xacars problem?

[David Higdon]

When my last pirep was sent out by xacars it showed that the flt was completed and landed at kdfw. If you look at the route,it shows that acft went to miami instead! Im new at this and Im sure that there is something that im not doing properly. I had two flts saved by xacars and one of them was a flt to miami.It seems that they were fused together somehow.Should I delete the saved pireps in xacars,and delete the reported flt to kdfw?

[Peter Schindler]

David, could you send these two reports via email to peter[ at ]air-child.com?
I'll see if I can find something there.

[Szymon Kurzacz]

Nah, got something similar, but it does not affect nothing more than stats.

Mine case is that i just landed in PANC after long travel from KSFO (with winds around 100kts blowing into face). All report looks ok, but distance is reported as only 94nm in place of about 1828nm. All other stats are more or less accurate - fuel, time of departure, landing so block time. Only that distance traveled is "bugged".

Probably cause of that is that i had little internet connection problem during flight, and because of that live acars stopped to work (my net provider disconnects me each day to force new ip for my connection). I have saved log on hdd if needed.

Offtopic: photos from ACH7073 flight numbered WF-10-11-*

[David Higdon]

David, could you send these two reports via email to peter[ at ]air-child.com?
I'll see if I can find something there.

I would be more than happy to do that.I'm not sure how to add an attachment to the e-mail tho

[Peter Schindler]

oops, that makes things difficult. Which mail client do you use?

[Peter Schindler]

Mine case is that i just landed in PANC after long travel from KSFO (with winds around 100kts blowing into face). All report looks ok, but distance is reported as only 94nm in place of about 1828nm. All other stats are more or less accurate - fuel, time of departure, landing so block time. Only that distance traveled is "bugged".

Szymon, this is a very difficult problem I'm looking after, at the moment. It affects some people regularly, like Yoram Benary, for example. Look at his pireps - he doesn't have many miles

The main problem is that XAcars doesn't provide a value for flown distance. It is mentioned in their documentation that the value is currently transmitted as zero (in other words: not implemented). So I helped myself with a workaround: while XAcars transmits live data, the map script constantly checks the distance between current and last position report and accumulates these distances in a temporary database table. When you finally send your pirep, the accumulated distance is read from this temp table. For some reason, which I didn't find yet, it seems that sometimes only the last leg (distance between touchdown and last position report) remains there, instead of the complete distance.

It's funny that it works for most people, most of the time. So, yes, disconnects might have something to do with it. Will need to do further tests - or hope that XAcars developpers will include the distance parameter soon. Would be the easiest solution, at least for me

If you still have it, send me your log, please. Thanks!

[Szymon Kurzacz]

Thank You. Most important that flight is scored, points, hours, miles, cargo and pax from flight are secondary things. From charity point of view we need as much flights as possible, and rest (including points) is more or less just for fun.
I personally have some kind of flightstips (like controllers), where i write down most important data for me witch is departure and arrival time zulu, distance traveled, flightplan and so other, so i have mine personal stats updated correctly on my website.

Will send logs from acars as soon as possible. During flight i've noticed that actually xacars have in data something like distance traveled, with is number that is rising from 0 during flight, but it still may not send it to live server.

[Peter Schindler]

During flight i've noticed that actually xacars have in data something like distance traveled, with is number that is rising from 0 during flight, but it still may not send it to live server.

Yes, this is the live stream data, I was talking about. What I wrote above is not totally correct because the Acars stream sends the total distance with every position report. This is what I update in the temporary database. I have to store it there because, after landing and during taxi, the Acars still transmits but the distance value is somehow reset. So my script stops updating the distance after touchdown, or it should do so, at least That's probably where to look for the false values of some people. Still wonder why it only happens with certain pilots or reports.

[David Higdon]

oops, that makes things difficult. Which mail client do you use?

Well,I've tried a couple of times to send you the files but they don't seem to be able to get through.I think the problem was with my computer and internet service not xacars.Anyway,I'll keep checking the forums.Thank you for taking the time.Thank you also Szymon for your input.

[Szymon Kurzacz]

oops, that makes things difficult. Which mail client do you use?

Well,I've tried a couple of times to send you the files but they don't seem to be able to get through.I think the problem was with my computer and internet service not xacars.Anyway,I'll keep checking the forums.Thank you for taking the time.Thank you also Szymon for your input.

Try sending those files in zip and/or with diffrent name, like asd.txt and include info about original names in e-mail. Some mailboxes dont like strange files and thread them as spam or virus warrnings... I've had that few times with xls files LOL

[Peter Schindler]

just for info: I received David's log files in the meantime
Thanks, David. Will look into it.