many thanks but I can’t login. Can you please help me?
Can you supply any detail?
Just a quick compliment for the developers. I developed a free aircraft booking system www.freeaircraftbookingsystem.com so I know how much effort goes into this sort of thing.
I love it. Brilliant thanks. It worked a treat. I even setup my plane using the wizard. It is very simple but clever!
Stuart
The UK is the most difficult part of the world when it comes to IFR route planning. It’s a country where there is very little controlled airspace, yet it is the most liberal of all when it comes to using DCTs. That is an awkward combination. It is very hard for us to know what DCTs are good in the UK and which are not. We can’t just forbid them because otherwise a lot of things don’t work out at all. Therefore we penalize them but don’t rule them out. Sometimes they need to be penalized harder to avoid them.
But it’s the other way round. I’m quite happy to have DCTs in the UK, and I want to avoid them elsewhere (unless they’re essential) and just follow airways.
Have you checked what CFMU and the ANSPs think of stuff like “SASKI DCT BOBMA DCT BARTU DCT BUB DCT LGE DCT PESOV” when it clearly defeats their route availability restrictions?
We are probably going to replace the “Avoid DCTs in the UK” checkbox with a slider that allows you to choose how much you want to penalize them.
That would be good.
How about doing it by FIR? “Allow DCTs up to X nm” by FIR as a preference?
I must also express my compliments to the authors. Great work and as a developer and Oracle guru I know how much effort was put in the development.
My first experience was very good as I got a routing which was never resolved by other programs. Hope they will add my home airport which is small VFR airport.
Good work, guys!
Joze
The UK is never going to be easy unless somebody manually codes in a load of the “street wisdom hacks”.
Also, anywhere near the LTMA, London Control don’t allow the flying of anything that resembles the filed route more than superficially – whatever the filed route is.
Last time I asked someone in the system about this stuff (specifically the acceptance/rejection criteria applied by London Control, to flight plans distributed to them and thus already validated by IFPS) I was told it in no uncertain terms that it is a trade secret which is defined in MATS Part 2 which is the commercially confidential part of ATC procedures…
The option of disabling DCTs works fairly well in UK airspace. I used it last week for EGKA-EGNS which is always a “dirty” route. Not as dirty as EGKA-EGPD though which ends with a lovely long DCT piece in Class G, which works as a purely Scottish speciality 
Have you checked what CFMU and the ANSPs think of stuff like “SASKI DCT BOBMA DCT BARTU DCT BUB DCT LGE DCT PESOV” when it clearly defeats their route availability restrictions?
Yes, they accept it otherwise it would trigger a restriction in IFPS. ANSPs define the DCT rules themselves with Eurocontrol and they choose what to allow. It’s that simple. The UK is different because a DCT can take you out of controlled airspace and we don’t know about that because the IFPS system does not have knowledge about airspaces. I’ve heard this “you should not use DCTs” before so I raised it with the NM team at Eurocontrol during a meeting. Answer was as expected: if it validates, it’s fine otherwise it wouldn’t validate.
I’m quite happy to have DCTs in the UK, and I want to avoid them elsewhere (unless they’re essential) and just follow airways.
Actually a DCT buys you more in e.g. Germany because you’re still guaranteed to be in controlled airspace so there is no potential downside. In the UK it’s about adding a clever DCT here and there to improve the airway routing but it is terribly hard for a machine to determine what is a clever DCT and what not. I really don’t want to go down the route of other solutions that do a lot of hand optimization in the UK.
Congratulations excellent work, straightforward and I like the simple to use HMI with some good features, will play some more with it.. !!
many thanks but I can’t login. Can you please help me?
enable cookies – at least with Firefox
I follow the link and when I enter login and password, I receive a message with a login error.
The user name or password you entered for area “DSL-2680” on router.euroga.org:80 was incorrect. Make sure you’re entering them correctly, and then try again"
I signed up via www.autorouter.eu yesterday afternoon, but didnt receive the validation email until now. I also checked the spam folder, of course.
In the meantime, I cannot login via EuroGA, because the system tells me “account already registered via autorouter.eu”.
