Fleet: Learjet 60 FAI Rent-A-Jet

[jonezi]

Flightplan link: https://oneclickhangar.com/forum/index.php?topic=1300.msg8323#msg8323

[mage]

Fantastic, and timely!

I just made a set of 52-week flightplans for this group and was (!) on the verge of setting them up (FS9). Scramble (Morten's preferred source) shows the fleet slightly larger (which means I will also need to make a new set of plans).

It seems that FAI aircraft appear on photo sites variously as FAI Rent-A-Jet, FAI Air Ambulance, and United Nations.

The fleet as of the present moment (all types) appears to be

FAI Rent-a-Jet

D-AFAM    Global Express    9028    Dec 2011    
D-AFAU    Global Express    9013    Mar 2013    
D-AXTM    Global Exp XRS    9102    Apr 2010    
D-AFAO    Global Express    9092    24 Mar 2021    
D-AFAL    Global Express    9016    1 Feb 2019    
D-AUWE    Global Express    9060    22 Jun 2018    
D-ACEV    Global Express    9084    May 2018    
D-AFAB    CL-604       5378    Aug 2014    
M-AFAC    CL-604       5412    Jul 2020    
D-AFAG    CL-604       5611    Jul 2019    
D-AFAD    CL-604       5348    Nov 2015    
D-AFAA    CL-604       5397    Dec 2015
D-AFAI    CL-604       5366    Sep 2010    
D-AFAN    CL-850       8081    1 Nov 2018    
D-IDBA    Premier 1A   RB-164    Nov 2019 from Fly Alpha (AOC merged with FAI after takeover)
D-IVAG    Premier 1A   RB-196    Feb 2020 from Fly Alpha (AOC merged with FAI after takeover)
D-CFAF    Learjet 60    60-107    Apr 2014    
D-CFAR    Learjet 60    60-095    Jan 2020
D-CNUE    Learjet 60    60-170    Dec 2009
D-CSTU    Learjet 60    60-161    Dec 2018
D-CLUZ    Learjet 60XR    60-386    Dec 2012
D-CFAZ    Learjet 60    60-030    Oct 2016
D-CSLT    Learjet 60    60-200    Feb 2008
D-CFAQ    Learjet 60    60-312    Jul 2019
D-CITA    Learjet 60    60-069    Feb 2019
D-CPMU    Learjet 60    60-032    Jun 2008
D-CFAX    Learjet 60    60-249    Jul 2015
D-CGRK    Learjet 60    60-203    Apr 2018

also D-CSKY, a Beech 350 from Fly Alpha is active.

There also seems to be a white variation on the ambulances, with just the URL and a QR code.

Thanks very much for these liveries, the timing is perfect!

[jonezi]

No problem at all Mage!

If they is any aircraft to paint just let me know, i can update. As long as they is plans we can get them in the sim! 

[airquimper]

Beechcraft Premier 1A are available now here : https://oneclickhangar.com/forum/index.php?topic=6526.0

Cheers

[mage]

No problem at all Mage!

If they is any aircraft to paint just let me know, i can update. As long as they is plans we can get them in the sim! 

I think the stable Lear variations are covered with the existing pack you released, so it's all good.
@airquimper - many thanks also for the Premiers! Considering that there's been a nice model available for years I'm surprised that there aren't more of them repainted. Maybe the p/k is hard to work with (I'm no expert).

The only plans I've made are 52-week plans (meaning 52x 1-week plans that get switched every week by a process in my system). I've started to do this for a variety of European operators to try to get some unpredictability into GA movements. I'm also looking at government fleets for the same treatment, starting with Middle East royalty. This means that on a weekly basis the flightplans might not be great if you're hoping for some GA action at Geneva in a week when a lot of the fleet is off around the world, but on average they will be at your favorite airport sometime in the year! For me, this is better than having some GA never turn up at all because they only operate around the same airports every week.

The plans I presently have for FAI have the fleet all based out of Nurnburg, but I might regenerate FAI as two sets of plans, with the main fleet at Nurnburg and perhaps a couple of CL-604 and a couple of Lears based in places like OBBI and GOOY. If I shorten the aircraft's range for those plans I can keep them operating in a specific region and not "going global".

I've attached these auto-generated plans to give some impression of whether they're of any use. I don't tell the AI where to go, but there are several mechanisms for influencing how it behaves (I can block entire countries, or favor airports that are known bizjet hubs, filter out military airports, reduce ranges to stop AI straying too far, and specify runway lengths & surfaces that they can operate from, and a bunch of other factors - so it's all done with data. It's a work in progress, and you might find oddities in the attached plans as a result.

