AIGTC/AIGFP – Dev Update – Alpha India Group

Since the first announcement of AIGTC and AIGPLN back in late 2019 a lot have changed in the FS world. P3D has got a new big update, and MSFS was released.

All these changes had an impact on the initial plan of the development roadmap for AIG Traffic Controller and the new fileformat AIGFP, but over the last couple of months things have become more stable and predictable for us, to allow moving forward with the development.

AIG Traffic Controller

AIGTC Version 0.3 has been released as a pre-alpha and prove of concept to see how stable the SimConnect-Interface is, to test out the AIGFP fileformat, start the first steps with helicopters and testing some stuff in the background.

Over the couble of months it was clear that 0.3 will be a dead-end and for the next version I have to rewrite the whole stuff from 0 back up to allow an easier extension later on with more features. Version 0.4 is currently tested internally in P3D and MSFS (yes you see correctly MSFS).

0.4 will come with following new features:

Delays

AIGFP based traffic will suffer dynamically delays, for that we have used the official 2019 delay statistic from the FAA. This will bring more dynmic in the weekly rotation based flightplans. Weather is now also a new factor for delays: In case of thunderstorms or other heady weather the airport will be closed for AIGFP based departures and the Aircraft will remain at the gate, till the weather gets better.

Ground Traffic (under investigation)

AIGTC allows handling of ground traffic at airports as well. At the moment we are testing some basic follow me operations for AI aircraft. A dynmic number (based on the airport size) of follow me vehicles is driving around the airport on “stand-by” and as soon as an aircraft is landing the car will get dispatched to the gate and performs a “drive-in” when the aircraft is getting close. After engine shutdown the car will return to standby-mode. (Modification for each airport will be possible)

I am currently not sure if this feature will be enabled by default in the initial release of 0.4 because we are missing default SimObjects for that at the moment.

In the logshot we might take over the controll of all Ground Vehicles and create realsitic ground operations for all aircraft at the airport.

AIGFP

The development and integration of AIGFP in all of our Tools has been a major priority over the last weeks, because it is currently the only way to get offline AI working in MSFS, so to actual test AI in MSFS we had to finish the integration of AIGFP in our tools. This had some nice benefits I would like to share with you guys here:

As you know the aim of the new format is to provide more information in a flightplan and per each single flight, incl. routing information. Since a few days we have now a fully functional intenal tool that will create realworld routing during the flightplan creation, so each new flightplan by AIG starting Summer 2021 will come with real world routing. And not just that, it will even follow current airspace (FIR) restrictions:

For example: European airlines will avoid MINSK FIR, airlines from Cyprus have to avoid Turkish airspace and airlines flying to and from Lebanon have to avoid Isreal.

Cyprus Airways avoiding Turkey and Belarus.

flyDubai avoiding Syria and Israel on the way to/from Beirut.

These rules are not hardcoded and our flightplaners can adjust them for each flightplan before creating the route, so russian airlines can still fly over Belarus and will not avoid Crimea, while other operators will avoid these areas in the Sim.