AFCAD
Version 1.2.2
User Manual
There are some simple tasks you can do with AFCAD that don't require you to read this whole manual.
If you only want to import downloaded airport facilities just go to the section Installing Downloaded Airports. If you only need to enable ATC at an airport then go to Adding ATC to an Airport. For other procedures refer to the Step-by-Step Instructions section in the Table of Contents.
General Program Usage
Working With Facility Objects
Final Notes
Rubber band selection
You can now select multiple objects by pressing down the mouse button on the window and dragging out a rectangle. When you release the mouse button all object inside that rectangle will become selected. You can add to your current selection by holding down the Shift key while using the rubber band.
Closing runways for landings or takeoffs
You could previously close a runway for takeoffs, but you can now close a runway for takeoffs or landings or both. This provides an easy method to make ATC assign separate runways for takeoffs and landings.
Increase maximum airport size
Installed airports (in the bgl files) were previously limited to a maximum size of 50K bytes. This limited the number of nodes and taxi links that could be created. That has been increased to 200K. That is about five times the size of a large stock airport.
Total facility restore option
A Restore all Airports item has been added to the File menu. This allows you to completely restore the facility files to their original 'out of the box' condition if you should encounter problems with facility airports. The program will copy the original files from the FS2002 CD.
Reversed arrow key directions
The arrow keys (up, down, left, right) now shift the airport on the window in the opposite directions to conform to the normal windows scrolling directions.
Movable Airport Reference Point
The Airport Reference Point (spiky pink dot) can now be moved using the mouse like other objects. This can be useful when creating overlay airports to ensure AI contact the correct overlay's ATC after landing.
Drive-through parking
You can now connect more than one taxi link to a parking spot. This allows parking spots to have a taxi link entering one side and exiting the other. This was provided mainly to be compatible with the few stock airports that already had such drive-through parking; however, because of limitations with the AI it rarely results in the kind of behaviour one would hope for, that is aircraft driving in from one side and driving out the other. AI will take the shortest path to the active runway and even if they can exit a parking spot going forward they will turn 180 degrees and go out the rear taxi path, if that is the shortest route to the runway. You should also be careful to avoid serial or 'string of pearls' parking, which can block some parking spots when others are occupied.
Zoom in / out keys
The + and - keys on the keypad can now be used to zoom in and out as well as the + and - keys on the main keyboard.
Ramdomizing parking
A Randomize button has been provided on the Parking List window. This will mix-up the parking order automatically to prevent AI from bunching up at certain areas of the terminal or ramp. The parking can also be sorted by categories (area, type, size) by clicking on the list headings.
N,S,E,W etc. runway designators
These are now allowed for runway designators. These are used for some water and non-paved runways instead of numbers.
Problems opening airports
When you saved an airport then tried to open a new airport in AFCAD, you would sometimes see a blank screen. This should not be a problem anymore. A similar problem, however, can still occur in FS2002 if an airport is saved while FS2002 is still running, FS may no longer display start locations for some airports or may even crash. This can be prevented by re-starting FS2002 after saving any airport changes. This will cause FS to update its scenery index. Alternatively, you can go to the Scenery Library window and click OK to force a re-indexing without having to restart FS.
Registration error
There was a small registration error when placing facility features using FS2002 in slew mode. This error gets more significant the farther out from the Airport Reference Point, and could be 10 to 30 feet at distances of 2 to 3 miles. The registration has been improved so that it is now typically within 1 foot over most of an airport's area, and within 3 feet at the extreme edges.
Bgl files crossing 180 degree meridian
For .bgl files that cross over the 180 degree meridian (western Pacific), if any airport was modified in one of those file it would render many of the airports in that file unusable. This only applied to three files: alaswafd.bgl (western Alaska and Aleutians), newzafd.bgl (New Zealand) and swpcafd.bgl (Fiji and surrounding islands). The program will no longer corrupt those files, and you can undo any corruption that has already been caused by simply opening any airport from each of those files and saving it again. If in doubt, open the airports: PANV, NZCH and NFNL and save them again (no changes needed).
Magnetic variation un-reversed
When entering the magnetic variation for a runway on the Runway Properties window, negative variations would be changed to positive, and positive to negative. This has been fixed.
Create a folder for AFCAD anywhere you want and unzip the files to that folder.
AFCAD doesn’t register itself with Windows, so if you want to get rid of it you can just delete the folder it is in and all the files.
It is a freeware CAD-style program that allows you to modify the Airport and Facilities Data (AFD) used in Microsoft Flight Simulator (FS2002). Facility data is part of the scenery database for Flight Simulator but facility data does not control any of the visual elements of scenery, like airport buildings or ground textures. Instead facility data controls the invisible maps of airports and other data that ATC uses to give directions and AI uses to move around and park at airports. It also controls the information that you see on the ‘map view’, GPS screen, flight planner, and start position set-up window in Flight Simulator. You can modify any of that with AFCAD.
Parking
You can add parking spaces (gates or ramp parking) and modify or delete existing parking spaces at airports for your own use, or to increase the AI levels at an airport. Parking can be added at airports that do not currently have it. This allows AI to be programmed at airports that could not originally support AI. Any number of parking spaces can be added, subject to performance considerations on your computer. You can also adjust aircraft gate parking so that aircraft doors mate with boarding ramps.
ATC
You can add ATC to any airport that does not already have it. This, in combination with the ability to add parking, allows any of the 23000 airports in FS2002 to support AI (only 1834 airports in the stock FS2002 could use AI). Adding ATC simply requires adding one or more control tower frequencies at an airport. It does not require an actual control tower scenery object, just the addition of radio frequencies. It may be a little unrealistic to have ATC at airfields that are uncontrolled in real life, but many people would live with that to have AI at their favourite airfields.
Taxiways
You can re-route the mapping of taxiways. This does not alter the visible taxiway appearance, but you can change the routes the AI aircraft take when moving around the airport, and you can change the routes that ATC instructs you to take, for example using the ‘progressive taxi’ mode (pink arrows).
Start locations
Every airport comes with default start locations for your aircraft at the end of every runway. These can be changed to be at different locations, such as at the taxiway entrance to a runway.
Control tower view
The location for the control tower view of your aircraft (selected by pressing Ctrl+S) can be changed. This can be placed at the actual control tower location, if there is a tower, or any other location or elevation.
Shifting airports
Some third party replacement airports do not line up properly with stock Flight Simulator airports. This can cause the AI to taxi and take off and land on the grass beside the runways and taxiways. AFCAD allows you to shift the entire airport, or realign specific taxiways and runways to correct this.
New airports
Although AFCAD cannot create the visual elements of airports (there are other tools for that) you can create the facilities data for new airports to allow AI and ATC, and to have the correct airport information appear in the map, flight planner and GPS windows.
Different runways for takeoffs and landings
At airports that have more than one runway, it is easy to make ATC assign one runway for landings and another for takeoffs. This applies to the AI as well as your own aircraft.
Multiple runway use
Although there is no direct way to make ATC utilise multiple runways for simultaneous landings or simultaneous takeoffs, ATC and AI can be tricked into using multiple runways by creating two overlapping airport maps. The map for one airport would have a different active runway and different parking spaces from the other. Visually you would see only one airport, but ATC would use the active runway at each ‘phantom’ airport for arrivals and departures. This also requires programming AI flight plans to use the two different airports for departures or destinations.
Sharing airport changes
You can modify the facility data for airports or create new airports and post that facility data for others to use. Airports are exported in text format source-code files which can be imported by other users running AFCAD. The export files are SCASM-compatible, so it is also possible to compile airports with SCASM (a freeware scenery compiler) and use them even without AFCAD.
Visual elements
You cannot use AFCAD to change the visual location of runways taxiways, buildings or other objects at an airport.
NAVAIDs
AFCAD can display the location and other information (identifiers, frequencies etc.) for NAVAIDs, And you can change this information, but it does not change the actual NAVAID signals that your aircraft instruments use, it just changes how the NAVAIDs are presented on Flight Simulator map views and the GPS window. The NAVAID information that your virtual aircraft instruments actually use comes from a different set of files that AFCAD does not work with. It is interesting though, to see where the NAVAIDs are actually located at an airport, and you can often see some glaring errors in localiser and glide path siting.
Taxi speed
You cannot alter the taxi speed of AI aircraft, or make them get off the runways faster, although in some cases if aircraft are making improper ‘U’ turns to exit runways you can delete or realign taxiway connections to change that.
BGL file backups:
AFCAD modifies the ‘.bgl’ files in Flight Simulator that contain facility data. These are all in the same folder :
…\FS2002\SCENEDB\AFDFILES\SCENERY\
It will only modify one .bgl file at a time, and before it makes an initial change to a file it will automatically make a backup copy of the original file with the extension ORIGINAL, for example:
Usneaf05.bgl to usneaf05.ORIGINAL
BGL file restoring:
These files can be used to restore facilities to their original state if necessary. Just delete the modified .bgl file and rename the .ORIGINAL file to .bgl.
As a more drastic step, if you want to restore all the facilities to their original 'out of the box' state, use the Restore all Airports item on the File menu. The program will copy all the original facility files from the FS2002 CD, which you will be asked to insert. It will not affect other FS2002 files.
Facility files are located on the FS2002 CD 1 in a file name "FS2002.CAB" and can also be extracted with Explorer or a Zip program, just double-click on that .CAB file to open it.
Saving export copies:
AFCAD allows individual airports to be output (‘exported’) as text files. These files can also be posted for other users, who can import them into their own facility database (refer to the Importing / Exporting section and Posting and Sharing Airport Files section for more details).
It is a good idea to export copies of the original airports before you overwrite them. Save those original airports in a folder just for that purpose so if you don’t like a downloaded file that you installed, or an airport that you changed, then you can easily restore the original airport by importing it back again. If you don’t keep exported copies of the original airports then you can still restore an original airport by opening the airport from the backup file (filename.ORIGINAL) using the 'From Specific File' open mode, export the airport, then re-import it into the working .bgl file. You could also restore then entire original .bgl file, but a bgl file can contain hundreds of airports and that would remove any other airport changes you have made in that file.
Similarly, you should retain any AFCAD files you download in a folder after you import them. That way if a facility .bgl file gets corrupted you can restore the original file and quickly re-import all the add-on airports.
If you import a completely new airport, or an airport overlay, the only way to remove the new airport or overlay currently is to restore the original .bgl file.
The import/export files are text files, and you can open them with an editor and write your own comments in them to explain what they are for or why you have them.
