Obsolete aircraft
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Why do I keep finding B747 schedules. Predominately British Airways and Virgin Atlantic.
They are even in the latest update. Come on guys there all gone. -
I have been using TG since 2018 when there were plenty of 747's in service. Just Flight have not kept up to date with real world changes in aircraft types in use and liveries. I cannot blame them as this would have been a huge task, particularly as the pandemic has resulted in significant changes to airline fleets.
Its quite easy to change an aircraft used in a flight plan via the Traffic Global Flight Plans section. You find the flight plan you want to amend then do so using the Edit Selected Flight Plan option. I have changed hundreds of them. For example you can swap a BA 747 for a 777.200, a 787.800 or a 787.900.
One frustration is that from launch TG was using some out of date liveries. EasyJet and Aer Lingus are examples. They also use some ridiculous fictional liveries with the A380 model like Air Siam, KLM and TAP etc. It would be a relatively simple task for the team update of date liveries but they don't and won't. I have request this many times.
However todays update brings hope. It looks like its now possible to add both flyable and none flyable AI models to the TG programme. I have not had time to try this out but if it works, users will be able to download AI models and liveries from a number of free sites into their flight sim and add them to TG. Brilliant, better late than never and all that but greatly appreciated by one and all.
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As @Lockheed-lad says, the database is not dynamic but it is a real-world database. It was last updated in 2019, so, even pre-covid, flights and airlines were changing once that 'one moment in time' was passed. It is not really practical to keep updating the schedules frequently - there has to be a compromise at some point.
As to 'ridiculous fictional liveries' - these are mostly down to code sharing. Taking the KLM A380 for example, there will be entries in the database that cause the software to allocate a particular livery to a particular plane. Air France and KLM are part of the Air France-KLM group and AF operated the A380. The aircraft should probably have an AF livery, but that's not what the real-world schedule says, so you get a KLM one.
Air Siam is odd - they stopped operating in 1975, so not sure why a livery was even created. Thai Airways had A380s. I'd be interested to see a screenshot and time/place for that one.
TAP is owned by Atlantic Gateway and that may explain their link.
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@Derek said in Obsolete aircraft:
As to 'ridiculous fictional liveries' - these are mostly down to code sharing
I find it impossible to believe that, Derek.
Sorry but I agree with Lockheedlad that these are plainly spurious repaints that have existed since the initial EA release. As they were probably comissioned before the EA release, perhaps they were handy for pre release testing. All that was so long ago now that it was possible that, at that time, some of those carriers had placed an interest or option to buy from Airbus which subsequently didn't materialise into firm orders. Air Siam? why not..though I'm not personally a fan of the colour......:face_vomiting:
Even after 3+ years, they and many other anomolies (that were also raised on the EA forum) remain, a lot of them requiring only really simple fixes like typos.
All the time I spent whilst on the EA forum I found that, the more I dug, the more there were and many of them raised then still remain.
Thankfully, none of them actually seem to detract from the ai in the sim (eg: those A380 paints aren't used anyway) and I would hazard a guess that most users don't even realise they are there. Fun to add flightplans should you so desire...
As an example though, here is another of those oddities (also unused in flightplans afaik):
TG A306 BA G-EUPX
Real life A319 BA G-EUPX
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Hmmm. Will have to look into this. Checking the invoices for liveries, we have a livery for Siam Air Transport Company (not Air Siam) which is the one you have shown above. They were an airfreight operation and their flights will have been in the database when the product was launched (although are likely to have gone by now as they ceased operations).
Also, if the repaints aren't used, how are they a problem? From the original post I assumed there were aircraft flying around with the wrong liveries. If that's not what was meant, are you able to explain it to me better? Where would I find the TAP A380, for example?
Finally, as to typos and bugs I did a number of clarion calls on the old forum for a round up of bugs etc. I listed them and they have been fixed. If there are still typos and anomalies then they certainly aren't on the collated list I produced. By all means raise a ticket with them and we'll fix them.
The BA A300-600 is a good example. If you know where and when it flies we can work out how that aeroplane has been allocated to that flight plan etc etc. -
@Derek
Easy enough to see the A380 liveries, Derek as they're all listed in the aircraft.cfg.The 'odd' liveries listed and the A306 do not, as far as I'm aware ay least, appear in the sim at all since there's no related flightplans.
I dread to think how many hours I spent back then sifting through each model and their repaints (the wife'll tell you) and posting errors (most of which got fixed).
So much so that I compiled a list of them mainly so that I could keep track and avoid duplications.
If you remember, Derek, your list was compiled from that!
In fact, I could most likely have been able to easily further clarify this if I hadn't recently lost the many Gb's of accumulated testing data due to a hdd failure.
I'm not 'having a pop' here but some recognition at some point would have been nice. I'm starting to know how Ray Fry feels about TG!!
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Who was the guy who had the minion avatar? He was the one whose list I worked from. We had a lot of back and forth. Was that you? If you created a different list then my apologies but I got involved a couple of years ago and I did ask for help and took everything off line after a while.
When you say they are in the cfg file that doesn't help. What flights are they associated with? Somewhere in the database it must say take Livery A and apply it to plane B and then fly from London to Paris. Obviously, we could include an Imperial Airways livery for the 787, but you wouldn't see it if there was no flight - unless it was an alternate?
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@Derek
Ah.Apologies, Derek. The unseasonal tropical heat must have got to me. The minion was me! (I did have a good reason to change my identity on this forum at the time...I can't reveal why without having to kill you...you understand..):shushing_face:
As far as I'm aware, none of the spurious liveries have associated flightplans in TG (in any version) so none will appear in the sim.
It's really not an issue (for me anyway), just rather odd that they got there in the first place. I reckon they were produced in the very early days prior to initial EA release and have just never been removed.
So, no worries!
(I'm all for an HP42 if you'd make a decent ai model for TG..:hugging_face: .)
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Panic over. TBH, I have always tried to be as candid as possible regarding this product. I am like a cracked record (as the old people say) in reminding everyone that it is an AI traffic program designed to greatly improve on the default experience. It's not Flight Radar and, without mentioning any names, attempts to run a real-time AI traffic system have not been that successful. It will always be a compromise, but, with the volume of aircraft and liveries included, we think it's a very good compromise and better than anything else in terms of adding traffic out of the box.
We're always keen on feedback. We haven't abandoned the program (as per the latest release) but we also have to balance up what is likely to produce the best experience for the majority of users. If there is a glaring anomaly - such as a wrong livery (not an alternate) - if we know the time and the place we can fix it. However, as you say, if there is a residual/redundant livery sat in the database there seems little point in doing anything about it.
As for the HP42, the team working on that has been diverted onto the DCS Blackburn Botha.
