Fsbuild-2 Flight Planner

I purchased FSBuild yesterday. I have spent the day playing with it, did a tutorial and read the User Guide, and I have questions for which I did not find any anwers. Hopefully you can help me.


1. When I try to delete a flight from the “User Saved Routes” category, I get a message stating “Subscript out of range”.

2. If there is already a flight plan showing, and I want to create a new one from scratch, how do I get rid of the existing one? I can clear the map by pushing the X button, but the Route waypoints table remains. So far the only I can get rid of it is by shutting down FSBuild altogether. There should be a “Close” or a “New” command in the File menu.

3. I wish to add the Captain Sim Lockheed C-130X Hercules. In another post, it refers to a ".prf file". Where can I get this file?

4. Comment: no help file or users guide shows up shows up in the Start Programs list; found it by accident in the actual program file. There should be a shortcut to it in the Start menu.

Gaétan

DELETING
Here is exactly what I did (for this test, I first created 3 different flight plans):
1. I selected the Flight Plans Folder, then the Categories tab.
2. In the list of categories, I selected “User Saved Routes” (ID 4)
3. I selected the third flight (KPHX-KABI – your tutorial 2)
4. In the File menu, I clicked on “Delete Flight Plan”.
5. A small window opened up stating “Subscript out of range” and showing an OK button.
6. I clicked on the OK button. The small window closed and a new small window opened called “Route Delete”; in the middle of it is a smaller window containing the Title KPHX-KABI, with a Delete button underneath.
7. I clicked on the Delete button and the first small window came back (“Subscript out of range” ).
8. Then I closed this window by clicking the X in the upper corner. The flight was still listed in the “User Saved Routes”.
9. I then double-clicked on the “Logged Routes” row (ID5), then I clicked back on the “User Saved Routes” row, and lo-and-behold, all THREE (3) flights were gone! However I did find them back in the Logged Routes category. This is a real mystery to me. The Users’ Guide does not even contain the word “Logged”, let alone explain what is the purpose of this category and how it works.
10. So, bottom line, I still don’t know how to delete a flight plan, plus I have a Logged Routes category that interacts with the “User Saved Routes” for whatever reason.
11. Would appreciate complete information.

GETTING RID OF AN EXISTING FLIGHT PLAN
Works as you described, however, in addition to clearing in the Flight Plan box, I still need to manually remove all the lines in the route waypoint table.

Thanks Ernie, now I understand both issues. I thought that each flight plan was saved in a file of its own similar to what is done in the FSX Flight Planner and other flight planning S/W. Now I understand that all the information for a given category is saved in one text file, which I can edit if need be.

I also tried the example you indicated on “getting rid of a plan” and I now see how it works. It’s just that it is a somewhat different approach compared to what I see in other S/W.

I think your User’s Guide could use a bit of updating to clarify these issues – and it would save you time answering posts such as mine. Not much text is required – just step-by-step instructions.

In the meantime, I have run into another issue. I developed the following plan using the manual method described in Tutorial 1:

OPKC DANG2B DANGI A791 JJS.JATEN VECC

Departing RWY was 25L; arrival RWY was 19L.

When I inserted the JJS.JATEN STAR, it showed the following points in the path (both on the map and in the waypoints table):

JJS CC101 JATEN CC319 CC306 CC335 VECC

However, after I pressed the BUILD button, al the CCXXX points disappeared and I was left with:

JJS JATEN VECC

Why did this happen? I don’t think this reflects the real STAR, however I am not sure because there is no JJS.JATEN STAR in the Navigraph charts (which is up to date – as is my AIRAC cycle 1202).

Gaétan

Ernie

Thanks, that explains it, although it was not obvious to guess at.

In the meantime I had created a different version of the route using the BAMUR STAR instead of JATEN. It had resulted again in losing the CC points. However, after inserting “STAR” after BAMUR it worked – I recuperated all the lost waypoints.

You mention that “JATEN is the STAR, JJS is the transition”, however in the STARS list on the right, it is listed as JJR.JATEN. Hence the confusion.

When I said that “there is no JJS.JATEN STAR in the Navigraph charts”, I meant it is not in the Charts even though it is in the database; however that is Navigraph’s problem, not yours.

I have a suggestion for your next version of FSBuild. Currently, when we click on Build, it exports the plan to FSX and PMDG (or whatever was selected) and automatically assigns a name in the format OPKCVECC.PLN or OPKCVECC.RTE. If I then create a different version of the plan, using a different route or SID/STAR, or a different aircraft, it saves it under the same name, thus overwriting the original file, which I might have wanted to keep. Having noticed this, I work around the issue by immediately going into Windows Explorer and adding 001 or whatever after the original name, e.g. OPKCVECC001.RTE. My suggestion is for FSBuild to automatically add such as suffix number if it sees that a plan already exists between the same two airports. An alternate would be to request the user to assign a file name of his choice.

At any rate, thanks for your support. In spite of all my questions, as I use FSBuild, I find I like it more and more. It certainly will save me time over tweaking routes built in FSX and making them fit in the PMDG FMC.

Gaétan