AFCAD presents a basic route map of an airport, similar to a subway transit map. Although AFCAD can be used by itself, it is much easier to use it linked with Flight Simulator so you can keep the facility map elements registered with the visual scenery. You can start Flight Simulator and ‘slew’ around an airport in a virtual aircraft and crosshairs will move on the AFCAD map to show your location. Alternatively the AFCAD map can be locked to your aircraft position like a moving map display. This requires the addition of a freeware program called FSUIPC, by Peter Dowson. FSUIPC, among its other uses, allows third party software to interface with Flight Simulator.
FSUIPC does not come with AFCAD but it can be downloaded from any well stocked flight simulation web site, or from the following site:
FSUIPC comes with documentation, but it is not necessary to read it for this application. All you have to do is copy the file FSUIPC.dll into the MODULES folder off your main Flight Simulator folder, for example:
…\FS2002\MODULES
That’s all you need to do to allow AFCAD to link with Flight Simulator.
Flipping Windows:
You can start either program first. Since most people don’t have enough monitor space to have both the FS and AFCAD windows open side-by-side you can have both windows maximised, and press the Alt+Tab key to flip back and forth between them.
Eliminating Pauses:
By default, Flight Simulator will go into pause mode whenever you leave the FS window. It can be a nuisance un-pausing that window all the time and this can be prevented by changing a parameter in the FS2002.CFG file in the main Flight Simulator folder. Use Notepad to find the following line:
PAUSE_ON_LOST_FOCUS=1
Change the 1 to 0.
You are probably anxious to try it out, so you can start AFCAD now and open an airport to ‘play’ with. Under the File menu choose Open Airport.
The easiest way to open an airport is to enter the ICAO code (e.g. KLAX) in the Airport ID box and click OK. If you do not know the airport code then you can locate the city using the tree window on the left side. This lists all the cities that Flight Simulator has, and all the airports associated with a selected city will be shown in the list box below. If a city has more than one airport then you must choose the one you want to work on before closing the window.
When you open an airport, all the facility data for that airport is read into memory and you should be presented with a map like the one below.
Any changes you make to an airport are done only to the data in memory. As long as you don’t do a ‘save’, none of the changes you make will affect Flight Simulator. If you want to experiment first before you do any serious work, then just don’t save the airport you are working on. When you do a save, the changed facility data will be re-inserted into the bgl file it came from. If you accidentally do save changes that you don’t want then you can restore the original bgl file to undo that.
If you have Flight Simulator open at the same time as AFCAD then you should do all the work on an airport that you need to do in a session and save the airport back to the Flight Simulator facility file only at the end. Flight Simulator needs to re-index modified facility bgl files, which it will do automatically when it restarts, but if you modify a bgl file before this re-indexing is done, and you open a ‘map view’ or GPS window while FS is still running it may cause FS to crash. If you want to save an airport while FS is still running, then go to the Scenery Library and click "OK". This will also force FS2002 to re-index and will make it stable.
If you are worried about losing data by not saving periodically, AFCAD does auto-backups to a separate file every couple of minutes and should recover after a failure or improper shutdown. Alternatively, while you are working on an airport you can ‘export’ the airport to a separate file in your own folder any time you want. This is at least as good as saving the airport back to the scenery, and it allows you to save progressive versions of your work.
Individual airports can be saved in text files. These files are given default names like KSFO1.txt and begin with the airport ID. You can change this if you want, but it is a good idea to keep the airport ID in the file name. You can use an editor to put your own comments in these files to keep track of what they are for or what changes they contain.
Before you export an airport you must open it first, which brings it from the Flight Simulator .bgl file into memory. If you then export the airport it goes from memory to a text file. You can export an airport from memory to a text file any time you want while you are working on it.
Similarly, when you import an airport text file, it will only be read into memory initially and you will be presented with the map of that airport. You can then use the Save command to insert the airport into the appropriate .bgl file (i.e. install the airport) or you can abandon that import file by opening another or closing the program. That way you can 'check out' an airport before you install it. You can examine the layout and other airport features and if you don't like what you see then you can choose not to install it, and the Flight Simulator database will not be altered.
Note that export/import files contain a built-in instruction specifying which .bgl file they belong in, so you don’t have to worry about that.
SCASM Compatible:
Exported files are in SCASM (Scenery Assembler) format. You don’t need SCASM to work with AFCAD and to export or import airports, but if you have some special need to do so, you could compile a text file exported by AFCAD into a stand alone facility .bgl file using SCASM 2.86 or above. The SCASM command to compile an exported file is (using a file named KSEA1.txt as an example):
SCASM KSEA1.txt
If you want to interpret the instruction format of an import/export file, refer to the SCASM documentation file facdat.doc. SCASM is available at various download sites and is not included with this product.
Because everybody makes mistakes, the undo command is possibly the greatest invention in computer science, after the spell checker. AFCAD can undo the last 12 changes using the Ctrl+Z key, or the undo button on the tool bar. There is also a redo command, Ctrl+Y. Keep in mind that if you undo a few changes then make a new change, you will not be able to redo the changes you ‘backed over’.
Another thing to keep in mind is that not every change shows up on the map window. For example, if you changed a gate number using a Properties window, you could undo that change later on and not see anything different on the map.
Here are keys you can use to move around the AFCAD map window. Because AFCAD works best in conjunction with Flight Simulator in ‘slew’ mode, where practical the same keys used to ‘slew’ around FS are used to move in AFCAD. Go ahead and try them.
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*Shift and rotate commands don’t work in ‘Lock’ mode. In that mode you must shift and rotate the aircraft itself to move the map.
If you haven’t already done so, you may want to start Flight Simulator now. Using the ‘Create a flight’ window, select the same airport you have open in AFCAD, pick an aircraft, and start your flight at that airport (but don’t go anywhere yet). If you installed FSUIPC you should see red crosshairs appear on the AFCAD map where your aircraft is.
The most convenient FS mode for most airport work is in slew mode with the top down view. Press ‘Y’ to enter slew mode and Ctrl+S key to change to top-down view (both of these keys toggle in and out of those modes). In top-down view mode you will also have red crosshairs on the FS window.
If you are not already familiar with FS slew mode, you can move your aircraft all around, even through buildings and other aircraft without fear of damage. You can use the joystick to move around, but here are some other keys you may find useful in slew mode.
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In slew mode, you can sometimes find you have accidentally moved so far away from the airport that you may not easily be able to get back. In that situation you can change to the AFCAD window (Ctrl+Tab) and press the ‘Home’ key on your keypad. That will return your aircraft in Flight Simulator to the Airport Reference Point, the approximate centre of the airport.
Jump Here:
Even more useful, you can put the mouse pointer on the AFCAD map wherever you want to be, then use the right mouse button to open a pop up menu and select ‘Jump Here’. The aircraft in Flight Simulator will immediately jump to that location.
So far you have been moving the aircraft crosshairs around a fixed map. In lock mode, the crosshairs (the aircraft) will remain at the centre of the AFCAD window, and the map will move with the aircraft, similar to a GPS moving map window.
Click the lock symbol on the toolbar to toggle lock mode
Here is a map presentation using an FS aircraft aiming forward on the runway:
Unlocked map (north at top): |
Locked map: |
If you find you have slewed completely off the airport in this mode, you can press the Home key in AFCAD to return to the airport centre.
The status bar displays the Latitude and Longitude of the mouse pointer when it is moved, or the lat/long of the red aircraft crosshairs when you are slewing in Flight Simulator.
The status bar also displays the direction (rotation azimuth) of the window in degrees true. That field will also show the heading of a parking spot or start location symbol while you are rotating it.
You can enter latitude and longitude in any of the following formats without having to change any settings in the program. The degree and minute/seconds symbols ( * ’ " ) are optional.
1 N49.12345 2 N49* 15.1234’ 3 N49* 15’ 45.1234" 4 N49:15.1234 5 N49:15:45.1234
You can change how the program displays latitude and longitude by opening the AFCAD.ini file and changing the following parameter line:
LatLongFormat=2
Change the number in the above instruction to the appropriate format number, 1 to 5 in the above list.
 NormalRunway |  Helipad |
 Nodes |  Links |
 Parking(ramp and gates) |  StartLocation** |
 TowerViewpoint |  AirportReference Point |
 Localizer* |  Glide Path* |
 Marker* |  DME* |
 VOR* |  NDB* |
* NAVAIDs are only visible if Show NAVAIDs is checked under the View menu.
** Start Locations are only visible if Show Start Locations is checked under the View menu.
Any map object can be selected by clicking on it with the mouse. Selected objects will turn orange. Multiple objects can be selected at the same time by holding down the Shift key while clicking on objects. To un-select an object, just click on a blank area of the window.
Groups of objects can also be selected by pressing the mouse button down on the window and dragging a 'rubber band' (dotted line rectangle) around the objects then releasing the mouse button. All objects inside the rectangle will be selected. You can add to your current selection by holding down the Shift key while using the rubber band.
Any object can be moved by putting the mouse pointer over the object, depressing the mouse button, and moving the mouse. Release the mouse button to set the final position of the object. If multiple objects are selected and the Shift key is held down to keep them selected then all those objects will move as a group. If you move something you didn’t intend to then use Ctrl+Z to undo it.
Any object, except the Airport Reference Point, can be deleted by selecting it with the mouse and pressing the Delete key. You can also select multiple objects and delete them at the same time. If you deleted something you didn’t intend to then use Ctrl+Z to undo it.
Double-clicking any object with the mouse will open a window displaying the properties of that object. That window will describe everything that is known about the object, and virtually all of that information can be changed.
Double clicking a blank area of the window will bring up the Properties for the currently open airport. This information cannot be altered in the Properties window because it uniquely identifies that airport. If you need to change it you may have to create a new airport, or make a copy.
These three items are what you will be working with the most when modifying or building an airport, so controls for these have been put on the tool bar. Other facility objects such as runways, start locations, frequencies and NAVAIDs can be inserted or managed using menu items or properties windows.
AI aircraft can’t go just anywhere they want at an airport, they can only follow the precisely defined paths laid out on this map. The paths are laid out as a pattern of points or ‘nodes’ connected by lines or ‘taxi links’.
The AI aircraft will follow links from node to node to get from parking to the runway on departure, or from the runway to parking after landing. Most of these nodes and links are on the actual taxiways or the terminal apron, but there must also be nodes and links on runways so the AI can taxi on and off the runways. Although these taxi links have a theoretical width, in Flight Simulator (at least in this version) the width is ignored and AI will follow any sized link anywhere, including over grass or even water. In fact you can create a fully functioning airport with AI and ATC with no visible runways, or other airport features, in the middle of a wheat field or even the ocean. Because the link width is irrelevant, they are shown as narrow lines.
