Finnair have been using the FPAssistant SDK suite along with the optional ARINC 424 Parser module to develop their own software tool in-house, an insight of the Microsoft Windows app is explained further below by Toni Kivinen who is the manager of Simulator Engineering at Finnair.
Finnair Flight Training has been struggled for years to keep ground data up to date in Full Flight Simulators. It is critical, the airports, runways, navaids and approaches are realistic and corresponds to real world. This is especially important for runways with special approaches on challenging airports. Keeping data up to date is also a requirement in CS-FSTD and audited by Authorities annually.
Most of the simulators are not compatible with the ARINC 424 navigation data and it cannot be uploaded as it is to simulators. Finnair has total of 7 pcs. of Full Flight Simulators from different manufacturers with different technologies, data converters are not available. FPAssistant SDK with the great documentation and close co-operation with CADology finally brought us the solution to build in-house software, to compare and monitor the changes between ARINC 424 data cycles. Tool output highlights the key data which should be updated and engineers can perform the update manually focusing only to data which is relevant. This way we do not need to update full ARINC 424 data to simulators as regular basis.
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