Hi @olafie ,
From the RAD support blog post:
To summarize, SimBrief currently supports RAD in terms of appendixes 2, 3, and 4. While the remaining RAD appendices are a bit more challenging to parse accurately, we are continuing to investigate ways of improving SimBrief’s route suggestions, including by parsing and adhering to more RAD appendices.
Appendices 2, 3, and 4 have been renamed since then to Annex 1, Annex 2A, and Annex 3B. These are currently the only ones that SimBrief parses. It’s extremely difficult to program a parser for the other Annexes, since they appear to be human-written (the way they are written varies widely, they often contain typos, and they generally have many more restrictions in them).
Another factor is that Eurocontrol does not allow access to their flight planning APIs for flight simulation tools like SimBrief. Real world airlines and tools use these APIs when flight planning, but we have no such luxury. Even with these APIs, airline dispatchers still need to manually intervene to find a valid route in many cases. To expect that SimBrief will get this right 100% of the time, fully automatically, without access to Eurocontrol’s APIs is basically impossible unfortunately.
The best we can do is continue to fine tune things. Historically, controllers on VATSIM like to blame SimBrief for basically every “bad” route, but the reality is most flights on VATSIM use SimBrief these days. Even if SimBrief plans a good route 90% of the time, everyone focuses on the bad ones of course. Over time we’ve gradually improved things, and will continue to do so, but as I said it’s never going to be perfect.
There is a system in place now for authorized users (people with knowledge of the RAD restrictions, VATSIM controllers, etc) to submit routes to the SimBrief database. If you are interested in contributing, let me know and I will send you the required info.
Best regards,
