FG SimBrief Importer Add-On

===========================



What Is This?

-------------



This is an add-on for FlightGear that adds a SimBrief Import dialog.



(See https://www.simbrief.com/).



What It Does

------------



The SimBrief importer can import various aspects of a SimBrief flight plan into

FlightGear. The import functionality attempts to support as many aircraft types

as possible, but due to the nature of the beast, it does not work equally well

with all of them.



Ideally, the following functionality will be supported:



- Flight Plan Route: This one imports the departure and destination airports,

  and all enroute waypoints, into the default flightplan. If "Activate

  immediately" is checked, it will also activate the flightplan.

- Departure RWY, SID: This will attempt to select the planned departure runway,

  and the planned SID, from the flightplan. Note that this will only work if

  your FlightGear navdata matches the selections from SimBrief, which may not

  be the case, especially if you're using the default FG navdata and/or an

  outdated AIRAC cycle in SimBrief. SID selection will also fail if SimBrief

  uses a different naming convention than FG's navdata.

- Arrival RWY, STAR: This will attempt to select the planned arrival runway and

  STAR. The same caveats apply as with the departure runway and SID.

- Performance Init: This sets a handful of key performance parameters;

  currently: cruise altitude and callsign.

- Payload: Imports passenger and cargo weights, and attempts to distribute them

  sensibly over available payload weight slots.

- Fuel: Imports block fuel as per the flightplan, and attempts to distribute it

  sensibly over available fuel tanks. Two fuel allocation strategies are

  provided:

  - "Balanced": distributes required fuel proportionally over all tanks,

    according to their declared capacities - large tanks get more fuel, small

    tanks get less fuel.

  - "First come, first serve": distributes fuel by filling tanks in declaration

    order. Some crude heuristic is in place that attempts to detect left/right

    pairs of wing tanks from their names, to keep things balanced, but it is

    not foolproof.

  Which of these strategies is more suitable depends on the aircraft type. If

  neither is good enough, but the aircraft comes with a "balance fuel" button,

  the recommended way is to use either fuel strategy, and then simply press

  the "balance fuel" button to let the aircraft sort it out.

- Winds Aloft: Runs a background process that sets winds aloft according to the

  forecast winds in the flightplan. This will only work with Basic Weather,

  since the Advanced Weather engine runs its own wind simulation that will

  overwrite winds aloft regardless of what we set.



Supported Aircraft Types (as per 09/2021)

-----------------------------------------



                         | FPL | Dep/SID | Arr/STAR | Perf Init | Payload | Fuel |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+

| E-Jet-family-YV [1]    |                         n/a                           |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+

| A320-family [1]        |                         n/a                           |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+

| 747-8i                 | yes | yes     | yes      | yes       | yes     | yes  |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+

| MD-11 [5]              | yes | yes     | yes      | yes       | yes     | yes  |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+

| 747-400                | yes | yes     | yes      | yes       | yes     | yes  |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+

| 737-800YV [2]          | yes | yes     | yes      | yes       | partial | yes  |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+

| 777 [3]                | yes | yes     | yes      | yes       | no      | yes  |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+

| Citation-II [4]        | yes | yes     | yes      | yes       | yes     | yes  |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+

| Citation X             | yes | yes     | yes      | yes       | yes     | yes  |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+

| CRJ700-family          | yes | yes     | yes      | yes       | yes     | yes  |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+

| QSeries                | yes | yes     | yes      | yes       | no      | yes  |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+

| DHC6 [4]               | yes | yes     | yes      | yes       | yes     | yes  |

+------------------------+-----+---------+----------+-----------+---------+------+



[1] - This aircraft already includes a SimBrief import feature, so this addon

      will either not work or disable itself. Please use the aircraft's

      built-in SimBrief importer instead.

[2] - Imports cargo, but not passengers, due to nonstandard handling of

      passenger counts.

[3] - Nonstandard handling of cargo and passengers.

[4] - Imported flight plan is of limited use, because the aircraft does not

      have an FMS.

[5] - Currently works, but devs plan to make a custom importer, at which point

      [1] will apply.



Aircraft types not on this list may or may not work; they simply haven't been

tested. Contributions on this front are very welcome.