Autorouter updates (merged)

autorouter: GAR and SMS gateway

We’ve released a few enhancements to the autorouter that I would like to describe.

General Aviation Reports (GAR)

When flying to the UK, a form called GAR has to be submitted with details about the flight and persons on board. This allows landing at any aerodrome, irrespective of its port of entry status. When we determine that a flight is subject to a GAR, we’ve been showing this for a while with links to external GAR mechanisms.

Now autorouter allows you to accomplish everything from within the application. A new ribbon “Customs / Integration” is shown in cases where a GAR might be required.

You can specify the personal details of all persons on the trip and their capacity on the trip.

It is possible to store a person record for future use (available in the “Predefined persons” list at the top). At this point you can already download the GAR form which is presented as an Excel file as requested by the UK Border Force (we just insert data into the Excel template they provide).

When filing a flight plan, we perform a few more checks. We warn you if the persons on board is different from the number of persons in the GAR. Also we give you the choice what to do with the GAR:

The standard is to send the Excel file to your email inbox so you can submit it. You can also choose to not generate a GAR or you can choose to submit it to NCU (the centralized GAR processing unit at the UK Border Force). An email is generated to NCU with the GAR file attached and your contact data. If you choose to submit to NCU, we will also send emails when you cancel, delay or bring forward your flight plan. You will be in copy of all emails so you can verify the data is correct.

At this time, it’s limited to UK GARs but we are preparing additional countries with similar requirements.

SMS gateway

Sometimes you’re at a remote place where mobile internet is either not available or slow or very expensive. Therefore we have created an SMS gateway offering the most important features of autorouter for quick access. The phone number is +4915792340092 which you should add to your phone address book. Note that it will only talk to you if you communicate with the phone that is registered in your user account.

Please only use the SMS feature when you really need it as it incurs a significant cost on our end. The technology are very suitable to in-air use. With a bit of patience, you will almost always be able to exchange the information in flight.

The following commands are supported for SMS:

• WX ICAO
  Get METAR/TAF of the given airport, e.g. “WX EDDS” for Stuttgart, Germany. Via SMS, only one airport is supported.

• CANCEL
  Cancel the flight plan whose EOBT is the next. There is no safety confirmation, it will be cancelled right away and you get a confirmation email and SMS.

• EOBT HHMM
  Delay or move forward the flight plan whose EOBT is the next. There is no safety confirmation, it will be moved right away and you get a confirmation email and SMS.

Miscellaneous improvements

• The briefing packs now have a descent table which is an optional item, similar to the climb table.

• You can now stop the router when some routes are already found and it will let you choose one of those routes instead of giving you an error. Can be handy when we find a suitable route quickly and spend considerable time looking for alternative solutions.

• On the flight plan page, we now show the moments correctly for aircraft with multiple fuel tanks which are consumed in the order they are defined.

Aviathor wrote:

I am wondering though, why you submit the GAR by e-mail. Is that to make the feature available quickly and you will down the road integrate with the GAR APIs?

At this point, the GAR APIs are not public and only available to one single party. When they become generally available, we will support them.

Sending the GARs by e-mail, how do you foresee dealing with the authorities claiming they did not receive the form?

I think these problems are rather theoretical. The introduction of NCU as the central entity to distribute GARs made things very straightforward. We are in touch with them and they acknowlege autorouter as a platform for submitting GARs. When in doubt, we always have the mail server logs with the SMTP receiver ID for each GAR. There are other vendors that provide similar email to NCU functionality.