PilotEdge Forums

I have had a long standing love/hate relationship with FSE. On the good side FSE adds dimension to the flight sim experience. Giving new reasons/places to fly. Highly addictive. On the down side (to me) it encourages negative learning to operate the plane in unsafe manner in an attempt to "get there" faster. Did I say "it's highly addictive"? At the moment I'm in a love phase.

One of my complaints regards the amount of time it takes to research and find "good" assignments. One of my solutions was to create a top 20 of airport destinations within the PE coverage area.

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=4890

Then another forum user (trigger_FSX) made a suggestion to look at a program called "FSE flight planner".

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=4955&start=10#p32116

As I'm looking at the youtube tutorial I was amazed to see how the authors (niska-aviation) were using a job naming prefix system to help Niska members to quickly locate other Niska member's jobs. Thus giving preference to members of the group. Simply brilliant!!

It occurred to me why couldn't the FBO owners within PilotEdge do the same thing? IE come up with a "standard" code identifier for all generated jobs thus making short work of locating PE member jobs.

Even better. What if kullery added an additional filter option to the following web site to show only the PE "flagged" jobs?

http://www.myflightroute.com/fse.php

IMO the huge advantage this methods offers is instead updating a thread with the PE member FBO's, the jobs are instantly identifiable in a programmatic manner.

It seems to me one of the challenges is deciding WHAT the Identifier is. While it might seam obvious to use "PilotEdge", this may be too many characters for each FBO owner to give up. Perhaps something short like "*PE" at the end of the job name. Or maybe ":PE".

I honestly don't know what restrictions FSE has regarding the length of job names or the allowable special characters. So any limitations should be taken into account before choosing the ID. By keeping the ID flag short, the FBO can still promote their own FBO.

Thoughts?

I must be missing something. As a pilot, I want to haul the most and best jobs available, not just those to/from PE members' airports. Why would I want to add filters to reduce the number of jobs considered?

For what its worth, the http://www.myflightroute.com/fse.php web page already includes a search option.

simply add "?search=XXXX" at the end of the URL

For example:

http://www.myflightroute.com/fse.php?search=penguin

will find all jobs which include the word "penguin" which happens to find most (perhaps all) of Keith's jobs. I will certainly update the jobs to/from my FBO's if there is a consensus in the community that this would be helpful (perhaps simply including "(PE)" in the job names would be sufficient).


EDIT: I have copied Keith's job naming convention so the above link will also pull jobs to/from my FBO's

I'm fine with adding a suffix to the end of all the jobs my FBO's and gates are creating. I'm not too keen on having them all called the same thing as that detracts from the fun of FSE and the weird and wonderful name you can give to your jobs.

I like the page Ken has created which shows all the jobs within the PE area although I not sure why you would want to narrow it down to a specific set of jobs with the search prefix.

I have to agree, I don't think uniformity is needed here. In any case, there's a lot more to maximizing the value of trip than simply finding a lot of jobs at one airport going to one other airport.

You need to look at multi-leg opportunities. For example, 7CA1, 6CA5 and 51CA are right next to each other. You could do a King Air run from 46CA to all of those fields, picking up return jobs at each one, then come back to 46CA. Or you could even carry more from 46CA and finish up at TSP. None of that is going to be obvious from an automated search.

Much of the fun is simply looking at what's available in real time, coming up with a plan and flying it. Variety is a good thing, otherwise the fun starts to dwindle and you're just flying the same route over and over again.

That, and for reasons I don't understand, people have copied the naming convention and have started creating jobs outside of the PE coverage area (such as MRY), so the name alone isn't a reliable source of information.

I'm not sure the full intent of the suggestion came through/understood. To those that don't understand WHY anyone would want to limit their searches to find jobs. That's why the feature is an "option". If you don't have any interest to give preference to PE members, then don't. I personally would like if possible to fill my plane with other PE member jobs WITHOUT having too spend too much extra time looking.

To the suggestion to follow Keith's model of adding the word "penguin" somewhere within the job names. IMO it has some merit but does have some limitations.

• To someone not familiar with PilotEdge or Task Saturated Penguin it's not intuitively obvious.
• It does not offer an opportunity to promote the PilotEdge brand outside of the PE community.
• Some FBO owners may find the Penguin ID too many characters to give up in the names picked for their jobs (7 characters).
• Currently "penguin" only finds Keith's jobs not the other PE members jobs. Obviously if other FBO's adopt this ID, the over time the results will improve

Again, this is not really about limiting the search to only PE members but offering an easy why to generate a "Starting point" for job search.

I invite everyone out there to just look at the jobs listed at 46CA. Of the (42) jobs listed on March 1st (14) contain the word "Penguin". Obviously this means that "Penguin" is a good start and if agreed to by other FBO owners would work.

To me one of the problems finding FSE jobs is alternating from not having enough data to drowning in data. To illustrate a point I attempted to put together a quick list of the PE members that own an FBO. Note, If your FBO isn't listed here, this only further makes the point about how hard it is to get the word out.

