by wagnerw » Wed Feb 25, 2015 10:26 pm
I wonder about us.
We are discussing this topic, as if it is the most important feature in our simulation world.
It was good to bring up all the details about it, as many will learn about it. Very often, when I told somebody to raise to 4000 ft, I got the confirmation for FL040. These details may be known to all professional pilots and semiprofessional sim flyers, but in our world, it is more important to help pilots on their way to the runway separated far enough from each other.
I think, everybody knows now, that only TA is fix for the airport and FL depends very much on many things. Some countries have a defined distance between them, less a fix TL no matter what, and most of them calculate the FL.
How do you want you this matter implemented in OR?
The current implementation calculates the next FL (really) above TA. As rule of thumb, do not assign the TA nor the TL to your contacts, and separation will be no issue. If the TL is fix for your country, you may ignore the calculated value. This would be pragmatically.
Otherwise, I would have to ask you for your desired minimum separation between the real altitudes of TA and TL, alternatively for a fix TL definition of the current airpressure at start, and for the third case additional a checkbox "fix value". Do you want to be warned if airpressure changes and TL needs to be corrected, after a thunderstorm crossed your airport?
Personally, this seems to be a bit too much detail for a small side issue.
We have a solution that follows the official definitions, by calculating the TL as next available flightlevel above TA. The issue is, that this TL is a little bit higher in some countries and in less countries even fixed to one value.
It is more important, that we all start to assign altitudes below TA in feet and all above in FL.