If you've ever felt like going for a simulated flight, but not known where to go, this page may help. It generates a random "mission," then assigns a coherent departure and arrival city pair, aircraft, and passenger count. It also estimates the distance, and calculates the time required in the selected aircraft.

Depart/Arrive

This is a random world city pair. It is weighted to select cities in the following order:

  1. Domestic U.S. city pairs.
  2. Flights between the U.S. and other North American countries.
  3. Flights between the U.S. and other countries of the world.
  4. Flights outside of the U.S.

Distance

The distance is calculated based upon the latitude and longitude of the city pairs. The current algorithm is not very accurate.

Time

The time is calculated based upon the cruise speed of the assigned aircraft, and the distance of the flight.

Mission

The mission is randomly assigned, and is fairly general. For instance, you get "Medical Flight" rather than "fly Billy Johnson to the hospital for an arm transplant."

Aircraft

The aircraft is chosen based upon the number of passengers, and the length of the route. That being said, you can still get routes that exceed the range of the aircraft, requiring fuel stop(s). This is on purpose because this happens in the real world.

The aircraft library is a selection of active, passenger-carrying, real world airplanes. The passenger capacity ranges in size from 1 (Cessna 150) to 555+ (Airbus A380).

Passengers

The number of passengers is random, but appropriate for the mission. The main purpose of having this information is so you can calculate weight/balance information for the flight.

 


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