Creating Routes

[Unknown98]

I've started working on routes again after scrapping it several months ago. Here's what I have so far.






So you will set the departure and final arrival airports, and then set the # of stops that you want between the two. It could be 0 stops if you wanted to, or (depending on the length of the flights) could be upwards of 10 or 15.  

The next thing I will work on is setting up the departure times for each leg of the route... which can get quite complicated because flight times will depend on the aircraft you assign to each route. Different speeds, turnaround times, and so forth... I'll have to think a bit more about how to make that work. I may need to have users select an aircraft first, before any of the steps shown in the screenshots above. That would allow for calculation of flight times. Otherwise you'd have to calculate it all manually by going to the route research page and figuring out how much time you need to allow between flights and so on. I don't think that would be enjoyable.

[Frenchie]

Terrific stuff unk!

I was thinking perhaps instead of a mileage limit (hard to calculate) we could impose a time restriction, say 24 hours for instance where the aircraft may be assigned to routes, after which you need to restart the same route or create a new one?

Also will it be possible to store routes in order to reuse them and perhaps tweak the times rather than constantly create new ones?

[POTKC]

Why not just put in a maximum of...I don't know, 16 stops, and then have people select where they want each one and leave all the unneeded ones blank? That way, you wouldn't have to preselect the number of stops, and it would facilitate the ability to amend routes after they have been created...

[Unknown98]

Terrific stuff unk!

I was thinking perhaps instead of a mileage limit (hard to calculate) we could impose a time restriction, say 24 hours for instance where the aircraft may be assigned to routes, after which you need to restart the same route or create a new one?

Also will it be possible to store routes in order to reuse them and perhaps tweak the times rather than constantly create new ones?

Yeah. So I was thinking the 24 hour limit as well, because the time that the aircraft is in the air is really the only thing we care about, mileage or # of stops can differ widely depending on aircraft.

My idea is to store the routes in the database and then on the "Routes" page, you would have a listing of each route, what aircraft it is assigned to, and so on. You would click "Start Route" and then it would insert all the flights into the database for the day. Once all those flights have been flown, the "Start Route" button would appear again and you would just have to click it again to start another route. I also want to create a way to swap out routes, so you could create 2-3 routes for one aircraft and then just switch between them. Editing of routes should also be possible so you don't have to create a new one if you want to change something, but I haven't thought much about the layout of that page or how exactly it would work. If you just need to change the times it should certainly be possible to edit the route, but if you want to add/delete stops that might be where you would just need to create a new one. I'm not completely sure yet.

Why not just put in a maximum of...I don't know, 16 stops, and then have people select where they want each one and leave all the unneeded ones blank? That way, you wouldn't have to preselect the number of stops, and it would facilitate the ability to amend routes after they have been created...

Well that has the potential to get quite messy on the backend... checking which boxes are empty, determining which stop is the last stop, what if the user skips a box, and so on and so forth... you end up with so many if/else, this/that checks and balances it can get complicated fairly quickly. It's better code-wise if I have the user select up-front how many stops. That was one of the issues I was running into last time I tried to do routes and I had to calculate how many stops the user had, without actually knowing how many they had, and trying to decipher it all.

[POTKC]

...you could create 2-3 routes for one aircraft...

Does this mean routes will be aircraft-specific? Wouldn't it be better to create routes that can then by assigned to any aircraft (maybe limited to the same aircraft type)?

[Unknown98]

Well the idea is anyway that you can assign the route to any aircraft but if you'll need to edit the departure times in most cases if you switch the aircraft.

[LordLetto]

So it's still a WIP? Just wondering cause I can start making one but after setting up the stops when I Click the "Configure Times" button nothing happens, Was thinking of making a Bug Report but if it's not Finished yet then there would be no need. Google Chrome BTW if Browsers make a difference in this case.
Was thinking a YXU Round Trip, YXU-YVR-ANC-CTS-NRT-CTS-ANC-YVR-YXU to use with my CS300

[Unknown98]

Yes it's still a WIP

[Ryan97]

I have just created a route from London Gatwick to Edinburgh at 08:00 GMT. Will this work or are they not active yet???

[Unknown98]

No they will not work yet.

I think I am on the verge of getting one-way routes to work (i.e. point A to point B, no stops) but I still got a ways to go.