Nodes and links are not just used for AI, they are also used to define the ‘pink line’ path that ATC will present to you if you request ‘Progressive Taxi’ instructions. Each link may have an associated taxiway or runway designator, which ATC will read out to for your departure clearance for example "taxi to and hold short of runway 12 using taxiway B C D".
AI aircraft will only go from parking to the runway, or the other direction, so there must always be parking for AI to work. They cannot be made to go from one part of the airport to another and stop.
If you were to create a new airport, or make major modifications to an existing one, you would generally place the node points first, at every taxiway or runway junction or places where a taxiway changes direction, then you would ‘connect the dots’ with taxi links. Nodes can exist by themselves, although they are useless to the AI in that form, but taxi links can only connect between nodes, or a parking space, so taxi links can’t exist by themselves.
There are only two types of nodes:
Normal nodes are used for the vast majority of taxiway and runway connections.
Hold Short nodes are stop points for the AI (and you) and should be placed wherever a taxiway connects to a runway.
Creating Nodes:
You can select the Node Tool for the appropriate node type from the toolbar. The mouse pointer will change to a ‘node drop’ symbol.
You can place nodes anywhere you want by clicking on the map window. You can position (slew) the aircraft in FS to a location where you want a node to be placed then Ctrl+Tab back to AFCAD and click the mouse pointer where the crosshairs are.
There is, however, an easier way. You can drop nodes anywhere you want without leaving the Flight Simulator window by slewing to the desired location and pressing the period key (.). This is easy to remember because nodes are essentially dots, like a period. AFCAD traps the period key and will place a node at that location.
Moving Nodes:
Like all objects, you can move a node by ‘grabbing’ it with the mouse and dragging it. You must be in ‘Pointer’ mode to do this (select the normal pointer from the toolbar). Note that any attached links will be dragged and stretched with the node. Alternatively, you could bring up the properties window and alter the latitude and longitude for the node.
Deleting Nodes:
Like most objects, you can delete a node by selecting it and pressing the delete key. Note that any attached links will also be deleted, as links cannot exist by themselves.
Changing Nodes Types:
You can change the type for one or more nodes by selecting them then choosing the new node type on the toolbar. You could also use the Properties window to change the type.
Node Exclusion and Snapping:
If you try to put one node directly over another it won't be allowed. Although they can overlap to some extent, nodes must be far enough apart that you can identify them as two separate nodes.
If you place a node that touches an existing taxi link, the node will automatically snap to that link.
Hold short nodes should be located at the hold short taxiway markers on the visual scenery if possible; however, a hold short node will not work if it is too far from the edge of the runway. That will result in AI aircraft stopping at the hold short node and getting 'stuck' there. The maximum distance seems to be just over 230 feet, but it is best to keep it under 225 feet to be safe. The stock airports all have the hold short nodes just under 120 feet from the edge of the runway, which is a good rule of thumb if in doubt. You can use the measuring tool to gauge this. Note that the maximum distance is from the edge of the runway, not the center line.
Another problem can occur when two or more aircraft line up at a hold short node for departure, the aircraft at the front of the line may get clearance and proceed to take off, but the aircraft behind him may become 'stuck'. This problem is more likely to occur with smaller aircraft. This can be prevented by placing a normal (blue) node just behind the hold short node. Some experimenting has shown this second node should be no more that 70 feet behind the hold-short node to work with all sizes of aircraft.
A link connects two nodes together or connects a node to a parking spot. There are three types of links:
Runway links: run down the centerline of every runway. These are always shown in black.
Taxiway links: are used on taxiways and on aprons. These are always blue.
Parking Connectors: connect parking spots to taxiways. These are also blue.
Links can be assigned designators (see the Designators section). The designator for a runway link should always be the same as the runway it is on, for example "Rwy 09L/27R". The designator for a taxiway link can be left blank, but is usually assigned a letter or letter/number pair corresponding to the taxiway designator for the real airport, for example A, B, B2. Parking Connector designators are always left blank.
Any link that connects to a parking spot (ramp or gate) will automatically be a Parking Connector type link. You can’t connect two parking spots together with a single link.
Creating Links:
Links can be drawn between nodes that have already been drawn, or between nodes and existing parking spots. For convenience, if you try to draw a link to or from a point where there is no node, AFCAD will put a node there for you (at both ends if necessary) when you draw the link.
To draw a link, select the Link Drawing Tool from the toolbar. The mouse pointer will change to the link drawing symbol.
Put the cross on the location where you want to start the link, press the mouse button and leave it down while you pull the link line out to where you want it to end, then release the mouse button.
You can select the designator for the link you are going to draw before you draw it using the list box beside the link tool button on the toolbar, but you may find it more convenient to draw the links first then set their designators later.
Link Snapping and Exclusions:
If you start or end a link on an existing node, the link will snap to the center of the node.
If you start or end a link anywhere on a parking spot, the link will snap to the center of the parking spot.
If you start a link within a node radius of another existing link, the link end will snap to the existing link and a node will be placed there.
Automatic Link Splitting:
Links cannot actually have nodes in the middle of the line, nodes (or parking spots) can only be at the ends of a link. For this reason, if you connect a new link to an existing link, AFCAD will automatically break the existing link into two separate links. Although they will still look like a single line, you can treat the links separately, for example you can delete one:
conversely, if a link you are drawing crosses any nodes, it will automatically connect to those nodes as two or more separate line segments:
Deleting Links:
As with most objects you can simply select one or more links with the mouse and press the Delete key.
Moving Links:
As with all objects you can just grab the link with the mouse (ensure the normal pointer mode is active) and drag it to where you want. Note that the nodes on both ends of the link will move with it, this also applies to a parking spot at the end of a link. Any connected links will stretch
Link Properties:
Double clicking a link will bring up a Properties window.
Designator: This box has a list of all the taxiway and runway designators that are used at the current airport. You can create a new taxiway designator by typing it directly in the list box beside the Taxi Link tool on the main window, for example "B7", and pressing Enter.
Link Type: This is set automatically to ‘Runway’ if the link is assigned a runway designator. It is set automatically to ‘Parking Connector’ if one end of the link attaches to a parking spot, and in all other cases it will be set to ‘Taxiway’.
Width: In the current version FS2002 this seems to be ignored by AI and can be left as is. For new taxi links AFCAD defaults it to 100 ft.
There are two types of designators:
Taxiway designators: A, B, B2 etc.
Runway Designators: Rwy 12/30, Rwy 26R/8L, etc.
Runway links will always have a runway designator, taxiway links can have either a taxiway designator or can be left blank. Parking Connector links are always blank.
All designators that have been created for the current airport are shown in the Designator List, on the toolbar.
Highlighting Designators:
When you select a designator from that list, all taxi links that have been assigned that designator will be shown in red. For example Taxiway B in the picture below:
You can use this to verify that a taxiway is unbroken, and to verify taxiway routes match the routes in published plans of the airport you are working on.
The first entry in the designator list is empty, and if you leave that list entry selected then no taxiway designators will be highlighted. The second entry in the list is the word "Blank". When you select that entry, all blank designators, including all parking links, will be highlighted.
Note that if a link has an incorrect designator or is blank, that won't prevent the AI from using it but ATC may give you strange or incorrect directions when you ask for taxi clearance.
Scanning designators:
You can flip through the entire list of designators, highlighting each taxiway/runway path, by pressing the ‘T’ key, or flip backward by pressing Shift+T
Changing designators:
The designator can be selected before you start drawing links, but if you are making large changes or building a new airport it may be easier to leave them blank as you create them. You can then select all the links that constitute a particular taxiway or runway (hold down the Shift key to select more than one object at a time) then choose the designator to assign to that taxiway/runway from the list. The selected taxiway/runway will be shown highlighted in red after you do this. Note that you don’t have to select nodes when you assign designators, nodes don’t have designators. You can also use this method to change individual links.
Creating a New Designator:
You can create a new taxi designator by typing it into the Designator List Box on the toolbar and pressing Enter. You just need to type the designator itself, e.g. "B2", you don’t need to type the word "Taxi".
Designators are usually single letters or letter and number pairs. You can create designators up to seven characters long but ATC will spell them out phonetically. It is unknown if there any actual words that ATC will recognise as a designator. You cannot enter new runway designators, that can only be done by creating new runways, or modifying existing runway properties.
Deleting designators:
In order to delete a designator you must open the Taxi Designators List window, called from the Lists menu.
Select the designator you want to delete and click the Delete button. Any links that use that designator will be changed to ‘Blank’.
Designator Properties:
The only real property that a designator has is its name. The Taxi Designators List window, called from the Lists menu, also shows the number of links that have been assigned for each designator. If any designators have 0 links then you may have missed, or misnamed a taxiway, or it may be an unused designator that you can delete.
You can place any number of parking spots at an airport. Having lots of parking spots will cause no perceptible performance problems by themselves, but if you load up dozens of parking spots with AI aircraft, especially detailed add-on aircraft, you will observe a frame rate drop when you go to that airport.
You can place parking spots anywhere you want, but you must connect them to the taxiway system with taxi links for the AI to be able use them.
Creating Parking:
You can select the generic parking type from the drop-down list on the tool bar (e.g. Gate Small in the picture below) and click the Parking Tool button on the toolbar. The pointer will change to a parking tool symbol.
As with creating nodes, you can use two methods to create parking:
You can place a parking spot by just clicking on the window. If you need to precisely place parking spots in the visual scenery you should use the aircraft position on the Flight Simulator window as a reference. Slew the aircraft to where you want to put your parking spot and switch back to AFCAD (Ctrl+Tab), line up the symbol with the crosshairs and click. This will place a parking spot at that location.
An even easier method is to stay in the Flight Simulator window, get the aircraft lined up where you want to put a parking spot and press the letter ‘o’ key. This is easy to remember as the ‘o’ is a circle like a parking spot. AFCAD traps that key and will drop a parking spot at the current aircraft location and heading. The following pictures show a sequence of parking spots being created while moving the aircraft around a terminal:
Note in the above picture that the parking circles overlap a certain amount. The parking circle radius is somewhat wider than the aircraft actually needs, so you can get away with a certain amount of overlap, but you should test the final product to make sure clearances are adequate with the largest AI aircraft that will use that parking.
It is usually easier to create all the parking spots first, then link them to the taxiway network afterwards. A parking spot must be linked to the taxiway network for it to work with AI.
Rotating a Parking Spot:
The aircraft stick-symbol in the parking spot circle points in the direction the AI aircraft will point when it parks there. You can change the direction by selecting the parking spot symbol and grabbing the rotate handle (dot) that appears at the top of the symbol. The symbol will rotate around to follow the mouse pointer until you release the mouse button. The heading field in the status bar will show the parking direction (degrees true) while you are rotating it.
