Automated Pilots: Limited Beta

[Cat]

sweet. all your hard work is really showing off on this one. Fun feature.

[Cat]

QUESTION: Are we also following the 1000 hours per 12 month rule? If so, operators setting up recurring 100 hour monthly schedules will have to lay off their pilot for 2 months a year.

1000 hours max in a 12 month period = 83.33 hours per month.

Just asking. Personally, I think that's getting a little strict for a flight sim "video game"


NOTES SO FAR:
1) Using dedicated routes and aircraft is the way to go to avoid conflicts with human pilots taking the bot airplane and/or route.

2) Plan schedules for longest duration limits (100 hrs a month) vs shorter ones (10 hrs daily).
I have my 2 bots set up for 5 days a week, 5 hrs a day with consecutive days off, recurring schedule.

3) Trips longer than 5 hours of flight time will require a layover and the associated additional expenses as well as keeping the pilot away from home that night.

4) Edit Schedule: In order to edit the schedule, it cannot be assigned to any pilot (even if they are in their off time). The edit feature is unavailble when the schedule has been assigned.

[joefremont]

QUESTION: Are we also following the 1000 hours per 12 month rule? If so, operators setting up recurring 100 hour monthly schedules will have to lay off their pilot for 2 months a year.

1000 hours max in a 12 month period = 83.33 hours per month.

Just asking. Personally, I think that's getting a little strict for a flight sim "video game"

I am not enforcing the 1000 hours per 12 month rule, since we already limit pilots to 100 hours per month which would come out to 1200 hours per 12 months it seemed like a needless complication.
I also read about a 60 hours per week rule, but with 10 hours per day over 7 days thats 70 hours per week so again it seemed to close.

You have mentioned the fact that for real pilots, if they flight is more than 10 hours they need replacement crew on board so no crew member goes over the limit. This seemed very complicated to manage so I decided that I would not enforce that, as long as it is the only flight they do that shift.

NOTES SO FAR:
...
4) Edit Schedule: In order to edit the schedule, it cannot be assigned to any pilot (even if they are in their off time). The edit feature is unavailble when the schedule has been assigned.

This is something I am still pondering. I don't allow editing of schedules while pilots are assigned, and the edits to routes are limited if they are attached to a schedule. You can change the hours and the days but not the aircraft allowed or the departure/arrival airports. I am thinking you should be able to add aircraft types to a route in a schedule, but should not be able to remove them. Maybe limited edits should be allowed to a schedule, probably only name and days of week for legs.

I did make a change so that for the first leg of a route, if the number of hours to complete the schedule is less than 80 and the hours to complete the schedule plus the hours the pilot has flown in the last 28 days is more than 100 the pilot wont start the route. The idea is to make sure they don't get stuck some place away from home without enough hours to do the next leg, but I am not entirely happy with it but have not yet figured out how to do a day by day evaluation of the route and the pilots hours. One idea that just occurred to me while typing this is to add to the schedule a field for something like 'do not start route if the pilot has more than XXX hours in the current month', put the burden for calculating that on the person setting up the route.

[Cat]

Personal Opinion on Schedule Edit: KIS ... able to adjust dep/arv times and days of week but otherwise untouchable unless the operator goes into Flight Plan and adjusts the individual route(s) as we always have.

I did notice if I did that and then went to "edit schedule" (after taking the pilot off it) that the schedule will import the new changes made via Flight Plan and all one has to do is click the schedule update/save changes tab. If one does not take the pilot off the schedule, any changes made in Flight Plan to routes on a schedule are NOT imported automatically to the affected schedule. This is a good thing in my opinion, keep that back door locked while the schedule is active.

Agree on the 60/1000 thought. Excessive over regulation can make a fun feature turn into a PITA.

[joefremont]

I did notice if I did that and then went to "edit schedule" (after taking the pilot off it) that the schedule will import the new changes made via Flight Plan and all one has to do is click the schedule update/save changes tab. If one does not take the pilot off the schedule, any changes made in Flight Plan to routes on a schedule are NOT imported automatically to the affected schedule. This is a good thing in my opinion, keep that back door locked while the schedule is active.

