change to icao equipment codes

[Ricardo Sousa (1110850)]

dunno if you're aware, but vatsim is seemingly changing over to the icao format (finally)

this is being done by the my.vatsim prefile page and by simbrief. I dont think its official yet as there was no communication about it, but uh people are using it at quite a widespread stage right now

[Juha Holopainen]

My take on this is that the change is both welcome and long overdue. However, it seems to be taking place without much - if any - warning to the developers of various clients, causing all sorts of problems. It really should have been better coordinated, now there are pilots filing flightplans in both the ICAO and FAA equipment styles with the ATC clients, online traffic viewer applications etc. expecting the FAA style. I fear it's going to be a bit messy for a while... At least for my part, I'm just going to see how it goes, for example whether EuroScope and its plugin development environment are updated to better handle the ICAO equipment codes or will I need to code workarounds to handle the two different possibilities...

[Mats Edvin Aaro (1227980)]

The developers were informed, but we released myVATSIM and as such also P0 and this system silently in order to make the transition as smooth as possible. 

The clients will eventually support them fully.

[Oliver Gruetzmann (961224)]

On 25/08/2020 at 04:45, Mats Edvin Aaro said:

The clients will eventually support them fully.

"Fully" is funny in this context. Which one does support support them at all currently?

The only thing I see is broken displays in the clients that use this information (the controller clients).

[Jonas Hey]

On 22/08/2020 at 14:40, Ricardo Sousa said:

dunno if you're aware, but vatsim is seemingly changing over to the icao format (finally)

this is being done by the my.vatsim prefile page and by simbrief. I dont think its official yet as there was no communication about it, but uh people are using it at quite a widespread stage right now

Thanks for using my flight for reference  ICAO formatting has been something long long overdue on VATSIM rather than the FAA style rubbish  

[Mats Edvin Aaro (1227980)]

On 26/08/2020 at 19:30, Oliver Gruetzmann said:

"Fully" is funny in this context. Which one does support support them at all currently?

They all support it. It is not a change in any of the flight plan structures. It's simply changing the string path, nothing about the layout of the flight plan has changed.

The developers of the major clients are already at work on parsing it in a better way (Maybe Juha is able to beat them to it with TopSky?).

Change is scary, but this change had to come, and it's better that it's coming sooner than later. The flight plan system will be improved with time, I am talking with Jeppesen about maybe being able to use their leaflet on it, as it's a lot easier to understand than ICAO's version.

[Oliver Gruetzmann (961224)]

On 28/08/2020 at 17:16, Mats Edvin Aaro said:

They all support it. It is not a change in any of the flight plan structures. It's simply changing the string path, nothing about the layout of the flight plan has changed.

Errm. No?

Seen all those screenshots with broken labels? The flight strip in Euroscope is useless currently.

Yes, technically they support it, it's simply a text string. But none of those clients is able to correctly parse the string and display the correct information. But no, I wouldn't call it "support".

On 28/08/2020 at 17:16, Mats Edvin Aaro said:

Change is scary

It's not. At least not for me. I've been looking forward to this change. I just think that it's questionable to implement something that nothing on the network supports at the time of release.