I'm lost with scheduled times

[Travis]

Please post your FCDU & FSCAPTAIN logs for this flight, and I'll check your times and look for any errors.

Since day 1, FSCaptain has used "Local time" for all schedules. Dutch made that decision to allow imported AI schedule files to be use to make FSCaptain Airline schedules.

The Specify Flight Details panel for the FSCaptain that you're using notes that "local time" is used for both Planned Departure and Planned Arrival times.

However since this has been the most-asked-for change in FSCaptain's near 10-year history, starting several weeks ago testers have been exploring an option to allow all schedules to be read as "Zulu time" instead of Local. It's working for us so far, but I want lots of testing (& fixes) before making this public.

I hope it will be made public very soon! (Within weeks....)

Best,

[evolae]

Dont know if you need something more.

[Travis]

I'll need your FCDU log file for this flight.

Unless you've defined a different location, it should be in your FSCaptain\Data\Logs folder.

BEst,

[evolae]

FCDU_20181227_213239.log (31.42 KB)

I think is this one.

[Travis]

That's not the log file for the flight itself, but it does show me that your time zone data has LEPA LEAL as "Zulu+1" - which is one thing I wanted to know.

(My default FSX time zone has LEPA LEAL as "Zulu+0", but my updated FSX time zones are correct. I didn't know what time zone data you're using in P3D4.)

You Dispatch Release shows that you went IN at 0919Z, which is 1019L - that's the "49 minutes late" from your scheduled arrival at 0930L.

Again, the next version of FSCaptain should allow you to specify Zulu times for all scheduled flights... which is what I think you're looking to do.

And in the future, you don't have to hunt for a specific log file... just select a group of log files that more than span the time window you're thinking of, and put them in a ZIP or 7Z or RAR or whatever. Or just grab all log files for the past few days or weeks!

Then email them to us and I'll go through them all to find the one(s) I need.

Best,

[evolae]

This is the CDU after the flight....so something I'm doing wrong or do not works as it might be....

[DirkDP]

Hi,

It's been said before in other posts as well, to have at least the option to set up flights and/or schedules in UTC would make all of this a lot less confusing.
When I do flights for my VA I use their UTC times to set up the flight in the schedule. I first have to start up FS9, go to depart/arrive airports at the depart/arrive UTC time, note the local time and enter that in the schedule. And of course DST makes it even more confusing, because even though I have Dennis Thompson's TZ files, some (most?) DST periods are now different than 15 yrs ago.

Just my 2 cent...

Regards,
DDP.

[Travis]

Dec 30, 2018 9:37:37 GMT -5 DirkDP said:

It's been said before in other posts as well, to have at least the option to set up flights and/or schedules in UTC would make all of this a lot less confusing.

Haven't you seen emails / Tester Announcements lately??

It's been waiting for you....

Best,

[Travis]

Dec 30, 2018 8:21:02 GMT -5 evolae said:

This is the CDU after the flight....so something I'm doing wrong or do not works as it might be....

Going back to the other thread, here's another of your images, showing the P3D "flight setup screen".




Now if I read the tiny print carefully, I would say that you are setting up your simulator to begin at LEMD on 30-Dec at 1120Z.  ("UTC Time" is checked.)

That should be 1220L (as LEMD should be Zulu+1).

You mentioned in the other thread that you like to begin your session 40 minutes before departure.  That's fine.  You have a 1300L departure set, so all should be okay.

But then you show your FCDU presumably a minute later... as you log in to Dispatch.



The time indicated there is 12:21Z.  That's a full hour later than I thought you were setting the simulator for.

Considering the one hour time-zone difference, you can see that with a SCHED DEPT of 1300L, you've logged in 21 minutes after the flight should have departed.

On your next flight, before you start your FCDU can you check that the simulator's / aircraft's time of day is what you've intended??

Best,

[evolae]

I check constantly the hour in the simulator so, the FSCaptain is showing one hour more. It's strange. I can assure that in the simulator, the departure time was 1200z, 1300 L

It's true, my plane clock is showing UTC time and I was thinking that this time was in Local. So, I don't know why, when I say to Prepare to enter at 11_20Z it understunds 12:20z.

[Travis]

To be honest, that's the only thing that made sense.