I don't think thats quite right, on the database record where we record each leg of the schedule, we just store the ID of the route record, everything else is read from the route, so any changes to the route are instantly imported to the schedule. However, the schedule is used to determine when the pilot books there next flight, once the flight is booked any changes to the schedule, including deleting the schedule, will not change the booked flight.

[Cat]

Hmmmmm OK I get the logic you are describing but when I just now added Sunday to the last leg of the day, it doesn't show in the schedule as a 7 but with an x



However, it shows 7 in the flight route itself



AFTER removing the pilot from the schedule, the list remains the same until I go into Schedule Edit where the Sunday now shows up and if I do not click on UPDATE, that x in place of a 7 remains when looking at the schedule.


Once I click UPDATE and then look at the schedule again, it then shows the 7.

[joefremont]

Humm, something I am going to have to look into, will have to wait till next week as I am travelling this weekend.

[Cat]

No worries and no complaints, just trying to help fully test it before full roll out.

[joefremont]

Ok that was not as hard as I thought.

Turns out when you edit a schedule, when editing the allowed days for a schedule leg, it only showed checkboxes for days the route allows, but the form when saving thinks if I don't see a check for the box its a no fly day, so days the routes is not setup for get marked as no fly days, and when the route is edited to allow it, the schedule still has it as a no fly day. So I fixed it so that does not happen any more but existing schedules have that issue.

[joefremont]

No worries and no complaints, just trying to help fully test it before full roll out.

And it is greatly appreciated.

[Cat]

MORE TESTING NOTES:
One cannot assign a specific aircraft to a schedule leg in the Flight Route creation tool. I tried and then those routes became unavailabe when building a schedule.

In the schedule set up, one can only choose the type, not a specific aircraft.

So if I want to have multiple regional pilots flying out of the same hub but on different routes and/or days, for now I need to set them up with their own fleet if I want them to use the same airplane always. It's a bit of a cumbersome workaround, but I'm pretty sure it will work, although I may have to assign each pilot their own unique rank to assign them to just their own fleet that has the specific aircraft I want them to fly.

Is it realistic to assign pilots to a specific aircraft tail number in airline ops? No.

Real airline pilots may find themselves flying 4 legs in a day with 4 different aircraft tail numbers (of the same type). Athough this usually happens at the larger hubs, not the regional airports they are connecting passengers to/from. For regional flying, I might have airplane 1 for the first out and back of the day, then might switch to airplane 2 for the next out and back pair, etc. Or I could end up flying the same airplane all day, it's usually something determined by dispatch/maintenance cycles, etc.

For larget jet ops flying to more major cities/hubs, you might change planes every leg. Fly airplane 1 from Detroit to Salt Lake, switch planes to fly to St. Louis then switch to a 3rd plane to fly back to Detroit. Mind you we are only talking about tail numbers of the same type of aircraft as real airline pilots can only hold one active type rating at a time so you will never see a 737 crew switch to an Airbus or vice versa.

Therefore I should prolly just let the bot pilots pick and choose between the multiple aircraft available at dispatch time and not try to assign them a specific tail number.

So with regard to all of this and thinking about maintenance cycles, one should probably have a "spare" aircraft of the same type in the schedule fleet so one airplane can be taken out of service for maintenance without upsetting the scheduled flights and/or pilot in question. OR schedule your guys with multiple days off so when the aircraft in question needs that 24 hr A check, you can get it done on the pilots' days off.

Airplanes are expensive and real airlines don't often have "spares" just sitting around. When one goes down for a mechanical issue, the scramble is on to rob Peter to pay Paul (aka take another airplane that is going out on a later flight). This can cascade into a scheduler's nightmare quickly where at some point if they don't get that aircraft back into service soon, some flight(s) will have to be cancelled. They will try to cancel the flight(s) that have the fewest number of tickets sold to minimize the inconvience to their customers.

