waite]

Hi Brent

I hope you had a good holiday.

Yes very good progress - I'll upload before the weekend.
Speak later...

[Brent]

Thanks Steve - that's great.

[Steve Waite]

Hi Brent,
We had internet problems since Friday so did a bit more work on it but uploading preview 16 now...I hope it's OK!
Best regards

[Brent]

Hi Steve
I installed pre 16 and really like the layout on the flight gen page (very intuitive). My results for searching airports with runway lighting were mixed however.

1. If I select "only include airports with lit strips" what will that include...airports with edge lighting or some other variation? When I selected that box I noticed that 'Search' excluded some airports that had edge lighting. These were standard FSX scenery airports.

2. If I selected 'exclude airports with lit strips' I did get some that were lit....confirmed with FSX "Go to Airport".

The good news, from a flt planning perspective is that all of the airports IF found in the first case had lit runways so if I travel there after dark I'm not surprised when I get there that I can't find the runway! However, it is missing some valid airports (lit) when I run a search (i.e. lit airports that show up when neither boxes selected)...hope that's clear.

Cheers
Brent

[Steve Waite]

I will check it through and see if it can be improved, but there is a problem pulling lit/unlit from the data. Some lights are simply embedded into the scenery/textures, but most airports have detail within the scenery information records about the lighting. You are only seeing those records filtered, unfortunately a limitation of the scenery data. It's probably all can be done in that respect but its more than we had. Even so I'll work on it if there's something can be improved.

[Steve Waite]

...so what I'm going to do is split out runway VASI, Approach and Edge lights through the filter. I'm going to include edge lights detail in the briefing airport information where we already have Approach and VASI details on a per Runway basis. Hopefully that should take care of it. Remembering that we get a list of airports with at least one runway that matches our criteria, but the planner prioritises runways of at least the length specified in our aircraft parameters.

[Brent]

Thanks Steve
That sounds good since I'm usually looking for a lit runway in a GA plane which would typically be able to land on small runways that may not have edge lighting, particularly in remote locales.

The larger jet airliners, of course, require longer runways and IFR landing aids would typically also have runway lighting anyway.

Brent