We have recently added a VATSIM Flight Finder tool to our web portal.
We often find that it’s tedious when trying to decide on a route for a VATSIM flight. We have tried to take the pain away from the pilot and speed up the flight planning process by letting our system find your potential routes for you.
So how does it work?
Simply select your aircraft type, airline and preferred VATSIM Air Traffic Controllers at your Departure and Arrival airports. Our system will then generate a wide range of routes for you to choose from, detailing the estimated flight time and other information. With the click of a button, you can export your chosen route directly into SimBrief where you can continue on with your VATSIM flight planning.
Example:
You’re a beginner and you only want to fly to and from airports that solely have a Ground controller online. Select “Ground” from both drop-downs, and our system will only display routes to and from airports that only have a Ground controller online.
This is completely free to use and does not require an account or active subscription.
We’re updating this tool constantly and we’re keen to hear your feedback, so please let us know your thoughts.
Great idea! I did not get any results. I tried Firefox and Edge browsers, but after inputting AAL or DAL as airline, then A320-200 or A320-251N as type, after pressing “Generate Routes”, nothing further happened. I gave it ample time to come back with a result.
It’s likely that no routes were found based on the settings you chose but it failed to tell you that. I have fixed that now. Please give it another try
Ok, now I got some results. What is the relevance of airline and aircraft type? I selected “American Airlines” and “A320-200” and it suggested city-pairs in Europe only, I found this a bit confusing. I expected this data to filter out routes that would not be realistic for such an airline. And since there are no ATCOs online in the USA right now, I expected no results. You may want to introduce a filter for “region” to localize flights, e.g. “Europe”, “North America”, “Central America”, “South America”, “The Americas” etc… and even add options for users to choose whether they are looking for flights departing or arriving in these regions and then the algorithm can do its magic.
The airline & aircraft choices are primarily for a nicer integration with SimBrief at the moment. I have taken your feedback onboard RE realistic flights in line with airlines routes etc and it’s something we’ll look into in the near future. This may require integration with Flight Radar or something similar to pull through real world flights, so may not be feasible currently due to cost but it’s certainly something we’ll look at. We’ll implement the regional filter as soon as possible though and report back on this thread once we have added it.
A simple filter regarding airlines should not require a big database, would it? E.g. US carriers can usually only fly national flights within the US and international flights originating or terminating in US territory. There are some exception with certain freedoms, but that would be too much for what you would like to achieve. I guess the regionalization with a filter would already be sufficient.
I just tried it, but it insisted that there were no flights found. I tried US to US, Colombia to US (while both countries had ATC active). There is a little bug in it.
This seems to only work for airlines, and only for fixed-wing. I’m flying an AW109 helicopter (ICAO: A109) and I don’t really see a reason why this good idea should be restricted to airlines or planes. Am I missing anything?
The aircraft and airline selections are primarily for the SimBrief integration and don’t actually affect the routes that are generated.
These are not required inputs and you can leave them blank if you wish.
We’ve taken your comment onboard though and will look to add a larger variety of aircraft types to the list. At the moment we have taken them directly from SimBrief’s supported aircraft API.
If you have any other ideas we’re keen to hear them!
Something is off. I just tested it again and it does not suggest citypairs in the Middle East. Currently there’s ATC in Tehran and in Dubai:
OIII has TWR APP CTR
OMDB has GND APP CTR
When I leave “Ground” selected it will not show any of these cities and citypairs at all, although it is a viable option. The filter and criteria needs a bit of refining, me thinks. Maybe you just need to have some criteria to define that an airport has some sort of “aerodrome control” active, this can be any combination of DEL GND TWR APP, not restricted to one that will ignore the rest.
Also, regarding the list of countries: is it possible to make the list in a way that you can type the name of a country (or parts of it) and then the list will only show countries that match this combination of letters? This would make the usability much better, more efficient.
As well, I’d consider not only having a list of countries, but rather groups of countries as a list item, too, at the very beginning of the list.
Please try again now. Ensure the flight time is selected as 2-3 hours in order to pick up OIII to OMDB.
I have just tested and it’s now working, see screenshot.
FYI incase you’re not aware, if you only select Ground, it will show airports that ONLY have Ground online. Airports with Ground AND Tower for example will not show in the results. The ATC selection has to match exactly. This is done purposely to allow the easy finding of flights for different levels of VATSIM pilots. IE a beginner would not want to see results for airports with all ATC online if they only wanted Ground, etc.
We’ll take a look at what you have suggested RE countries.
Yes, when I had switched TWR and APP on, it found this city-pair, no problem. But by having switched GND only, I did not get any results, although there was good ATC coverage. Maybe the default station-type should be TWR.
or simply an option to select positions as exclusive (only the mentioned position(s) staffed at the airport) or inclusive (any positions at the airport staffed as long as the mentioned position(s) are staffed)
It figures it out based on various factors. IE length of flight, number of departures / arrivals at selected airports and how many controllers are online.
