Area based separation

[Ricardo Sousa (1110850)]

This might have been requested before, but I couldn't find it.

 

In the future it would be nice to be able to define areas by coordinates where within them a certain separation is applied. Practical example

big red line is obvious, but white circle is then 3nm and white line to the west is conventional. Problem is, none of these areas match any sector, the same sector can apply up to 3 different separations.

Right now we hacked up the separation minima based on the logged callsign, but its far from ideal. And I imagine the real system has something to deal with this

 

all that said, I understand this is a pretty significant change in how it works

[Juha Holopainen]

The real system does have the capability for offline-defined STCA and MTCD volumes with specific alerting values to override the default ones. At least a simple version of this would be more of a performance issue than a coding problem, and is likely to be included at some point in the future.

By simple I mean in case of STCA for example two tracks in area A but both heading towards area B, the area B alerting values would only be used after at least one of the tracks was actually inside the area, and for MTCD the checks would only be done at one-minute intervals along the route. Predicting transitions between areas more accurately would be a much larger task both programming-wise and in terms of performance cost. Note that even this simple version would see a performance hit depending on the number and complexity of defined volumes, especially with MTCD.