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Welcome to my new blog !!!.

Well the title explains a lot but i will explain why I started my project

One of the main if only the main reason for doing this is that so much data is out there which may or may not be correct or exactly what I want to achieve for this exercise.

Virtual Airlines have been around for many years to make the experience of flying with a flight simulator such as Microsoft Flight Simulator or X-Plane or indeed any other flight simulation platform that has appeared over the last 10 to 20 years.

Virtual Airlines come in all shapes and formats , many emulate their real world entities and many others are fictional or in other words exist only for the Virtual Aviation world.

Obviously the Virtual Airline needs a website address and web-pages to operate and many have spent the time to develop extensive websites with a plethora of download files to support their Virtual Airline such as Aircraft Liveries and unique ACARS reporting systems.

Others on the other hand have taken the approach to customise a package that is available on the internet and start their airline from that software.  I can note two such cases of Virtual Airline that are apparently in use today these are Virtual Airline Manager aka VAM and PHPVMS. 

Both these development offer a download of software to run your Virtual Airline with obviously some effort to update all the database tables as you need them.

This of course takes time as these two products come with some data to get started with but as you want to build your own Virtual Airline there is a lot of input to be made for airports , aircraft and the schedule.  The schedule is in effect the airline timetable of routes that you can fly with certain aircraft as determined by the airline.

For my study and project I am looking at the core structure of one of these two products without any set preference, and as such it seems logical that my project with some changes can work for either anyway, to base this first project on Virtual Airline Manager.

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Roadmap for my Project

Given that for my project I have chosen the package Virtual Airline Manager references will be made regarding the tables and data of that package.  However the roadmap can apply in theory to any software for a Virtual Airline. Firstly with any software package you need to install it and get some understanding of how it works so that what you create in a refined process is suitable for use.  The same applies if the Virtual Airline already has been built with software other than a package. Once I am happy with the basic installation of Virtual Airline Manager , it does come with some data but since you are starting out to build a new airline many tables are empty and those that have data in would apply to any airline created.  Well thats the theory I guess but in reality is the supplied data what I really want . The main data that is supplied in Virtual Airline Manager  is for Airports and their associated runways and local navigation aids. Because this is an installation with no
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Discovery of where I get the data from

Since I found that the supplied airport data in Virtual Airlines Manager was not suitable for several reasons , I had to think of what data do I need and where can I get what I feel is better data. I sat back and looked at how I use flight simulation and how what I needed from that to accomplish my needs. I found it easy to think about this ,  I fly with the X-Plane flight simulator with various aircraft some of which are payware.  When I fly I like to use the auto-pilot and thus follow a flight route in the FMC computer.  Thus I have a subscription to Navigraph to update my FMC data each month on their release cycle and I create my flight plans using SIMBRIEF. So I looked into what I get from Navigraph and I found that I can get a list of all the Airports and Latitude and Longitude in a text file NZSP-89.981947-144.063631 Where NZSP is the ICAO code and the Latitude and Longitude co-ordinates. This is a starting point as with this file I get nearly 13500 airports that I co
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Filling in the Missing Details

This is the first field I looked at and it seems that this is only available in the original out of date supplied data from VAM. For my initial entry for this I set a default of 'airport' which makes some sense.  However later on providing i have enough data that matches back to the VAM data I can update this to their values such as 'small_airport' , 'large_airport' etc. This is one of the more difficult fields to get the correct data from as many airports change their name and sometimes they change the ICAO code if available. Remember my test case of Jan Smuts Airport in South Africa that was FAJS becoming OR Tambo and FAOR. I needed a set of data that was correct with the names of Airports associated with the ICAO code if possible. It so happens if you are careful you can get a free set of data using an API KEY from a real world website in fact it is ICAO themselves https://www.icao.int/safety/iStars/Pages/API-Data-Service.aspx For free
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