If you create parking spots using the mouse-click method then the parking spots will aim to the top of the window initially. If you use this method it is best run in ‘Lock’ mode. That way the window top is always the direction the aircraft is pointing and any parking spot you create will have the same heading as the aircraft. If you use the ‘o’ key method in FS to drop parking spots then they will always have the aircraft heading, whether in lock mode or not.
Deleting Parking:
As with most objects you simply select one or more parking spots with the mouse and press the Delete key.
Changing Parking:
You can select one or more parking spots then choose a new parking type from the drop-down list on the tool bar. All the selected parking spots will change to the new type and size. To make more specific changes such as setting gate numbers or fine-tuning the parking radius, you will have to call up the Properties window for each parking spot and change it individually.
Parking Properties:
As with all objects you can double click a parking spot to bring up the Properties window.
Radius: See the next section Parking Sizes.
Heading: This is the direction the aircraft will be pointing when they begin at a parking spot. Note that when an aircraft taxis into a parking spot after landing it will not turn to this heading, it will remain at the heading of the taxi link that brought it to the parking spot.
Area: This is the part of the airport (e.g. NW Parking) or the gate group (e.g. Gate A) for this parking spot. A gate group is usually a separate terminal or wing of a terminal building. Smaller airports may just have ‘Gate’. This parameter doesn’t affect the AI, it just affects how the parking spot will be labelled in the FS start locations parking list.
Number: This designates the individual gate or parking spot. This number goes along with the ‘Area’ field, such as "Parking 14" or "Gate 12" or "Gate B 5". As with the Area field this parameter doesn’t effect the AI, it just affects how the parking spot will be labelled in the FS start locations parking list.
Parking Type: This specifies the general parking type. Parking spots will have type labels like "Ramp GA small" and "Gate Medium" that show up in the parking list, but it seems that these labels are just for the benefit of the user, and don’t actually direct specific types of aircraft to those parking space types.
Flight Simulator airports use a handful of predefined sizes to go along with the general Parking Types (e.g. "Ramp GA small" is 32.8 ft , "Gate Medium" is 124.7 ft , etc.). AFCAD will assign the pre-defined sizes when you first create a parking spot, and you can use those values or you can change them to any size you want.
What will direct specific aircraft to specific parking spots is the parking radius, measured in feet on the parking Properties window. An AI aircraft will park at the smallest empty parking spot that is big enough to hold that aircraft (they will park at bigger spots if none of the ‘right sized’ spots are available). The required parking spot radius for a particular model of aircraft is specified in the .mdl (model) file for that aircraft. That radius is typically 75% of the wingspan, rounded off to the nearest metre. This means you can make parking spots that are matches for most individual aircraft models (737, MD83 etc.) and get those models to park in only those spaces, unless they are all full. Here is a list of minimum parking sizes for some FS stock aircraft (in feet).
Dash8 50 ft (15 m) 737 73 ft (22 m) MD83 79 ft (24 m) 747 155 ft (47 m) 777 151 ft (46 m)
Note that the parking radius appears to only be encoded in the .mdl files for FS2002-built aircraft (stock aircraft and GMAX-built aircraft). The parking radius is specified in the header of the .mdl file. Aircraft not built with GMAX, which includes virtually all older add-on aircraft, use a different type of .mdl file which does not have the parking radius encoded. For those aircraft, Flight Simulator applies a default parking radius of 16 metres (52.1 feet). This can result in many add-on aircraft parking in inappropriate sized spots. At this time there does not appear to be anything that can be done about this. Note that even some GMAX built aircraft can have the radius incorrectly encoded, but this can be fixed by modifying the .mdl file radius entry with a hex editor.
Parking List Window:
The Parking List window, called from the Lists menu, shows all the parking spots for the current airport as they will appear in the start locations list that you call from the Flight Simulator Create a Flight window, with the addition of the radius for each spot.
Parking is assigned to AI aircraft in the order the parking spots appear in the Parking List window. When you start a flight at an airport, Flight Simulator will place the AI aircraft in the appropriately sized parking spots in sequence, down the list.
It may look more orderly to put all gates in the list in sequential order, for example Gate 1, Gate 2, Gate 3 … etc., but it will result in AI aircraft bunching up in one area, or one terminal, when you start a flight. This will eventually randomise as AI comes and goes, but it will look more realistic if you mix up the parking order in the list, and cause the aircraft to be more evenly distributed around the terminal(s). You may notice that Microsoft mixed up the parking in this way in many stock airports. Aircraft don't usually cross over between gate and ramp parking because they have different size ranges, so you can keep gate and ramp parking together as separate groups without having to worry about aircraft bunching up, unless you have not used the default sizes for these types of parking.
You can reorder the parking list in two ways. You can grab list entries with the mouse and drag them to different locations in the list, or you can use the Randomize button.
The Randomise button will keep parking grouped by type (gate, ramp, cargo), but will mix-up the order of the parking spots within each type-group.
You can also click on the column headings of the parking list to sort the list by area, type, or size. This makes it easier to locate parking spots in a large group, or to inventory parking. Keep in mind that when you close the window the order you see in the list will be the order the parking will appear in Flight Simulator, so if you sorted parking by area, type, or size you should randomize the parking again before you exit. Alternatively, you can click the Original Order button, which will return the parking list to the order it was in when the window was opened.
Aircraft Turning on Departure:
The AI aircraft do not ‘push back’, although they might in future versions of Flight Simulator, they just rotate in place until they are lined up with the taxi link then they proceed forward. Aircraft always rotate in the direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise) that is the shortest turning angle to the taxi link.
This usually doesn’t matter in open parking areas, but if you are parking close to a boarding ramp you should make sure an aircraft always turns clockwise so it doesn’t have to swing right through the boarding ramp. You can ensure this by making the taxi link come out from directly behind and slightly to the right of the parking symbol, as in the pictures below. To do this it may be necessary to create an extra link or two in some locations to angle the aircraft into the parking area correctly, as in the second picture.
Drive-Through Parking:
You can connect more than one link to a parking spot to create 'drive through' type parking; however, because of limitations with the AI it rarely results in the kind of behaviour one would hope for, that is aircraft driving in from one side and driving out the other. AI will take the shortest path to the active runway and even if they can exit a parking spot going forward they will turn 180 degrees and go out the rear taxi path, if that is the shortest route to the runway. You should also be careful to avoid serial or 'string of pearls' parking, which can block some parking spots when others are occupied.
Specialised Parking:
Flight Simulator provides parking types labelled "cargo" and "mil" (military). It is unknown if AI can be specifically designated to use spaces with these labels. There may or may not be fields in the aircraft .air, .cfg or .mdl files that can designate the aircraft as mil or cargo types. If not, it should be easy to direct military aircraft to special parking, since you would only program military AI aircraft to use military bases, or you can use the custom parking size method to tailor parking spots for F-16s, C-130’s, etc. at mixed-use airfields. Cargo aircraft may be a little more difficult, as they are usually just repaints of civilian aircraft.
It is also unknown if FS really differentiates between GA (General Aviation – ramp parking) and commercial aircraft (gate parking). The default GA ramp parking is normally just much smaller than the gate parking, which forces light aircraft to use those ramp parking spots.
Tips for Creating Parking:
When you choose an aircraft to slew around in, use the same type of aircraft you are creating parking spots for to get an idea of the size requirement and clearances. This is especially important if you want to mate aircraft doors exactly with boarding ramp openings.
Microsoft sprinkled parking rather loosely around the stock airports. Not surprising as they probably had to do this by hand for a couple of thousand airfields. You may want to delete most or all of the parking spots at an airport before you create your own so you aren’t constrained by existing parking spots.
If you are trying to align an aircraft with a boarding ramp, you may find the FS slew keys, especially the arrow keys and rotate keys (keypad 1 and 3). provide finer control than the joystick.
Avoid trapping AI aircraft in pockets, such as behind other parking spaces, as an AI aircraft may become stalled if another aircraft is parked it its way.
Testing Parking:
After you have completed parking changes, and saved the changes back to the FS facility file, you must restart Flight Simulator to get it to re-index the changed files and use the modified airport properly.
You can test parking by actually going to each parking spot yourself from the ‘Create a Flight’ window in FS, but a more thorough test would be to create AI traffic that uses all the available parking spaces, then observe how the AI aircraft fit in and depart from those spaces. For example you can use TrafficTools and generate a batch of flight plans departing your airport (going anywhere, it doesn’t matter). Just repeat a single flight plan several times and have each flight depart two or three minutes apart. For example, the following Flightplans.txt file has 12 aircraft (or the number of parking spaces you have to test) departing KLAX at two minute intervals for KSFO starting at 16:00. The altitude, return times, and other details aren’t important:
AC#4,N1000,100%,24Hr,IFR,16:00:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KSFO,20:00:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KLAX
AC#4,N1000,100%,24Hr,IFR,16:02:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KSFO,20:02:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KLAX
AC#4,N1000,100%,24Hr,IFR,16:04:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KSFO,20:04:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KLAX
AC#4,N1000,100%,24Hr,IFR,16:06:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KSFO,20:06:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KLAX
AC#4,N1000,100%,24Hr,IFR,16:08:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KSFO,20:08:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KLAX
AC#4,N1000,100%,24Hr,IFR,16:10:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KSFO,20:10:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KLAX
AC#4,N1000,100%,24Hr,IFR,16:12:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KSFO,20:12:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KLAX
AC#4,N1000,100%,24Hr,IFR,16:14:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KSFO,20:14:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KLAX
AC#4,N1000,100%,24Hr,IFR,16:16:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KSFO,20:16:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KLAX
AC#7,N1000,100%,24Hr,IFR,16:18:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KSFO,20:18:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KLAX
AC#7,N1000,100%,24Hr,IFR,16:20:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KSFO,20:20:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KLAX
AC#7,N1000,100%,24Hr,IFR,16:22:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KSFO,20:22:00,00:00:00,300,F,1234,KLAX
You can go to the airport sometime before 16:00 and use the top-down view mode (Ctrl+S) to see the whole terminal area, and check all aircraft in their parking spots to make sure they don’t overlap or have other problems. Then starting at 16:00 you can observe them departing to make sure they leave the parking spots and proceed on the taxiways without interference or other problems.
Since AI taxi so slowly, you may want to watch this at an accelerated speed by pressing R++ to go to 4x speed. 4x is the fastest speed that will support AI.
