When I tried to load this via the EFB in the MD11 I got a message about being unable to load the flight plan.
I double checked the Navdata and it was the latest, so I did a few searches and stumbled on a comment in a forum, I think it was Avsim about single direction airways not being handled correctly in Simbrief which resulted in this error. So I went to RouteFinder (free access area) and generated a flight plan, pasted it into Simbrief and hit generate - now the flight loads with no error - this is the plan
The segment NUKTI W66 DKO is no longer valid in recent AIRAC cycles (it was in the past, when the W66 airway was bidirectional, which it no longer is), but because Simbrief doesn’t check/enforce directional airways, it doesn’t show an error.
On the other hand, most aircraft FMS systems do check and enforce airway directionality, thus the import fails.
I have removed the bad LOWW → RKSS route from the Simbrief database.
See also the following topic for more information:
Regards,
Tim
@SimBrief I seem to recall all routes with […] W66 DKO were removed from the database, but I guess not? It’s possible in was re-introduced by someone copying over from edi-gla, I guess.
Thanks, that makes sense, however, it does prompt another question -
Is it possible for airway directionality to be checked automatically at the time of route generation?
Having said that I don’t have any knowledge of how Simbrief generates routes, but I have always expected that the route generated would be “correct” for the current navdata.
Simbrief does not generate routes most of the time, instead just going with either:
a manually validated route provided by special Simbrief users with the corresponding privileges
a VATSIM route (filed on VATSIM and cleared by a controller at some point in the past)
whatever the last route is that a Simbrief user entered for a particular airport pair (this ia the case here for LOWW RKSI)
only if none of the above are available, does it generate a route (IIRC, using an algorithm provided by Navigraph Charts’s autoroute function)
The route in question (i.e. the one with the issue) might actually be a real-world route flown by actual airlines from LOWW to RKSI, except it’s just outdated and the segment NUKTI W66 DKO, which used to be valid, no longer is.
As far as Simbrief’s inability to check and enforce airway directionality, it’s indeed an annoying limitation, but my understanding is, it’s not trivial to fix sadly.
SimBrief should now be able to evaluate airway directions. The route in @sbraiding’s first post should no longer be suggested by default, and will instead appear as invalid in the list.
