I’ve opened an ATC position and updated the ATIS on Aurora. The new ATIS takes about 10 seconds to appear on Webeye. However, on Navigraph, I had to close and reopen the app to see the new ATIS, which took 4 or 5 minutes. If I stayed in the app, the ATIS wouldn’t update, even after closing and reopening the Airport page.
This refresh rate for the ATIS is not acceptable.
Additionally, I think it’s very important not to be forced to close the ATC menu to get the ATIS update. Perhaps integrating a “Refresh” button could make updating the ATIS much simpler?
In that case, this list should be kept up-to-date! Much like the departures/arrivals screen, it should be updated every minute. Unfortunately, we forgot to add this before release. In the future, it will be automatically updated every minute!
We grab this data from IVAO every 30 seconds on the server side, but we never know when IVAO will update it since we use the publicly available data! I hope 1 minute will be enough in the app?
If not, we’ll have to speak to IVAO directly. We have had several instances of errors from the IVAO APIs in the last couple of days, and if we are to increase the refresh rate further - we want to ensure that it won’t cause trouble for them since we’ll need to hit private APIs instead. We also use server clusters, so every added request is multiplied by the number of servers running at any given time. This can be worked around of course, but not trivially.
Before we do that, however, is a sub-minute update rate on the ATIS necessary? What scenarios do you see being affected by this? Navigraph Charts being a much more complex app than IVAO webeye, we need to be mindful of where we spend network and CPU resources.
I just got word from IVAO that the maximum refresh rate they provide without custom solutions is 15 seconds. So the question still stands - is it necessary to refresh this information more than once a minute in our app?
We could have a manual refresh button too, but I find it highly unlikely that it would be commonly used to check for updated ATIS - especially not more than once a minute
Exactly !
It’s good to know that this section will be kept up-to-date every minute in the future.
In my opinion, 15 seconds could be very useful. When we request departure clearance, we open the ATC section, take the ATIS information, and then contact the radio. It takes about 10 seconds to do that…
But if the ATIS refreshes every minute, it increases the chance of confirming the wrong ATIS information.
I’m not a developer, but keeping the current 1-minute refresh rate AND adding a refresh button could be a potential compromise between CPU resources, network congestion, and user experience
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