FSAirlines

I was just working with a pilot who has a problem with the client where the app was crashing when it tried to load the flight from the server. Turns out the flight in question had nine technical stops defined and when the client tried to load all the airports related to the flight it was overflowing the data buffer used and causing the client app to stop working. Now I either need to increase the buffer size in the client and/or reduce the number of airports returned from the server but it got me thinking, what limitations should we put on technical stops in a route. Right now there really is no limitation, because up till now the only thing they were used for was in the client when you land at the airport and you did not push divert it used that list to determine if you were doing a tech stop or landing at the wrong airport. But now we are caching the airports in the client and I am working on some logic for the automated pilots that uses the technical stops to determine how the bot going to determine where they will actually land, a long list of tech stops makes that logic very complex so I was thinking of adding some limitations to the list of technical stops which I think would be:

• No more that four

• The distance from the technical stops to either the departure or arrival airport must be less than the distance between the departure and arrival

• The distance from the departure to the technical stops and then to the arrival airport must be less than 150% the distance between the departure and arrival airport

• The distance between the technical stops and the arrival and departure airport and the distance between each technical stops must be at least 100 nm

The route that started this problem was between FZAA FKYS in Africa 540 nm away and the tech stops were OIII OISS OIIE OMDB OIMM KLAX EHAM FAOR LEMD, the closest of which was 1500nm away and the furthest is KLAX at 7600nm away.

Thoughts?

Edit: This has been implemented.

tech stops were supposed to be like refueling stops for aircraft that could not make the distance non stop. I call this pure abuse of the system. I would put the max limit at 3. There is no purpose in booking a flight around the world in say a CRJ2 with a gazillion technical stops as the flight will not make any money. It is far better to have individual routes and/or charter trips. Real world example: You might book a flight from Las Vegas to Miami with a stop in Dallas. But it will be two separate flights in their system, just a "continuation" for through passengers. But the aircraft will be refueled, replenished with catering and new passengers boarded as those only wanting to go to Dallas deplane. So using a technical stop in this case would cost your VA money because you don't have any passengers changing at all and they all paid to go to Miami not Dallas.

I agree with the above. Keeping the technical stops limit to a low number (I would think 3 or 2 myself) makes sense.