>>PE member FBO networks
Byte LLC Network lwilliams
California Dreams opening David Gilbert
Golden Eagle Aviation Network Peter Grey
Task Saturated Penguin coma24/Keith Smith
<<

I further challenge anyone to come up with a list of all airports with FBO's owned by a PE member. Is it accurate? And most importantly once you have the list HOW it it useful to find a job? I for one will not spend the time to go individually through each airport looking for a suitable job. Whereas if there were a method to quickly find all PE member jobs I would gladly look through that list first before expanding my search.

To the point about not wanting to name all jobs the same. This is NOT what's being suggested. The idea is to allow each FBO operator to name the job as they do today only change is to add a coded text ID that can be searched upon. IMO this is why the text ID should be as short and descriptive as possible.

When I started this thread I was thinking of a PREFIX character string. But as kullery has pointed out the search string does not have to be at the beginning. To that end, simply adding PE to the end of the job name may offer the best compromise of:

• Be unique enough to quickly filter the results.
• Will only sacrifice (2) characters to the job name. Thus allowing the job names to maintain diversity that adds to the FSE experience.
• Allows limited subtle promotion of the PE brand for others to see.
• Be easily extended to other FBO owners as other PE members become FBO owners.

Bottom line. For the suggestion to work it will need consensus and "critical mass". Without "critical mass", then the point made by Tim Krajcar won't be overcome.

Note, to illustrate how quickly 46CA has grown I invite everyone to look at the Aircraft operations link on the Airport page. During JAN 46CA managed 400 operations. If this pace continues for 12 months then 46CA will appear on the FSE "Heather" report.

http://www.fseconomy.net/forum/fse-gene ... 2015#87153

Thanks for the input.

I share some of your frustrations in dealing with FSE data. I really want to augment the list I have at http://www.myflightroute.com/fseairports.php so that it identifies:

• FBO Name(s)
• FBO Owner(s)
• Affiliated with P/E (Y/N)
• # of lots available for building
• links to available scenery (non Gateway)

This would be helpful to identify potential sites for new FBO construction and to take over sites if/when they are abandoned.

It is very difficult to obtain this data without manually accessing all 296 airport pages on FSE. Because they change so frequently, this needs to be an automated process. I have some code which can extract the data from each web page but I am having difficulty getting it to run because of the security tied to the user IDs. I'll keep playing with this.

Regarding job naming, I happened to run across some jobs at KMHE which included a symbol in the name which made them stand out. I'm experimenting with this on my jobs from 04CL to see how it looks and how it responds to a search query.

I'll give this more thought, but I have to head out for now. Just a quick note, 46CA will not appear in the Heather report, I PM'd her and asked her to suppress it from her reporting.

46CA was made for PE members. While I can't stop the greater FSE community from using it, of course, I don't particularly want to publicize it outside of PE. Doing so would just resort in the jobs being flown offline, which is not the goal.

Keith,

Your goals to establish an FSE FBO network for PilotEdge users is completely understandable. I also understand that you are not interested in operating the FSE network for the primary purpose of making v$'s. But would you agree that ideally the FBO's should generate enough v$'s to be self sustaining?

Consider:.

• IF the FBO's are generating positive v$'s, this increases the options to expand the FBO network thus generating even more jobs.
• Establishing reciprocal cross linking agreements with other FBO operators benefits both by creating more destination pairs. The advantage is well understood which is why it was adopted in an informal way so quickly.
• I'm assuming that the other FBO owners goals are not as altruistic as yours and would like to make as many v$'s as possible.

I'm not so sure that having non-PE members fly some of the jobs is such a bad thing (within limits). It generates v$'s and "may" offer a chance to introduce PE to new people. IMO anyone has has to be highly "motivated' to fly in/out of 46CA especially with default scenery. This alone should limit the non-PE users from siphoning off 46CA jobs. Besides it's a lot less work to find jobs in/out at KSAN or KNSY which is only 42 NM away.

In some ways this is a "Field of Dreams" problem. If you built it, they will come. But what if they don't? At this risk of hitting a nerve if one looks at the thread dates in FSE Economy forum it's easy to see the current interest in the PE/FSE is a relatively recent phenomenon. Along the way the PE/FSE combination has started to gain new traction which is a good thing. What's needed now is to have pilots to fly all of these new jobs.

At the time I made this suggestion I thought the idea justified itself in terms of mutual benefit, simplicity, and flexibility. However this seems not to be the case. Without enthusiastic support, probably best just to let the idea die a natural death. Unfortunately I'm likely to find my FSE jobs by going to the locations with the highest concentration of jobs so as to limit the time searching FSE.

Thank-you for all that you do.

I was able to make some updates to the FSE Airports page which may be useful for anyone researching locations within the PE service area to establish an FBO.

In addition to identifying the airports in the PE service area, the list now also includes all existing FBO's, name of the owner, number of gates and the distance from 46CA. If there is no existing FBO, in most cases the site is available for building. FBO owners which are known to be PE users are highlighted (please contact me if I missed any, this is easy to update). This data is updated everyday at 12:00Z. I wanted to include the number of lots available at airports without an existing FBO however the FSE data feeds do not include this information.