News and stories about how FPAssistant is developed and the technologies used to create it
The completion of the FAS Data Block - Data Store Extension (DSE) option was being delayed because of support for the .NET Standard 2.0 within the Azure Cosmos DB SDK but early in 2019 Microsoft announced version 3.0 of the Azure Cosmos DB .NET SDK; this initial public review targets .NET Standard 2.0 which is [...]
Good progress has been made on the Parser with API support for the ARINC 424 records list below, the data is accessed through an data object returning collections of records with fields/properties. A unit test framework has been added so that further tests can be added for checking ARINC 424 validation rules and other constraints. [...]
Programming work has started on developing a parser for ARINC 424 Navigation System database files, it is developed as a parser because it will read the 424 data file to build a data structure; this structure can then be accessed using an object based API similar to others in the FPAssistant SDK. The API is [...]
Just added are the 3 calculations from 8260 Volume 3 covering the RNAV and RNP 1 Departures, these are: Projected Altitude VA Segment Distance VA Segment Termination Altitude ROC, CG and Climb Gradient Termination Altitude These are available in the SDK and coming very soon to the Windows 10 App SDK Usage PbnCalculations pbnCalclations = [...]
Quite often we get asked.... How is FPAssistant software delivered? Well in the old days this could be through an installer but could be a big effort when dealing with a single DLL file. Then again, it could be zipped up and sent by email, download link and the customer would need be contacted or have [...]
Question: How can I calculation a True Air Speed and obtain the conversion factor? In the SDK we use the IndicatedAirSpeed struct which has a few different constructors to handle a different temperature variation, the full API documentation can be found here. Two values are required, these are an Airspeed and an Altitude value. So an example [...]
Code Coverage is important when testing software to investigate and determine how much of the programmers code is being coverage by the test cases. The code coverage amount is represented as a percentage. The Wikipedia definition is... "In computer science, test coverage is a measure used to describe the degree to which the source code [...]
Both in ICAO PANS-OPS and FAA TERPS there is a requirement to encode a set of final approach parameters into a binary file that is known as a Final Approach Segment (FAS) Data Block (DB). An encoding tool for both SBAS and GBAS procedures is now supported in the FPAssistant SDK and the app. [...]
There are quite a few mobile apps and also web sites that allow real-time flight tracking presenting data with the aircraft overlaid on a map. There are a few places to access this flight data and one which we have found driven by a worldwide community of participants is ADS-B Exchange. This site is co-op of [...]
Maximum Descent Gradient & Minimum Deceleration Distance Two new calculation required for FAA TERPS have been added to both the FPAssistant API and also to the Windows 10 app, work will begin soon for the Apple iOS and Google Android apps which will include these calculations as well. Here is a screen shot of the [...]