Vatsim realistic update proposal (navaid control)

General Discussion
1

Hi, all!

To extend realism and pilot experience I would to offer a significant upgrade of pilot-airport interaction. Giving ATC ability to control navigation aids and landing system in area of control. According to NOTAM or affected by local problems, navaids may not function full time. Pilots and ATC must consider this situations and do they work with availiable capabilities.

Supposed brief technical implementation

Step 1: Creating navaid database based on wpnavaid from AIRAC, updates on every cycle

Step 2: Creating VATSIM API endpoint for ATC and pilot clients for managing navaid states

Step 3: Adding new functions to simulator SDK for control navaid status and/or other parameters

Step 4: Pilot client rework to control simulator thru new SDK functions

For example, X-plane already contains SDK for managing navaids thru XPLMNavigation objects and SDK need to be extend with functions like XPLMNavAidEnable / Disable and XPLMGetNavAidInfo must have new property like “enabled”.

This is how it works:
ATC must visit special page and check/uncheck enabled navaids. And in future this ability can be added to ATC control software.
When connected, pilot client periodically fetches navaids around specified radius via API endpoint and set navaid state in simulator using XPLMNavigation* functions according to it status in the Vatsim database.

What you think?

2

Neat idea, but it would be a massive amount of work that impacts nearly every aspect of the VATSIM technical infrastructure for something that impacts pilots relatively little in the real world. (Navaid outages do happen, but they don’t affect every pilot everywhere.) I think all that development time would be better spent elsewhere.