Creating and saving CDU plans without CDU running

[TobiBS]

Hi Pete,
Hi Ray,

would it be possible, that you send me some plans via E-mail as well? I am taking part in VATSIMs Worldflight this year with a team that uses PM and therefore it would be nice to precompile all plans when the routes are out. It would be great if you can send them.

Can you confirm, that the loading process is then to type the name of the route and click on CO ROUTE to load the route and then it is in the FPLN?
Are there any other infos stored despite the flightplan itself?

[Ray Proudfoot]

Hi TobiBS,

Here are the plans Pete sent me. They do include SIDs and STARs plus a waypoint 40 miles from arrival so you may wish to remove those.

The procedure you describe to load is how I expect it to work. There are other values in the Squawkbox formatted plans but it's not clear what purpose they serve. The plans as provided work fine.

[TobiBS]

Thanks Ray,

well that looks simple, do you know if you can also use the naming scheme for the files that is typical for airlines (IATA_Dep then IATA_Dest then two digits for the number of the route)? just rename a file and try to load it with the new name.

[Ray Proudfoot]

The naming structure for the CDU to list it has to be ICAO-ICAOx.sbp. If you omit the hyhen they aren't listed. The x indicates there can be additional letters but I don't know if there's a limit. As you say, rename one and see if it gets listed.

[TobiBS]

Well I have no PM Software here, therefore I can only test that with PM Users. But if it is like you say, that would also be ok. The reason for the other naming scheme is limitations in real avionics.

What do you mean with getting listed, do you have to type departure and destination first and then you can load a CO ROUTE by selecting it from a list? That would represent the real procedure, as far as I know. But normally it should also be possible to type the name of the route directly into CO ROUTE to laod it.

[Ray Proudfoot]

I haven't tried all the ways of loading a plan but it you enter the departure ICAO and then press CO Route it should list only the routes from that airport. It acts like a filter. I haven't tried the other method you suggest but in theory it should work and then only list all the routes between the two airports entered.

[Peter Dowson]

The naming structure for the CDU to list it has to be ICAO-ICAOx.sbp. If you omit the hyhen they aren't listed. The x indicates there can be additional letters but I don't know if there's a limit.

Okay, here's how it works:

The name, as you say, is DDDD-AAAAx.sbp, where DDDD and AAAA are the departure and arrival ICAO codes, and "x" is optional.

There can be only 1 character x -- 0-9 or A-Z or a-z, all fine. If there are more characters than 1 in x, then the CDU listing loses characters after the '-' in its list. I suspect therefore it also wouldn't match the Arrival ICAO if using both DDDD and AAAA to search.

Examples:
LEMD-LEIBS12 comes out as LEIDBS12, losing 3 characters after the - to allow for the 3 characters added at the end.
EGCC-EGGD2W comes out as EGCCGD2W, losing 2.
However
EGCC-EGGD2 comes out okay as EGCCEGGD2

So, please only add one character.

I would also ask for that character to be a number, 0 - 9, please. Or at least avoid N E S and W, so I can distinguish between the routes I generate with FliteStar which include SIDs and directional preferences thereby imposed, and those from vRoute.

Hope this helps,
Pete

[Ray Proudfoot]

Hi Pete,

Thanks for the explanation. This will be useful to Michal when he generates a flightplan name. I've posted a message on the vRoute thread pointing him to this thread and in particular, your post.

[saabpilot]

Looking into my CDU/Plans folder I see the following:

All my CO routes (saved from the CDU) are in the "CFP" format and not readable as plain text.

Plus Two old routefiles dated 1999 delivered with PM and in SBP format (readable as plain text).
Last file is icaofile.txt - a textfile with ICAO code, lat/long and airport name all in plain text.

[Ray Proudfoot]

Bjorn,

A rar file is like a zip file. It contains other files, compressed. I wouldn't expect the CDU to read that directly. It should probably be moved elsewhere.