As for the rest of FAI...
There's a new ex-USA arrival (D-CFAR) painted into all-white, but I bet it won't stay that way, the question is whether it goes straight into UN service or into the main fleet. FAI does a lot of work with the United Nations and have at least 2 LJ60s operating for the UN (CFAF/X), one recently in Afghanistan alongside a CL-604, and the other in western Africa - Senegal, Algeria, etc).
The problem with United Nations work is that the aircraft effectively vanish from the face of the earth unless they come back into ADS-B coverage, which leaves us wondering whether the aircraft is WFU or actually extremely busy.

Since my setup has been frozen in 2019, my updates now are limited to GA that I try to backdate, so the URL/QR-code livery is relevant to me, but since it is text-only I can put something together for that. Those aircraft are changing colors often enough to be a problem for a repainter and it's probably not worth doing.

With the sudden end to access into Afghanistan it might mean that these aircraft are redeployed into Africa or possibly back into the European-based ops. A lot depends on the UN priorities of the moment.

This is an aircraft.txt from my FAI plans (also attached) with annotations.

AC#1000,487,"AI Bombardier Global Express 6000 FAI Air Ambulance D-ACEV"
AC#1001,487,"AI Bombardier Global Express 6000 FAI Air Ambulance D-AFAM"
AC#1002,487,"AI Bombardier Global Express 6000 FAI Rent-A-Jet D-AUWE"
AC#1003,487,"AI Bombardier Global Express 6000 FAI Air Ambulance D-AFAU"
AC#1004,487,"AI Bombardier Global Express 6000 FAI Rent-A-Jet D-AFAL"
AC#1005,487,"AI Bombardier Global Express XRS FAI Rent-A-Jet D-AXTM"
AC#1006,442,"AI Bombardier Challenger 850 FAI Rent-A-Jet D-AFAN"
AC#1007,459,"AI Bombardier Challenger 604 FAI Air Ambulance D-AFAA" (has been working with UN in Afghanistan)
AC#1008,459,"AI Bombardier Challenger 604 FAI Air Ambulance D-AFAB"
AC#1009,459,"AI Bombardier Challenger 604 FAI Air Ambulance D-AFAD"
AC#1010,459,"AI Bombardier Challenger 604 FAI Air Ambulance D-AFAG"
AC#1011,459,"AI Bombardier Challenger 604 FAI Air Ambulance D-AFAI"
AC#1012,459,"AI Bombardier Challenger 604 FAI Air Ambulance M-AFAC"
AC#1013,440,"AI Learjet 60 FAI Air Ambulance D-CFAF" (was White URL/QR code livery - but presently operating for UN and in UNO livery (UNO-333) - probably in Afghanistan as was operating recently out of Bahrain)
AC#1014,440,"AI Learjet 60 FAI Air Ambulance D-CFAZ" painted by DJ, many thanks!
AC#1015,440,"AI Learjet 60 FAI Rent-A-Jet D-CGRK"    painted by DJ, many thanks!
AC#1016,440,"AI Learjet 60 FAI Air Ambulance D-CITA" painted by DJ, many thanks!
AC#1017,440,"AI Learjet 60 FAI Rent-A-Jet D-CLUZ"    painted by DJ, many thanks!
AC#1018,440,"AI Learjet 60 FAI Air Ambulance D-CNUE" painted by DJ, many thanks!
AC#1019,440,"AI Learjet 60 FAI Rent-A-Jet D-CSTU"    painted by DJ, many thanks!
AC#1020,440,"AI Learjet 60 FAI Air Ambulance D-CFAR" (recent arrival, presently all-white with large reg on tail)
AC#1021,440,"AI Learjet 60 FAI Air Ambulance D-CSLT" seems to have gone dark at the beginning of 2019 but still listed by FAI, latest pictures show the red livery. Has not moved on to another operator. Last known location, Wilmington, DE, USA (arrived from Guatemala). My guess - WFU - but might be operating for UNO.
AC#1022,440,"AI Learjet 60 FAI Rent-A-Jet D-CFAQ"    painted by DJ, many thanks!
AC#1023,440,"AI Learjet 60 FAI Air Ambulance D-CPMU" painted by DJ, many thanks!
AC#1024,440,"AI Learjet 60 FAI Air Ambulance D-CFAX"  (White URL/QR code livery after a time with the UN and now back with the UN in western Africa (Senegal, Algeria, etc, UNO-450) - reg previously on a LJ35 w/o in Algeria)
AC#1025,425,"AI Raytheon Premier 1A FAI Rent-A-Jet D-IDBA" painted by airquimper, many thanks!
AC#1026,425,"AI Raytheon Premier 1A FAI Rent-A-Jet D-IVAG" painted by airquimper, many thanks!