Ship me your log files and I'll review them.

I'll wait until other P3D4 Captains can chime in. Perhaps later in my evening I can check P3D2.5 to see what it does when I want to spawn at Madrid.

Best,

[flyguy]

Good afternoon Travis,

I would like to bump this timing problem I am still having with FSCaptain, I have re-sent the files requested to the 3 email addresses, thank you in advance,

Guy.

Dec 17, 2018 22:28:10 GMT -5 Travis said:

Hi Guy,

(Yes, I remember the shaving commercials from the 60s/70s....)

After one not-so-happy scheduled flight early in my career, I didn't touch scheduled flights for years.

Even now I usually forgo them. As long as I can keep my 100% Block Time efficiency rating, I'll be happy.

So I salute you in being willing to tackle them!
-----

I'd like to see both FCDU logs for these flights. I'd also like to see the full Dispatch Release files please.

Now I'm in the midst of a winter head cold, so I may be missing something more than my car keys....

But from what I see in the screenshots, your F27 flight was scheduled to leave the gate at EGNS at 0021 and park at EGCC at 0022. That's a span of one minute, even given that it's set for the low-traffic time of half midnight.

First, we should not allow such a set of scheduled times to be used.  I'll put that on the plate for another day, once I suss out a good time window.

You were deemed late because you went IN 1338 minutes after your scheduled time. (That's what you see on the FCDU.)

Another thing we may have gotten wrong (I'll need to see the FCDU files to verify) is that we should not have allowed you to start your scheduled flight 1294 minutes late!

It looks the two of you had Block Times of 41 & 42 minutes. You finished in 45 minutes, and your fellow Captain in 43 minutes. He departed one minute ahead of his scheduled departure time, and seven minutes late. All well within acceptable limits.

Both of you went OFF within a minute of one another, and landed at the same time (dual runways, eh? ). Your Taxi In was significantly longer though. A better selection of parking spot would have negated that....

It's just that both of your scheduled times were not the same as his. (Your half midnight versus his nearly 10pm.)

Had you shared his times, you would have on the cusp of the "10 minutes late is okay" window when going IN, but otherwise okay.


Please let me know if I've completely missed something obvious!

I'd be happy to expound on related items if you like.

Best,Good afternoon Travis, I would like to bump this timing problem I am still having with FSCaptain, I have re-sent the files requested to the 3 email addresses, thank you in advance, Guy.

[Travis]

Jan 15, 2019 9:53:33 GMT -5 flyguy said:

Good afternoon Travis,

I would like to bump this timing problem I am still having with FSCaptain, I have re-sent the files requested to the 3 email addresses, thank you in advance,

Guy.

I'm so sorry I dropped the ball on this one!

Your log showed that you used the Specify Flight Details dialog to enter a Scheduled Departure time of "21" and a Scheduled Arrival Time of "22".

Now I don't believe that you're mad enough to think you could make the flight in one minute, so unless there were some typos on your part, I'm now thinking that you may have entered something similar to "21:55" and "22:40" instead.

That dialog treats those with the ":" character as a "value terminator".  So you could have entered "21:00" or "21:59" and we would have understood "0021"!

I'll state now that the 1.8.1 Release Candidate will honor the ":" character, as well as the expected HHMM data for these two fields.

I'll change the label to indicate we're looking for hHMM, but we will accept hH:MM as well.

I'm sorry for the lack of instruction on the dialog, as well as being sorry for my delay in responding!
---

On a different tack, I hope that once the Testers sort out any issues with the "Zulu Timed Schedules" (and there's not been a single complaint so far!) that we can activate this for all Captains of 1.8.1.

Best,

[flyguy]

Good morning Travis,

thank you very much, we can tick this one off as completed, you are spot on I was entering times using colons, I have just completed the same flight using the format 1055 - 1145 and it worked so I can now work on improving my "On-time percentage" that is very low at 50%.

Cheers,

Guy.

[Travis]

Very good news Guy!

This was the final "showstopper bug" in the current cycle.

(That doesn't mean it's "the last bug" - only the last bug we know of which could make a normal FSCaptain operation fail.)

We have started building & testing the Fixpack and Full Installers and hope to have links available within 36 hours.

Best regards,