On the Flight Simulator window where you choose the starting airport for a flight, you have a list called ‘Runways / Starting Positions’. You can start at either end of any runway. At the bottom of that list you have all the parking spots, as described in the Parking section above. The runway start locations don’t have to be at the exact ends of the runways, you can change the position and heading of each start location, and even add more. However, there must be a start location assigned for every runway (e.g. for both runways 08 and 26 for the runway 8/26 pair). The ‘Active runway’ category will look for one for the active runway, and if FS doesn’t find one it may dump you in the Bermuda Triangle, or somewhere.
Displaying Start Locations:
By default, they aren’t displayed in AFCAD so as not to clutter up the runways. You can display them by choosing Show Start Locations from the View menu. They appear as pink circles.
Moving start locations:
You can drag them anywhere with the mouse, for example, if you want to start at the hold-short marker at the taxiway entrance to the runway.
Rotating a Start Location:
You can change the start heading the same way you do with parking spots. That is done by selecting the start location symbol and grabbing the rotate handle (dot) that appears at the top of the symbol. The symbol will rotate around to follow the mouse pointer until you release the mouse button.
Creating Start Locations:
Call up the Start Location window from the Insert Menu. You can fill in the properties for the new start location, or just click on a runway at the location where you want to start and the properties will be filled in for you. Note that the start location must be designated with a runway number (e.g. 16, 9R etc.) but that runway doesn’t have to actually exist.
Deleting Start Locations:
Select one or more with the mouse and press the Delete key.
Start Locations Properties
Double-click on a start location to open a Properties window. The parameters are straight forward.
Start Locations List
You can call up a list of all start locations under the Lists menu. As with the Parking List, you can re-order the start locations by dragging the list entries around with the mouse.
This doesn’t create a visible control tower scenery object and it has nothing to do with ATC in Flight Simulator. It specifies where the default ‘tower view’ of your aircraft will originate, you can see your aircraft from the tower view by pressing the ‘S’ key in Flight Simulator. You can put this viewpoint anywhere you want. It can be where the real tower is, or it can be at any other location and elevation. The tower location is shown with a pink circle on the AFCAD map:
If a tower location is not specified for an airport then FS will place it at some default position near your aircraft starting position. There can be only one tower view at an airport (regardless of how many tower scenery objects the airport may have).
Moving a tower:
You can drag it anywhere with the mouse.
Creating a Tower:
Call up the Control Tower window from the Insert Menu.
Deleting a Tower:
Select it with the mouse and press the Delete key.
Tower Properties
Double-click on the tower symbol to open a Properties window.
Communication (comm) frequencies are not visible on the AFCAD map, but you can set up all the radio channels (tower, ground, ATIS, clearance delivery, etc) for an airport using AFCAD. These frequencies are shown on the Flight Simulator map view window when you click on an airport to get information for it. They can also be tuned with your aircraft radio stack. But most important of all, comm frequencies enable ATC.
Enabling ATC:
To make ATC work at an airport that doesn’t currently have it, all you have to do is add a control tower frequency and you will get full ATC service at your airport. It is as simple as that. This works even if there is no control tower scenery object at that airport, or a control tower there in real life.
Because one of the requirements for AI to work at an airport is ATC, this allows tens of thousands of Flight Simulator airports to have AI that couldn’t have it before. Of course you will still have to program the AI to use that airport, but there are other tools for that.
Frequencies List:
You can call up a list of frequencies already at your airport (if any) using the Comm Frequencies item under the Lists menu..
Adding a Frequency:
Click the ‘Insert’ button on the frequencies list window. You will be provided a window to fill in the properties for the new radio channel.
Properties:
Frequency: AFCAD inserts a random frequency in this box. You can replace that with any frequency you want as long as it’s not already assigned at that airport. If your airport has a real life tower you could use the published frequency for that tower.
Type: All of the possible comm types are available from the list, but the most important for adding ATC is ‘Tower’. This will give you the combined Ground, Tower, Departure, Arrival (etc.) services that you can expect from a small airport tower. You may also want to add ATIS. You could also add separate channels for Ground, Clearance Delivery, Departures, Arrivals etc, but that would probably stretch the boundaries of realism if you have a one-runway airstrip.
Name: For tower frequencies (except for ATIS), this field should have the name of your airport, usually the town name. If you are lucky then Microsoft will have recorded that airport name in the ATC voice files and will use that name in communications, for example: "Penticton ground, Cessna CWXYZ request taxi for takeoff". If it doesn’t recognise the place name then ATC will use the generic terms "tower" and "ground", e.g. "Ground, Cessna CWXYZ request taxi for takeoff". If you are unsure what name Flight Simulator refers to your airport by, check the properties for the airport by double-clicking on the main window. For ATIS this field must have the ICAO code for your airport (e.g. KLAX).
Deleting a Frequency:
Select the frequency in the list and click the Delete button.
Making AI use your airport:
Just adding a tower frequency doesn’t automatically make AI appear at an airport, it just allows it to work there. You will also need parking spaces and you will have to program some AI flight plans to make AI come and go. You can use TrafficTools, or other AI programming aids such as the Microsoft Traffic Database Builder for that. You will also have to add the airport to the airport list in TrafficTools or the Traffic Database Builder. You will need the latitude, longitude, and elevation for the airport, which you can get by double-clicking the Airport Reference Point symbol (the pink spiky dot on the AFCAD map).
This includes conventional runways and helipads, which are circular.
Moving Runways:
You can drag them with the mouse, or open the Properties window for the runway and change the latitude and longitude.
Rotating a Runway:
This can only be done by opening the Properties window for the runway and changing the heading field.
Creating a Runway:
Call up the Runway window from the Insert Menu. You must then fill in the properties for the new runway. You will probably want the published data for the airport you are working on to help you with this. If you are entering a runway that is already in the visual scenery then you can enter the runway location, size, and heading data from that scenery file, if you have it. Otherwise you may have to do some trial and error adjustments to get the ‘facility’ runway aligned with the visual runway. Keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be an exact match, because you can’t see the facility runway, it just guides the AI for landing and takeoff. See Runway Properties below for more information.
Deleting a Runway:
Select it with the mouse and press the Delete key. A runway may have associated ILS equipment (localizer, glide path and DME) for both ends, and if you delete that runway then any associated ILS equipment will also be deleted.
Runway Properties:
Double-click on a runway to open a Properties window.
Base and Reciprocal ends: The ‘base’ end of a runway would be the south end of the runway if it was un-rotated (had a heading of 0 degrees true). That is, if you were at the base end looking up the runway you would have a heading of 0 degrees. The ‘reciprocal’ end is the other end.
Designator: This must be 1 to 36, possibly with a L/R/C suffix (Left, Right, Centre) for conventional runways. Note that there is no runway ‘0’, it would be ‘36’. The runway designator does not have to match the actual magnetic heading, but it should for the sake of realism. For Helipads, the designator will be 0H at both ends.
Closed for Takeoff * : You can specify one end, or both ends of a runway as closed for takeoffs. AI and ATC will not use that runway end for takeoffs. This does not prevent aircraft from landing on the runway.
Closed for Landing * : You can specify one end, or both ends of a runway as closed for landings. AI and ATC will not use that runway end for landings. This does not prevent aircraft from taking off from the runway.
Pattern: This is the published pattern (circuit) direction for the runway. The AI don’t fly patterns in this version of flight simulator, but they probably will in the future, so if you are creating an airport, try to enter the correct direction.
Length: The runway length does not include the overrun area, for runways that have them (see Overrun Areas below).
Width: Self explanatory
Pattern Alt: The published pattern (circuit) altitude (AGL or ASL) if different from the standard 1000 ft AGL used for most airports. As already mentioned, the AI don’t currently fly patterns but probably will in the future.
Surface: It is unknown if the AI cares about this, but it may in future versions of FS.
Heading: The base end heading, degrees true.
Magnetic variation: The published magnetic variation for the airport can be used for all runways. This will be negative for east and positive for west (e.g. -20 is 20E).
Magnetic Heading: This is automatically calculated from the true heading and variation. It is for your information only
*Note: You can force aircraft to takeoff and land on different runways by closing the default active runway to either takeoffs or landings. The default active runway is the longest runway that faces the wind. You will probably have to close both ends of the runway for takeoffs or landings because of a quirk of the Flight Simulator ATC. ATC is so determined to use the longest runway as the active that it will assign the wrong end (tailwind end) of that runway for landings or takeoffs if the correct end (headwind end) is closed. Closing both ends will force the next longest runway to be used instead.
The part of the runway marked as an overrun area (yellow stripes) is not included in the runway length, but note in the pictures below that runway taxi links (black lines) extend into the overrun areas to allow AI aircraft to turn around.
Runways List:
You can call up a list of all runways under the Lists menu. As with the Parking List, you can re-order the runways by dragging the list entries around with the mouse. This only affects the order the runways are listed on the FS airport description window on the map view.
Active Runway Selection:
Flight Simulator ATC will always use a single 'active' runway, unless you set up a multiple runway system using takeoff or landing runway closures or overlays. The method FS uses to select the active runway is rather simplistic and limited, it will just use the longest runway as the active runway. ATC will assign whichever end of that runway is closest to having a headwind. Even if there is a strong crosswind, and there is another runway that is at a perfect heading for the winds, but that runway is slightly shorter, ATC will still use the longest runway.
In the case where there is more than one runway of the same length, then ATC will use the one that is closest to facing the wind. If they all have the same heading (or if winds are calm?) then ATC will use whichever one has an ILS for the active. If all of them or none of them have an ILS, then ATC will use the first runway in the Runway List as the active.
Another unfortunate problem with the FS ATC is that when winds are calm, ATC can use both ends of the same runway at the same time for landing, with rather alarming results.
If you want to have a more realistic airport operation and have ATC use appropriate runways for the winds, then you may be able to make two runways the same length by shrinking one and lengthening another. Since the AI touch down fairly far down the runway, and not at the actual touchdown marker, you can get away with lengthening a runway a certain amount.
The NAVAID information contained in facility files does not have any affect on how your aircraft’s instruments work. That information comes from different files that AFCAD doesn’t deal with. For example, if an airport you fly into has a misplaced localizer beam, this won’t allow you to fix it. The NAVAID information in facility files is just presented for information purposes on the FS map view and GPS windows. However, it can be informative to see where the NAVAIDs are placed (or misplaced) at an airport. It appears that any errors in placement for the NAVAIDs you fly with are also contained in facility files, as the data was derived from the same database. If you can manage to correct NAVAID errors in the scenery files then you can make the corresponding correction in the map view using AFCAD.
