CPDLC Free Text

[Spyros Stavrakis (1463640)]

Good evening!

I am aware that there is a feature to respond to a/c using CPDLC with a free-text message.

As there are many possible instuctions that may be given to an a/c, is there a way to write a free text message, without it having to be included in the free text section of the CPDLC.txt? Is this feature into consideration?

If I am missing something please do point it out!

Kind Regards,

Edited March 30, 2023 by Spyros Stavrakis (1463640)

[Juha Holopainen]

It's not possible to compose messages manually, all the messages have to be pre-defined.

[Matisse VanWezer (1385143)]

On 31/03/2023 at 09:42, Juha Holopainen said:

It's not possible to compose messages manually, all the messages have to be pre-defined.

I too wonder why it is possible to reply to aircraft with a free text, but initiating a call can only be done using the predefined set.

Would be awesome if you could give a brief explanation as to why that is!

 

Edit

For clarification, when I mention free text I mean you get the box where you can type anything you like. While the pre-defined text is what TS gets from the cpdlc.txt

Edited April 2, 2023 by Matisse VanWezer (1385143)

[Juha Holopainen]

The only action possible in the real system is archiving the message, the other options in the plugin are for handling exceptional circumstances and VATSIM/Hoppie issues. The manual reply possibility is only meant for situations where a downlink is not correctly parsed by the plugin but you still want to answer it.

Say for example someone sends "Hi could I please go up to 350?" Now for a human reader that's fairly clearly a request for FL350 but for the plugin that's just garbage. Since it doesn't parse as a non-supported message either, the plugin gives up and presents it to the controller for possible action. As the unparsed downlinks and manual reply uplinks do not update any track label information, personally I'd never issue any clearances that way. So far I've kept the manual reply option available, leaving the decision of using it to the users, but it would probably be easiest just to remove it and classify unrecognized downlinks as unsupported messages.