Hey IFC, what’s popping?
Yesterday, with the (pretty sweet) release of 20.1, we got features such as Centre, SIDs and STARs.
If you don’t know what a SID or STAR is yet, I highly recommend checking out these pages put together by the hard working Infinite Flight staff members
Anyhow, SIDs and STARs are great! The only challenge I’ve been hearing people (including myself) run in to, is using webpages such as fpltoif.com and simbrief. If you’re not familiar, these web pages can generate a flight plan you can copy into Infinite Flight and are especially useful for long hauls and crossing the ocean However, once you’ve pasted the flight plan into Infinite Flight, you must now set a SID and STAR if there’s active ATC. This creates a challenge, because if you simply pick a SID and STAR after importing the flight plan, the flight plan will, in simple terms, die. Of course I don’t mean that litterally, but the simulator will want to put the both the SIDs and STARs and the end of the flightplan essentially rendering it unflyable. The same also goes for Oceanic routes, and these are even more challenging to add because the are in the middle of your flight plan.
What would be nice to see, would be Infinite Flight automatically recognizing the end point of a SID and the closest WPT of the fightplan you pasted into Infinite Flight and connecting the two points, deleting all the waypoints before the closest one. Same thing for STARs, it recognizing the start of a STAR and connecting it to the nearest waypoint so you can avoid flight planning disasters and not waste a half hour to an hour on the ground.
This would be the ideal time to vote for a feature like this, since an update has just dropped and (after the devs have taken a long long long break for putting up with us,) they’ll be looking for new features to add to the next update, so let’s make this one of them and make flight planning less of a pain!