As to whether the AI use the NAVAID data, the AI do not use the VOR, NDB, and DME information, and they do not appear to use the facility ILS for guidance, but ATC may use the presence or absence of an ILS to decide on runway assignments under some conditions.
AFCAD can show all NAVAIDs that Flight Simulator knows about, but not necessarily all together in the same map. When you display an airport on AFCAD you can see all the ILS equipment: localizer, glide path, ILS-associated DMEs and markers at that airport. NDBs, VORs and TACANs, however, are considered separate facilities from airports, even if an NDB or VOR is located on the airport property. So if you want to examine VOR, NDBs, TACANs, and VOR-associated DMEs you will have to open a separate NDB or VOR facility. You can find and open VORs and NDBs using their two or three letter identifiers the same way you open airports. You can also use the world-places tree on the Open Airport window and find a NAVAID category for a specific country (or state) and open that to find a list of NDB and VOR sites.
ILS equipment (localizer, glide path and DME) are always ‘attached’ to specific runways, except for markers, for some reason, which can exist by themselves and don’t have an attachment to specific runways (in facilities anyway).
When working with ILS equipment, keep in mind that the localiser (long green arrow) is actually located at the far end of the runway from where you will be landing. Most published airport maps for pilots show the localizer symbol at the approach end, so as not to obscure the runway symbol. The glide path (small green arrow) for that approach is located near the touchdown point at the other end of the runway. The DME (blue square) may be located at either site, or somewhere else.
You may also find some airports have offset localisers, which don’t line up with the runway for various reasons such as terrain avoidance and noise abatement.
Displaying NAVAIDs:
By default, they aren’t displayed in AFCAD so as not to clutter up the runways. You can display them by choosing Show NAVAIDs from the View menu.
Moving NAVAIDS:
You can drag them with the mouse, or open the Properties window for the NAVAID and change the latitude, longitude and heading (if applicable).
Creating a NAVAID:
Call up the window to create the appropriate NAVAID (Localiser, Glide Path, Marker etc.) from the Insert Menu. You must then fill in the properties for the new NAVAID. You will probably want the published data for the airport you are working on to help you with this.
Deleting a NAVAID:
Select it with the mouse and press the Delete key.
NAVAID Properties:
Double-click on a NAVAID to open a Properties window. The NAVAID parameters are mostly self explanatory. The ‘unknown’ field is always 0 and can be ignored.
NAVAIDs List:
You can call up a list of all NAVAIDs at a site under the Lists menu. The ILS equipment is grouped by runway end, except markers which are grouped together.
You can activate a measuring tool by right-clicking on the window with the mouse and from the pop-up menu that appears, choose Measure Distance. The distance from the point where you clicked to the current mouse location will be displayed in the status bar. You can repeat this to set a new measurement point.
If you want to install an AFCAD format airport file that was made or modified by someone else, then you don’t have to read this entire document. Just follow these instructions.
NOTE: AFCAD does not change any visual scenery, it changes the invisible mapping of taxiways and parking spots that ATC and AI use. Do not install an AFCAD airport and expect to see new boarding ramps attached to your terminal building.
If all you want to do is add ATC to an airport then you don’t have to read this entire document. To add ATC you only need to add a tower frequency, you don’t need an actual control tower. You should refer to the section Comm Frequencies – ATC for details, but here are the instructions in a nutshell:
If you have an airport with more than one runway then it is easy to have ATC assign aircraft to takeoff from one runway and land on another. This applies to both the AI and your own aircraft.
In Flight Simulator, ATC will assign the longest runway that faces the wind as the active runway for both takeoffs and landings. You can flag that runway as closed for takeoffs. ATC will continue to assign that runway for landings but will then assign the next longest runway for takeoffs. Conversely, you can flag the runway as closed for landings and ATC will continue to assign that runway for takeoffs but will assign the next longest runway for landings. Here are the instructions:
If you just want to add a few extra parking spots and they don’t have to be precisely aligned with any scenery features, such as boarding ramps, then you can probably do that with just the mouse and you don’t need FSUIPC. If your parking does require precise placement then you should do that from within Flight Simulator itself, using FSUIPC to tie your virtual aircraft position to the AFCAD map. FSUIPC must be installed separately, see the section Preparing to use AFCAD – FSUIPC.
After you create parking spots you must link them to the taxiway system or they won't be of any use. You should have a basic familiarity with the node and link system for taxiways. If you are extensively reworking an airport then you should carefully read the sections of this manual up to the Parking section. If you are just adding a few parking spots then you could probably get away with skimming the sections on nodes, links and parking. Here is a typical procedure for adding parking in a nutshell:
The visual models of some third party replacement airports are not in the exact same locations as the original Flight Simulator airports, with the result that the AI aircraft taxi in the wrong places and take off and land in the grass beside the runways. AFCAD can shift the facility maps so they line up properly with the visual models, and make other fine adjustments to taxiways. Here are the basic instructions to do that. The process will be easier if you have FSUIPC installed, see the section Preparing to use AFCAD – FSUIPC.
You can place one or more copies of an airport at the same location, making slight changes to the copies, and they will be treated essentially as one airport by ATC. You might want to do this, for example, to trick ATC into using more than one runway at the same time, or to make GA traffic use a different part of the airport from commercial traffic.
Although there may be a ‘base’ airport and ‘overlay’ airport at the same location, the airport will still look the same, and you will hear the ATC for both airports as a common ATC, as long as you keep the same radio frequencies for the overlays and the base airport.
Note that making an overlaid airport operate properly can be tricky, and you should not attempt to create such an airport, especially if you intend to post the result for others to use, unless you are prepared to carefully test the resulting airport using both departing and landing AI aircraft.
Although it is relatively easy to make airport overlays, that is not all there is to it. You must also program AI to use the different airports, for example if you make an overlay for KLAX called 2LAX with a different active runway, you would probably want to program part of the AI destined for KLAX to go to 2LAX, to split the traffic between the runways. ATC will not simply divide the traffic between the runways for you, you must program each aircraft to land on a specific runway (e.g. a specific LAX copy).
The basic premise behind using two runways simultaneously is having two nearly identical copies of the airport, closing all the runways except for the one you want to be the active runway in each airport. ATC will use the one open runway (or the longest runway if several are open) in each overlay for arrivals and departures.
Another thing you will need to do is create separate parking for each overlay. This is usually just a matter of deleting half of the parking spots from the base airport, and deleting the remaining parking spots from the overlay. If you don’t do this you will find the AI at both airports parking in the same places, like ghosts occupying the same space.
One thing that can make working with overlay airports tricky has to do with a quirk of the Flight Simulator ATC. If you program the AI to use separate overlays, they will land on the appropriate runway for the overlay they are assigned to, but once on the ground the AI will contact the ATC ground control at the closest airport for taxiing and parking instructions. At a normal airport there would only be one ATC ground control, and the closest airport would obviously be the one the AI just landed at, but in an overlaid airport there would be two ground controls at the exact same location, so the AI would contact just one of those ground controls. Unfortunately that may not be the ATC in the overlay the AI was programmed to land at, and they would end up going to a parking spot in the 'other' overlay. But worse still, this usually results in all the AI ending up in the same overlay and fighting for all the parking spots in that overlay, which would only be half the parking at that airport.
There is a way to get around this, and that is to move the Airport Reference Point (the pink spiky dot) in the overlay and/or base airport. The AI contact the closest ground control based on the distance to the Airport Reference Point, so if you make sure that the reference point for each overlay is closest to the active runway for that overlay, then the AI will contact the 'right' ground control upon landing, and will remain in the overlay that it was programmed to land in. This works well for airports with parallel runways like KLAX or KATL, where you can easily move the reference point closer to the appropriate active runway, but that may not be easy to achieve at airports with crossing active runways.
Another problem is that the AI in the overlay and base airports may not be aware of each other, and this can result in aircraft from the base and overlay passing through each other when taxiing, like ghosts. To prevent this from happening, or reduce the occurence of it, you can make sure the parking spots for an overlay are mostly on the same side of the airport as the active runway for that overlay. This will prevent the AI from the base and overlay airports from crossing though each-others 'territory'. This works well at airports where the terminal is between the active runways, like KLAX and KATL, but may be more difficult to achieve at some airports. If there are specific trouble spots at an airport you could also delete one or more taxiways in the overlay to force the AI to use separate routes.
Because of these limitations, it may be especially difficult to make airports work with more than one overlay. Having two or more overlays may only be practical at airports like Denver (KDEN) which have widely separated airport sectors.
Here are the typical steps in making an overlay, using KLAX as an example. Note that there are other methods or sequences of events you can use, but you will have to export at least one file.
Step 1 - Create the overlay airport:
Start by opening the stock KLAX.
Close both ends of the two southern runways for both takeoffs and landings, as indicated by the red X's in the picture below. A runway can be closed by double-clicking on it to bring up the Runway Properties window, and setting the 'closed' checkboxes. You could also assign one of the two remaining runways for takeoffs and the other for landings using selective closures.
The picture shows half of the parking deleted, mostly on the south side so the AI using the north runways don't have to cross over to the south side's territory and also don't have so long to taxi.
The airport reference point has also been moved a few hundred feet north to be closer to the active runway, as indicated by the red arrow. The reference point can be dragged with the mouse.
Step 2 - Export the overlay airport to a text file:
Do not save this file back to the FS facilities database, but instead export it to a text file. Call it something like 2LAX.txt .
Step 3 – Modify the base airport:
Now open KLAX again. You will get the original KLAX back because you didn’t save your previous changes back to the facility database.
Close the two northern runways in this base airport and delete all the parking spaces you didn’t delete in the overlay. You can leave the Airport Reference Point alone as it is already as close as it needs to be to the active south side runways.
Now save this file back to the facility database. You don’t have to export it, but it is a good idea so you can retain text copies of both the base and overlay airports.
Step 4 – Change the ID and name of the overlay airport:
Using Notepad, or some other text editor, open the text file (2LAX.txt) that you previously exported.
Change the identifier instruction from KLAX to 2LAX:
ICAO_ID( KLAX ) to ICAO_ID( 2LAX )
Change the airport name instruction at the end of the file:
NameEntry( AIRPORT 1 "Los Angeles Intl" )
to
NameEntry( AIRPORT 1 "Los Angeles Intl 2" )
NOTE: you must change the airport name, if only slightly, or FS will index two airport IDs to one name which can lead to problems.
ALSO NOTE: although you can make airport Identifiers more than four characters long, like KLAX2, you shouldn’t do it. AI flight plans can’t use identifiers more than four characters long so you could never program AI to use an overlay. I replaced the ‘K’ with a ‘2’ rather than changing some other part of the identifier because K can be assumed, at least in that part of the world, so you can change it and still clearly identify the airport as LAX. Also if you use numbers instead of letters there will be almost no chance of it conflicting with an existing airport ID.