this is the URL/QR livery on CFAF and CFAX
https://www.planespotters.net/photo/1014797/d-cfaf-fai-flight-ambulance-learjet-60
https://www.planespotters.net/photo/864925/d-cfaf-fai-rent-a-jet-learjet-60

[mage]

I've done a bit more with the FAI flightplans, separating out the UN flying (3 aircraft, one CL604 and two Lears) from the rest of the fleet. There may be more with the UN, but it's very hard to verify since the aircraft often "go dark" when they are on those ops. Long absences from European airspace is usually the best clue, but that obviously takes time!

This allows for someone making UN flightplans to avoid overlap with FAI - they can flightplan those three FAI aircraft on UN ops as part of their own package. Even so, I've then made some autogenerated flightplans for that subset anyway. These can then be completely removed should someone make UN flights later, but they allow the fleet to operate.

Incidentally it's very easy to remove individual aircraft from the aircraft.txt and flightplan.txt files if you use an editor such as Notepad++, you can simply find any line that begins with (for example) "AC#11," and then mass delete any such lines in all opened files.

For Notepad++ this means using "Regular Expression" mode to allow wildcard searches, and then look for instances of the aircraft's number (e.g. AC#1013) and selecting the text to the end of the line for deletion. You need to use the "wraparound" option because the search crosses 2 lines when it searches for the end of line text (\r\n) return, newline. If anyone uses this editor, the search string is

\r\nAC#1013.*?\r\n

where I've assumed the aircraft number is AC#1013 and you replace that text (and any character up to the next end-of-line - \r\n - with

\r\n

You tell Notepad++ to "Replace All In All Opened Documents", and those aircraft in the aircraft files and in their associated flightplans files will be deleted.

This is useful when dealing with bulk flightplans files like these because you can selectively remove aircraft that have left the fleet, from all the source files at once. It's a powerful editor, thankfully the "undo" works!

I mention this in case some later flightplans (e.g. for the UNO) require some aircraft to be removed from multi-week flightplans. Anyone that has ever made large flightplans might also appreciate the facility to edit columns of text as well (alt key and select with the mouse). It's a good editor, and it makes working with bulk flightplans (or any textual data) much less time-consuming.

The UN flying has also been limited to smaller geographical areas by brute force, simply removing airports from the process that I didn't want the aircraft visiting. Normally I'd leave the airports in and limit by other means that I've put into the spreadsheet. I decided to leave all African and Middle Eastern/SW Asian airports in play even if they're not places the UN fleet would typically visit. These are intended to be annual plans, so a visit or two to Hurghada isn't impossible. It's important to remember that any flights you don't especially like won't be repeated every week. With careful setup in the spreadsheet it is however possible to adjust the behavior of the AI so that it is broadly believable.

I expect there will be glitches in these plans, possibly visits to military airports that I've not spotted and flagged as military. There's the facility to make AI avoid "bad" airports and favor "good" ones, but the airports need to be correctly set up to make this happen. If anyone sees something, let me know and I can improve the data that generates the plans going forward.

I should mention that in the previous plans the airports.txt files were missing the aircraft's base! This was a coding oversight that I didn't spot when compiling using AIFP, because that program figures out its own airports list! Code is fixed to add the base to that list.

So here are some divided plans for UN and non-UN fleets. I've also added in the King Air since there is a repaint out there for D-CSKY, the King Air that, like the Premiers, is ex-Fly Alpha. I've capped the King Air's cruise at FL220, since they never go to their max altitude anyway, at least, not that I've seen or flightplanned for!

I hope you can find some use for these. If there are any basing issues I need to be aware of (they might not all be at EDDN) let me know and I'll make some more! if there are any particularly wacky destinations, likewise. I may have less precise control over that aspect, but I have some control. If you feel particular categories of airports are too busy with FAI, again, I can tweak some settings and get minor airports more - or less - represented in the plans, for example. The aircraft are more busy than they might often be, but the flightplanner doesn't like very long ground times - the planner gets a bit less reliable with sit times that are longer than 12 hours.

Note that the last file in the attachments is the spreadsheet that created these plans, and you'll need MS Excel to use it and also to enable macros for it. It won't run any code if you stop macros from being used. There are no instructions althogh there are some help comments for columns to give some impression of what the values do. You might need to experiment! If you've ever used the RPP generator you will recognize some of the operations this does. Maybe best to experiment!