All this is just FYI, no design changes to the system are required at this time (my opinion).

[joefremont]

When I setup the schedules, I wanted to make sure that if a pilot started with a plane, they should be able to complete the schedule with the same plane. Having route with assigned planes would make that very complicated, so I just don't allow it. There is an option on the schedule 'Allow aircraft change' which if set to 'no' (the default) the pilot should have to finish the route with the same aircraft. This is not a hard and fast rule, if its time for the pilot to fly the next leg and the aircraft they were using is not available then they will pick another. I assumed that in general a pilot should do the entire schedule with the same aircraft, otherwise at every stop they may try to switch to another with better maintenance or more fuel, leaving the less maintained aircraft away from the base.

I sometimes wonder if the single aircraft assigned to a route is useful, it was the first attempt we did at restricting routes on a finer grain than aircraft type, but since then we developed fleets and you can restrict a route by fleet. But there are still about 20k routes in the database (out of 1m) that are restricted to a single aircraft.

[Cat]

Yeah it's a feature I don't use but was going to until I stepped back and looked at the big picture and asked the question, "Is this how it's done real world'? And that made it a no brainer to not use assigned aircraft.

BUT I can see where the gamer VA's flying airliners in formation with live multi-player formats would want to restrict each pilot to a specific aircraft to keep them from bashing one and then taking a better one to bash that one next.

I never got that part either, gamers thinking airliners fly together from point A to point B.

So just for grins and more testing, I am setting up a 2nd automated CRJ pilot in both Las Vegas and Detroit with different routes/schedules to see how they play with the first pilot in their division regarding aircraft selection. LOL

[joefremont]

I added a page to allow the duplication of a schedule, your allowed to do top level edits as you make the copy. I am adding a requirement that within an airline an schedule name has to be unique and non blank. Right now the duplicate and edit pages require that, I have not put that restriction into the create page.

I am doing some testing trying to see if I can build an airline just using automated pilots, duplicating the old 'AirCal', I am sure I am the only one here that remembers it. So far I started with three 737-200Adv's and in a week have earned enough to buy 2 more. It does not hurt that a 732 can be purchased for about 8m while a max would be about 100m. Fortunately the virtual residents around the Orange County airport do not complain about the noise from our old jets, while the real world residents complain a lot.

I started by making daily schedules for each of the five pilot that has about 6 hours of flying, but I realize that at that level they can only fly about 4 days a week. So with the the new duplicated function, I made copies of each of the schedules and set the originals to fly 4 days a week and the copies, which I tagged the weekend versions, they will fly 3 days a week, Just hired five more pilots to cover those, which actually puts me at my limit for pilots, I think I may have to increase the limit.

[Cat]

Nice -- I have 7 right now operating out of two different hubs, Las Vegas and Detroit. CRJ7's are getting hard to come by now so my last two pilots are 737 guys, one flying our original 733 bought in 2012 and the other flying a 737ER "on demand" ... no schedule as I wanted to see how the book flight feature works for automated pilots.

Seems to work great but it will be easy to forget about on demand pilots, I think it's better to schedule them and let it roll over and over. The only thing that needs watching now is the aircraft maintenance as they are getting used way more than when i had human pilots only flying a couple of times a month.

One way to get more automated pilots is to pony up and buy another platinum with another email account. LOL My "test pilot" account I use to make video's and stuff with adds another 10 automated pilots available but I doubt I'll go that big in case I need to pull that one out to make a video (like the upcoming one on how to set up automated pilots). It's easier to make video's "starting from scratch" so viewers can see how it's done vs trying to explain what's already been done and in progress.

I did notice that only my owner account can hire pilots but I figured that was just a beta testing thing. Once it rolls out to the masses, I imagine anyone with permissions within their VA will be able to hire automated pilots.

Feature works great so far, really well done Mr. Joe, congrats!!