Save the file and close Notepad.
Step 5 – Import the renamed overlay airport:
In AFCAD, import the 2LAX file you just changed. AFCAD will say that it is a new airport and ask if you want to add it to the city of Los Angeles, to which you should respond OK.
You now have two overlaid airports in the same facility bgl file (usswaf04.bgl in this case).
Step 6 – Test the changes in Flight Simulator:
You can close AFCAD and start Flight Simulator. It will take a few extra minutes to index the changes. When you go to the ‘Create a Flight’ window, you should now see both KLAX and 2LAX under the city of Los Angeles, and you should be able to select either one. When you choose to start at KLAX on the active runway you should materialise on the longest southern runway, 07L. When you choose to start at 2LAX on the active runway you should materialise on the longest Northern runway, 06R (depending on wind direction and which runways you have actually closed).
Now you can program the AI to use KLAX and 2LAX using your AI flight planning tool of choice. Don’t forget to add 2LAX to the AI airports file (e.g. Airports.txt in TrafficTools) so the AI flight plan builder knows about the new airport. You can just make a copy of the entry for KLAX, with the same latitude/longitude, and change the ID of the copy to 2LAX.
Hints and Kinks with overlaid airports:
(Thanks to Tom Gibson for helping research this)
If you import an airport and you want to revert back to the original one you can just import the original airport over it. However, when you import an overlay you are essentially importing a new airport. At the moment there is no way to selectively remove new airports so the only way to get rid of it would be to restore the original bgl file. The original bgl file is auto-saved before you make any initial change to that file. It is easy enough to restore the bgl file, but if you have changed any other airports in the same bgl file they will also revert and you will have to re-import them. If restoring an original bgl file would create a lot of work for you then you may want to save your current bgl before you modify it. A future release of AFCAD is expected to be able to selectively remove airports from bgl files.
As with any airport-editing job, it is a good idea to export the original airport first, and give it a name like KLAXoriginal. That way you will have the original airport should you need to revert to it, or to use it for reference.
When you have decided on an ICAO ID code for your airport overlay, even if it just substitutes a number for a letter, make sure that code is not already used. You can do this by going to the Open Airport window from the File menu, type in the proposed code, and click the Search button. If an airport with that code appears in the list box, do not use it. When done click the Cancel button.
You should avoid using the same active runway in more than one overlay. This can result in incorrect radio chatter on approach, such as having two aircraft that are "number one for landing" on the same runway. You will also not get missed approach calls for any approaching aircraft if another aircraft is on the runway.
When you start at an airport in your own airplane and you contact ground control for clearance, you will get the ground control at the closest overlay (closest Airport Reference Point), no matter which gate you are parked at or which overlay you actually chose to start in. This means you will be assigned to depart from the active runway associated with that ground control's overlay. In a typical setup this would be the closest active runway, which means less taxiing for you.
There are a couple of minor compromises when using this technique:
a. Each overlay airport will use a different controller voice. If each overlay uses a different runway this doesn't really cause a major compromise with reality, since it just appears that there are different controllers controlling different runways.
b. Taxiing aircraft will cross the active runway of the other overlay when an aircraft has been cleared to land or takeoff. This crossing behaviour is rarely a problem, and at many airports it is no problem at all (i.e. airports with runways on opposite sides of the terminal).
There are a couple of things that you might think would be a problem, but aren't:
a. Although the radio chatter for all overlays are on the same frequencies, the controllers and pilots of all overlays wait for each other to finish speaking before initiating their transmissions.
b. All the overlays will use the correct airport facility names (i.e. "Los Angeles Ground").
This assumes you already have the visual scenery part of the airport, for example a third-party add-on airport, and need to add facility data. The facility data is completely independent from the visual scenery, so it doesn’t make much difference where the visual scenery came from or how it was constructed. There doesn’t even really have to be any visual scenery.
If the airport already has some facility data, like an older FS2000 airport, then you may be able to just open that facility file and add the extra stuff you want, like AI taxiways, frequencies, and parking.
If you need to create a facility from nothing, here are the suggested steps:
Step 1 – Determine the ‘home’ bgl file:
Determine what facility bgl file your airport belongs in. Pretty much the whole world is divided into blocks of facility bgl files. You can find which one your airport belongs in by opening an airport that is nearby the one you are working on and seeing what file it is kept in. You can double-click on a blank area of the airport to bring up the Airport Properties window and the file will be named there. If you are unsure which airports are nearest the location of your new airport you can use the Flight Simulator map window, go to the latitude/longitude for your new airport, and look for nearby airports on the map.
Step 2 – Create a seed facility file:
Open the nearby airport in AFCAD and export it to a text file. You can use that exported file as a seed to start your new airport.
Open the text file you just exported using Notepad, or some other editor.
Delete all the data from that file except the following lines (using an airport at Laramie, Wyoming as an example):
;
; HomeFile( "usncaf06.bgl" )
;
Container( APT 1 )
APLocation( N41:18.7229 W105:40.4991 2218.33 )
ICAO_ID( KLAR )
EndC
NameList( 409 )
NameEntry( REGION 0 "North America" )
NameEntry( COUNTRY 0 "United States" )
NameEntry( STATE 0 "Wyoming" )
NameEntry( CITY 0 "Laramie" )
NameEntry( AIRPORT 1 "Laramie Regl" )
EndNL
Basically all you want to keep from the original file is the HomeFile instruction, the APLocation, ICAO_ID, and the NameList instructions.
Leave the HomeFile line alone, and replace the old latitude/longitude and elevation with the lat/long elevation for your new airport in the APlocation instruction. You can get this from published airport data, or you can just pick a location roughly in the middle of the airport runway complex if you can’t get that information.
Replace the ICAO code with your own, for example: ICAO_ID( KXYZ ).
Replace the CITY and AIRPORT NameEntry’s with those for your airport, for example:
NameList( 409 )
NameEntry( REGION 0 "North America" )
NameEntry( COUNTRY 0 "United States" )
NameEntry( STATE 0 "Wyoming" )
NameEntry( CITY 0 "Palookaville" )
NameEntry( AIRPORT 1 "Joes Airpark" )
EndNL
You could change the state, country, and region if those weren’t the same, but use only a state, country, and region that Flight Simulator already has, or there could be problems. Only Australia, Canada, and the U.S. have states or provinces in FS, so leave the state blank for all other countries. If the country, region or state are too far off then you probably have the wrong bgl file.
Save the file and close Notepad.
Step 3 – Import the seed file:
In AFCAD, import the file you just modified. You should now have just the Airport Reference Point symbol on the map.
You should start Flight Simulator now so you can slew around your visual scenery to help align the facility objects on the AFCAD map. Get into slew mode (Y key) and top down view (Ctrl+S). You may have a problem getting to your new airport if it isn’t in the airport list yet, you can just right-click on the AFCAD window and select Jump Here from the pop-up menu. The aircraft in FS will slew to that location.
Step 4 – Create runways:
You should place the runway(s), using the Runway item under the Insert menu. Slew the FS aircraft over the ends of the runway to give you a reference point and adjust the runway into position.
Now select the designator for the runway you just created from the designators drop-down list in the toolbar and draw a ‘runway type’ taxi link (black line) from one end of the runway to the other.
Step 4 – Create taxiways:
Now you can slew in FS to all the taxiway junctions and press the period ( . ) key to drop a node at each junction.
Now you can return to the AFCAD map and you should have something like this:
Use the link tool to join the appropriate nodes.
Select the hold-short node tool on the toolbar (red dot) then slew to the hold short markers and drop the hold-short nodes (period key again).
Assign a taxiway designator by selecting the sequence of taxi links for taxiway ‘A’ with the mouse, holding the shift key down while you click to allow multiple items to remain selected. Type the designator ‘A’ in the designators box on the toolbar and press the Enter key. This will create taxiway A.
Repeat for taxiway B, C, D etc. You may end up with a few blank connectors that you don’t know what to do with, especially on an apron, you can often just leave them blank. Choosing the "Blank" designator in the designators list will highlight all the blanks, and you can see if you missed any important taxiway segments.
Step 5 – Create Parking:
From the toolbar Parking Types drop-down list, select the type of parking you want to create first, for example "Gate Small". On the Flight Simulator window, slew to the location you want to place the first parking spot and get your aircraft lined up. When you get it where you want it, press the letter ‘o’ key to create a parking spot. You can then slew to the next location and repeat this as often as you need. You can select different Parking Types from the toolbar if you need to.
On the AFCAD window, double-click on each parking spot to open the Properties window. Set the gate/parking name and number (e.g. Gate 23, Gate A 17, Parking 6, etc.) The parking spots are just sequentially numbered by default. The numbers are just for your reference and the AI doesn’t care about them. If you are satisfied with the stock parking spot radiuses you can leave them as they are, or you can change them.
You must link the parking spots to the taxiways. Select the Link Tool on the toolbar and drag a link from each parking spot to the nearest, or best placed, taxiway line. You may need to use two or more links for some parking spots, or you may need to adjust some taxiway routes.
When you have created and linked all the parking, go to the Parking List window and make sure the parking spots are in the order you want. You should mix the list up a bit if you want to prevent the AI from bunching up, as AI are assigned parking from the top of the list on down. You can drag list items around with the mouse to do this.
Step 6 – Create Start Locations:
You must at least have a start location for both ends of any runway that will become the active runway (the longest runway), and it is recommended that you have a start location for every runway. The start locations don’t have to be right at the end of the runway like they are in stock airports. Use the Start Location item under the Insert menu to insert a start location. Click on the map where you want to place the start location. If you click on a runway itself AFCAD will automatically insert the runway heading and designator for you.
Step 7 – Create a Tower View:
You don’t have to have a tower view, even a lot of major stock airports in FS don’t have them. FS will use a default tower view somewhere near where your aircraft is if you don’t assign one. You can assign one by choosing Control Tower from the Insert menu. Keep in mind that this has nothing to do with AI or ATC.
Step 8 – Create NAVAIDs
If your airport has ILS equipment you can use the NAVAIDs item under the Insert menu to create them. Remember that a localiser is usually at the opposite end of a runway from its associated glide path. You may need to zoom out to place outer and middle markers.
Step 9 – Create Comm Frequencies
Open the Comm Frequencies item under the List menu to create all the radio channels you need for ATC. Click the Insert button on that window to create them. Some of the frequencies, such as FSS, aren’t used for anything in this version of Flight Simulator, but they show up in the airport information window.
