Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler - Questions about ACARS simconnect implementation

Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler | Airline Operations | Questions about ACARS simconnect implementation

DVA341
Senior Captain, B737-800

Joined on October 15 2001
Century Club
DVA Twenty-Year Anniversary
Everett Century Club

Kefar Sava, Center District Israel

143 legs, 463.5 hours
36 legs, 79.1 hours online
39 legs, 77.6 hours ACARS
1 legs, 2.0 hours event

Posted onPost created on January 28 2023 07:08 ET by Oren Geva

Hi, I hope Luke sees this here, I am not sure which forum to post this in.
I am to start working on a small univ. c# project, and I am going to build a flight log application, detecting when a flight starts and where and where it ends, and log some events during the flight such as periodic lat/lon/alt/spd, gear retractions and extention, flaps, etc. and then present a flight log where opening each flight will show some critical events + draw the flight path on a map.
It is somewhat similar to ACARS, only it will not have a server-side and be used for personal tracking.
Specifically my question is about how often do we snapshot the location while in flight - as I want enough data points to draw a detailed flight path but not to many so I inflate the db.
How is it implemented in the ACARS code? Can I get it for reference? I saw the backend is available, but I didn't find the client.

Oren Geva

Senior Captain, B737-800

DVA043
Senior Captain, MD-11
OLP

Joined on June 10 2001
Event Half Century Club
Online Double Century Club
50 State Club
DVA Twenty-Year Anniversary
Everett 1500 Club
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"Col. Panic"
Marietta, GA

2,347 legs, 9,466.0 hours
240 legs, 553.9 hours online
2,005 legs, 8,259.1 hours ACARS
75 legs, 196.3 hours event
2,383 legs, 9,600.9 hours total
91 legs dispatched, 66.4 hours

Posted onPost created on January 28 2023 13:10 ET by Luke Kolin

There are two different intervals. The first is how often to poll for status (and it is polling - while SimConnect is event-based FSUIPC is not), which is usually several times a second and increases when we are near takeoff and landing. The second is how often to persist the data, and this is time-based and depends on speed and flight phase. It can very between 2-3 seconds on takeoff/landing to 30-60 at cruise. My suggestion would be to use either the per-frame or 6Hz spacing from SimConnect to get data, and then persist the info based on speed.

Cheers!

Luke Kolin

Senior Captain, MD-11

Posted onPost created on January 28 2023 13:31 ET by Oren Geva

Thanks!
I will use simconnect - I don't want to mix two SDKs in this project, and want it to be as simple as it can be.
With simconnect it would be subscribing to events, and I assume I can just store a list of events in memory or something and persist to db when it reaches a certain size or at certain intervals.
Actually this would be a good case for this silly course, as I would need to create different layers and abstractions for this and use the stuff they want to see in it.
God knows why I did this to myself, but this will be a nice project.

Oren Geva

Senior Captain, B737-800

Posted onPost created on January 29 2023 01:29 ET by Oren Geva

How do you detect the landing and take off?

Oren Geva

Senior Captain, B737-800

Posted onPost created on January 29 2023 10:00 ET by Luke Kolin

There should be a boolean flag that that tells if you are on the ground.

Cheers!

Luke Kolin

Senior Captain, MD-11

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