I've recently joined Intercity Airways and use PFPX to plan my flights. I thought it would be nice to have the Intercity Airways schedule in PFPX however I found no mention of it on the website or forums so I went ahead and created it. It includes all the flights, all 924 of them (I hope I got them all).



Some Notes:

   
• I wasn't sure when the Spring/Summer 2014 schedule ran to so I just assumed a nominal date of 31/12/2014 (I can change this if I find out the actual date).
• The flights are true to the days listed (eg. 1234567 or 12345 7).
• I have added the Duty Number and Equipment type to the notes column for reference (eg. Duty 88 / DH8D).
• I have noted the flights as Domestic for flights within the UK or same country and International between countries (I'm not sure if this is correct for Europe but can change if I'm wrong).
• The exported PFPX Intercity Schedule XML file is approximately 500KB in size so easy to share.

I am happy to share this with anyone from the VA who uses the software (with permission from the bosses of course).

I hope this will be useful.

Regards,
Serge

Flights between the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) and the Republic of Ireland are considered domestic (this is known as the Common Travel Area, CTA).

Flights between EU member countries, Norway and Switzerland are classified as domestic (this is known as the Schengen Area), but this excludes the CTA countries. This would affect flights in/out of Düsseldorf only (there are other rules but they don't apply to Intercity's flights at the moment).

In simple terms for the purpose of traveling, the CTA is considered a single country and the Schengen zone is considered another single country.

Thanks for clarifying that for me Chris. I'll update my schedule accordingly.


Cheers,
Serge

Blimey Chris you're a mind of information mate it's great being a member here at Intercity.

Thanks

Oh by the way, I forgot to mention the schedules generally change with the clocks (aka daylight savings time), the dates are listed here. However sometimes we're a bit slow getting them uploaded    Once you're happy with your PFPX schedule, you can e-mail it to us and we'll upload it to the downloads area.

I'm full of useless facts Steve, I once got nicknamed SOAK (Source Of All Knowledge)

EDIT: I think you may be missing a few flights, I think it's 935 in total. They run sequentially so it should be easy to spot the missing ones.

Quote from: Chris Liu on Apr 30, 2014 16:23
I'm full of useless facts Steve, I once got nicknamed SOAK (Source Of All Knowledge)

Nah, Chris I'm learning from you, I'm sure others are too, and I don't think that's useless Chris! So keep up the good work mate.

Quote from: Chris Liu on Apr 30, 2014 16:23
EDIT: I think you may be missing a few flights, I think it's 935 in total. They run sequentially so it should be easy to spot the missing ones.

Hi Chris,

Yep, I missed a few flights so the total I get now is 934 which is still one less than your total. Looking into it further and it appears Flight Number ICX543 doesn't exist (when using the website schedule search tool which is where I generated my list from). Is this an error by the schedule search tool or the flight just doesn't exist?

Other than the missing flight I'm pretty much done with this now including knocking up a Readme file with instructions. I'll hold off sending it to you until I get clarification regarding the missing flight. I assume I'll just use the VA contact email address to send you the files?

Cheers,
Serge

Hey Sergio,

I don't know too much about PFPK; so just a quick question or two; are you able to calculate fuel and loads etc for the Q400?  I know that TOPCAT doesn't really have that many aircraft files and so I never bought it; is PFPX the same boat ie only has a few aircraft profiles?   The other thing is it seems to be forever having hotfixes and rewrites even though it took years to develope and was even longer in beta; what are your thoughts on it?

Quote from: Steve Prowse on May 01, 2014 08:57
I don't know too much about PFPK; so just a quick question or two; are you able to calculate fuel and loads etc for the Q400?  I know that TOPCAT doesn't really have that many aircraft files and so I never bought it; is PFPX the same boat ie only has a few aircraft profiles?

G'day Steve,

PFPX has quite a few more aircraft profiles than TopCat (too many to list here) including the Q400. Unfortunately there is no profile for the JS41 however it is currently being worked on by some volunteers over in the AVSIM Forum so hopefully we will have one soon. It is fairly accurate with the fuel calculations and performance profile for the Q400. On my last flight (ICX98 EGLC to EHAM) I arrived at most of the waypoints within a minute to what PFPX calculated. I can't remember how accurate the fuel calculation was but I think it was within 100kg for trip fuel.

For loading, you can either enter passengers and cargo or just put in the ZFW the Majestic load manager calculates if you want to match exactly. If using passenger numbers then it will be slightly out as Majestic use about 84.8kg per passenger where as PFPX can only use whole number which would be 85kg for closest match so the final weights won't match exactly using this method.

Here is a link to the PFPX flight briefing package from the flight I mentioned above if you want to look at the output.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/chgf3c5h2xvu60j/ICQ98%20EGLC-EHAM%20%2829%20Apr%201255%20UTC%29.pdf

Quote from: Steve Prowse on May 01, 2014 08:57
The other thing is it seems to be forever having hotfixes and rewrites even though it took years to develope and was even longer in beta; what are your thoughts on it?

Yeah, I kind of agree with you here. They move quite slowly and it can get annoying waiting so long however I can't imagine how complicated this software is so I don't mind giving them a bit of slack. Not much else we can do but be patient.

If you have any other question about PFPX let me know.

Regards,
Serge

Many thanks for the info Sergio.  I also looked at the output link you've provided.  Have you seen SimBrief yet?  It too outputs CIRRUS (Simbrief also has options for different formats) and it, my view, is excellent.  Clearly you've much more control over the actual FP but for what we use here ie short haul with some routes verging on medium I think Simbrief ticks all the boxes.  I can however see that for the Long haulers (using NATS for example) PFPX does have its advantages; also, you always have PFPX to hand, I guess Simbrief could go offline when needed, or worse close down, heaven forbid.  So I'll stick to Simbrief and Aivlasoft's EFB for now.  The way I see this is PFPX is the dispatcher's tool set, and Simbrief is in fact being dispatched..

Cheers

No worries Steve.

I agree that SimBrief is also an excellent tool especially considering it's free. It's also being actively developed and improved upon with new flight plan formats added regularly.

We simmers are certainly spoiled for choice these days with so many products to choose from.

Cheers,
Serge

I can confirm ICX543 is missing, I must have had a brain fart or something! Serge has finished the schedules and I've placed them on the Downloads page of the website for anyone who wants them. Our thanks again to Sergio for converting the schedules for use in PFPX (we'll send you the .csv file next time  )

Happy to help out Chris.

I'll definately take you up on your offer of a .csv file next time though. Copying and pasting from the schedule search webpage into Excel became a little tedious after a while. Although once into Excel it was fairly straight forward to parse into the xml format PFPX required.

Cheers,
Serge

I've made a few minor corrections to the schedule and Serge has kindly updated the PFPX files to match, these are now available from the Downloads page of the website