Step 10 – Final Checks
For Final checks for incomplete taxi links and other things, see the Final Checks section.
Step 11 – Save and test
From the File menu or the toolbar, click Save to write the completed airport to the FS bgl file.
You can also discard the original seed file and export your completed airport to a new text file so that you can retain a separate copy of it. You can open that file with Notepad and write any special information you might want for you own reference as comments in the header.
To test your file, re-start Flight Simulator and check that the new airport can be found in the Create a Flight window (e.g. enter the identifier, such as KXYZ). Make sure all the start locations (runways) and parking spots you created appear in the Runway / Start Position list. Choose a parking spot and an aircraft and start a flight at that airport.
Open the map window and click on the new airport and verify all the runway data (length, surface etc) is correct and any ILS is listed with it. Verify the comm frequencies you entered are listed.
Check that you can communicate with ATC.
You can test the taxiway routing by requesting ‘progressive taxi’ instructions from ATC for various runway departures, and from various parking spots. Ensure the arrows lead you were you expect them to. If you don’t see any arrows then you may have put the Airport Reference Point at the wrong elevation. The elevation can be changed from the Airport Reference Point properties window.
You can also create a few flight plans that use that airport to test the AI can come and go properly. Make sure the AI don't get stuck at a hold short point before entering the runway, if they do then the hold short node may be too far from the runway.
Test the airport with winds from both ends of the active runway to verify the taxiways work properly to both end of the active runway.
Here are a few things to watch out for and check out before you declare a new airport, or a modified airport, ‘finished’:
Non-connecting taxi links: Zoom in to close range and inspect the areas where you made any taxi link connections. Watch for nodes that come close to, but don’t really connect to links. AI won’t use those links because they look like dead-ends.
Overlapping nodes: Look for places where two nodes overlap. Overlapping nodes don’t really connect, and once again the AI won't cross them.
Runway links are all black: If you have been working on runway taxi links, make sure the runway links are all black. This tells the AI it is a runway and not to use it for taxiing (except to get off of it). Make sure the overrun areas, for runways that have them, have black taxi links too (see Overrun Areas in the Runways section).
Taxiways are all blue: Conversely, make sure all taxiways are blue.
Contiguous Taxiways:Use the taxiway designator cycle commands ‘T’ key and Shift+T to cycle through and highlight all taxiways, or at least examine the ones you worked on, to make sure they are unbroken (e.g. taxiway A doesn’t have a blank gap):
Orphan nodes or parking spots: Make sure there are no loose nodes or parking spots that don’t connect to any taxiways:
If you post airport facility files you modify or build from scratch you should follow these recommended guidelines:
Post export.txt files rather than compiled .bgl files, unless you can provide an easy way to replace the stock airports with the downloaded .bgl files, or can find a way to exclude the stock airports. This shouldn’t be a problem for brand new airports.
Since a lot of download sites limit file names to 8.3 characters, you may want to use the following naming convention:
XXXXNZZZ.txt (or .zip)
Where XXXX is the airport ID, like KORD,
N is a version number 1-9 then A-Z,
ZZZ is a personal identifier like your initials, or some other identifier.
For example KORD3PTB.txt, EGLL1JRB.txt
Even if you don’t use this exact convention, you should include the airport ID in the file name, preferably at the beginning, so users can easily search a file repository for specific airports (e.g. search for KORD*.*).
Put comments at the beginning of the export text file explaining what it is about. For example, a purely fictitious version of KORD:
; This is a 2 part (base and overlay) FS2002 facility file for KORD. ; The base file uses runways 14R/32L ; The overlay uses runways 14L/32R ; The base file has the ID KORD, and has 20 small gates, 15 medium, and 10 heavy ; The overlay has the ID 2ORD, and has 21 gates small, 13 medium, and 5 heavy. ; Use the AFCAD program ‘import’ command to install each of these files. ; ; Version 1.3 ; John Smith smith@email.com 5/7/02 ;
If you put the file description in the comments at the beginning of the file instead of (or in addition to) putting them in a separate readme file, it will eliminate the problem of the readme file getting separated from the data files. That will likely be a problem when users download several facility files and put them in the same folder. They may end up with several version of KORD from different authors and may not be able to sort them out.
And above all, before you post any file TEST IT. Use batch AI flight plan files like the one listed in the Parking section of this document to test the AI parking and general movements.
No new gates or other changes visible at an airport
AFCAD doesn't modify any of the visible scenery, so you will not see any new boarding ramps at a terminal building. AFCAD modifies the invisible mapping and data that Flight Simulator ATC and AI uses to operate at an airport.
AI get stuck at a hold short point and don't move
This will happen if a hold short node is too far from the edge of the runway. The hold short nodes should be no farther than 225 feet from the runway edge. If AI get stuck when they line up behind an aircraft at a hold short point, then placing a normal node just behind the hold short node will usually fix this. (see Hold Short Node Limits).
AI get stuck on the runway preparing for takeoff
This can happen if there is no hold short node for the taxiway connection to the runway.
AI don't stop at a hold short point
The hold short node is probably too close to the runway, or is actually on the runway.
ATIS doesn't work
Unlike other tower frequencies which have the airport name in the Name field for the comm frequency, ATIS requires the ICAO identifier for the airport in that field (e.g. KLAX).
Flight Simulator displays blank start positions for an airport
After you save changes to an airport using AFCAD, you must restart Flight Simulator to allow it to re-index its files.
Flight Simulator crashes on opening a map view or flight planning window
This has the same cause as the previous problem.
This ReadMe document has no pictures
The pictures are all in separate .gif files, and all those files should be in a separate folder named 'Pics'. Sometimes that folder does not get created properly.
Aircraft make a U turn and take off from the edge of the runway
When the AI have to go to the end of a runway and make a U turn to take off, they will not automatically re-center on the runway and may end up taking off from beside the runway. This can usually be fixed by placing a loop simulating a turn around bay at the end of the runway, as follows:
Note that the taxiway angles back toward the runway just before it reconnects at the end. This guides the aircraft back onto the runway, they may try to take off from the wrong side of the loop without it. Do not put hold short nodes on the loop.
AI overfly the airport
This is a problem with many stock airports as well as AFCAD-added airports. Aircraft seem to come in too high to land. They make a missed approach and may do a 'go-around' or may continue to fly off into the distance. This may apply to the entire airport, or just certain approaches. This seems to be an issue with the terrain mapping in Flight Simulator. The AI seem to use some kind of terrain avoidance. They may use a general 4km world terrain mesh map, or tables of minimum safe altitudes buried in the visible scenery modules. These terrain maps or tables may have incorrect data, or over-generalised area information that makes the AI think the terrain around an airport is higher than it actually is. Unfortunately there is currently no known fix for this. Overflying aircraft may also be caused by using too high an altitude in the flight plan. The AI descent planning is rather simplistic, and it doesn't always start descent early enough to lose the required altitude before touchdown. Another thing that can cause overflight is using a VFR flight plan. A lot of aircraft, including most of the stock jets, can't land in VFR mode due to a bug in the AI. Another thing that can cause overflight is entering FS too close to the landing time for an aircraft. FS is not very accurate at back-projecting approaches, so when you start a flight, if an aircraft is already on approach it may have 'materialised' at a point too high to land.
Aircraft disappear after landing
You must have enough parking spaces of a large enough size for all the aircraft that are landing or they will disappear. If that is not an issue then the problem is probably caused by an unconnected parking spot or an unconnected node/link somewhere. The AI will be assigned the next available parking spot in sequence from the parking list and if the next parking spot is unconnected to the taxi system then the AI software will consider the airport full (for that size of aircraft) even if there are plenty of other connected parking spots available further down the list. Examine all parking spots to make sure they are connected, and inspect the node dots on the taxiways at close range to make sure they are actually connected to the taxi links.
I added an ILS but my aircraft can't tune it in
The NAVAID data in the facility files that AFCAD deals with are used only for reference purposes and are not used by the AI or your own aircraft ILS equipment. The ILS equipment your aircraft uses is part of the visual scenery and AFCAD can't be used to modify that.
Float planes don't work properly at water airports
Although you can build a water aerodrome, the AI will still think they are on a land airport. Float planes with retractable gear will taxi around as if they were on pavement, and fixed float planes may taxi around with a trail of sparks. There is apparently nothing that can be done to make the AI behave as if they were on water.
I moved or added the tower symbol, but the tower view point didn't change
This can occur if you start at an airport using the default flight, or any saved flight. When you save a flight in FS it saves the tower view point along with all the other flight parameters, so if you change the view point it will be overridden when you recall a saved flight.
The settings for a saved flight are contained in text files with the extension ".FLT" in the folder FS2002/Flights/myflts . You can easily find the tower location in the .FLT text file and modify it to ensure your saved flight uses the new tower view point. The tower location looks like the following:
[Tower] Latitude=N049° 04' 27.5052" Longitude=W123° 00' 57.1697" Altitude=+000059.00You can paste in the lat/long/elevation from the AFCAD properties window for the tower, or from the export file. The lat/long/altitude is in a slightly different format, but it accepts the AFCAD format OK, for example Latitude=N49* 04.7928' .
My airport has no control tower symbol
Many stock airports, even a lot of major airports, don't have a fixed tower view. You can add one or use the default tower view that FS provides when no fixed view is specified.
No progressive taxi lines
If you request progressive taxi instructions and the pink progressive taxi line is not displayed, then you may have the Airport Reference Point at the wrong elevation. You can check the elevation of the visual scenery for your airport using the Shift+Z key display when taxiing or parked at an airport in Flight Simulator. This is the elevation of the aircraft body, so subtract a few feet to get the ground elevation. The Airport Reference Point should be close to this elevation.
AI park in parking spots too small for their size
Parking spots are assigned to aircraft based on the parking spot radius and the size of the aircraft. Older add-on aircraft don't have the aircraft size encoded and may use the wrong sized parking spot. The size (radius) is normally encoded in the aircraft .mdl file, but older (non GMAX built) aircraft use a different type of .mdl file that does not encode the aircraft size. It may not be possible to fix this.
AI bunch up in one area when parking at the terminal or ramp
Parking spots are assigned to aircraft in the order they appear in the Parking List window. Use the Randomize button on that window to mix-up that order and spread out the AI.
You can report problems with AFCAD, or suggestions for improvements to:
Lee Swordy
You may also be able to get assistance from people experienced in working with AI traffic and airport modifications by going to the TTools forum at www.Avsim.com .
AFCAD and this document are copyright © 2002 Lee Swordy. This material may not be distributed for commercial purposes or posted in the public domain without the author’s consent.
Microsoft and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 are trademarks of Microsoft Corp.