SIMACARS progress

[Michael Blakely]

In my quest to find a better performing alternative to our FSACARS, I've been looking at SIMACARS. I made some great progress this weekend and I think this will eventually become a viable alternative.

I installed SIMACARS and the Virtual Airline Manager (VAM) website it's designed to work with. Many of us love our website and don't want to switch to VAM, so I need to reverse engineer how SIMACARS communicates with VAM in order to integrate SIMACARS with our AAVirtual website.

I captured all the messaging that goes back and forth between SIMACARS and VAM for a standard flight. I looks like it should be fairly easy to adapt our AAVirtual website to work with SIMACARS.

Next steps:
- Capture messaging for non-standard situations such as log-in errors, server timeouts, simulator crashes, duplicate FREPs, etc.
- Update AAVirtual for the SIMACARS messages
- Release to any AAV pilots who would like to Beta test

No commitments on the timeline. You know me. Brief spurts of rapid progress on AAVirtual followed by months away as I put my nose to the grindstone at my real world job.

Here's a screenshot of the Wireshark tool I use to capture the SIMACARS messages.

[Robert Simac]

Awesome! Do pls keep us posted about the progress.
While simacars is also windows only, the scanned traffic protocols may be useful for an attempt to implement rudimentary non windows equivalent...
I did some work on fsacars Linux equivalent and it seems it is in domain of possible...

[Michael Blakely]

Mike, have you checked other VA sites about how it works, check this http://www.flycoa.com/DOCS/simacars.pdf?

Stuart,
I've been using this instruction to get where I am. I have SIMACARS and VAM installed and operational. That part was pretty easy.

What I'm working on now is understanding how SIMACARS communicates data with VAM so I can then update AAVirtual.com so that SIMACARS can talk to AAVirtual.com.

[Michael Blakely]

OK, so it was not just as simple as replacing the link in to AAV ACARS and seeing what came in.

I tried that first. Crashed and burned.

[Michael Blakely]

OK, so it was not just as simple as replacing the link in to AAV ACARS and seeing what came in.

I tried that first. Crashed and burned.

FSACARS just sends the flight data to a single web address, something like www.aavirtual.com/pages/fsacars/receive-pirep.php. If there's a lot of data, it breaks it into multiple messages, but they all go to the same web address. It doesn't need any specific response from the server and just pushes the response into a file on your computer.

SIMACARS sends 8 different messages to 8 different web address, and if it doesn't get one of a few expected responses, it errors out and doesn't finish. All the messages are there to support the additional features in SIMACARS and VAM like:
- Releasing the aircraft back into the fleet of available equipment for pilots to use
- Noting which airport the pilot left the airplane at
- Send live position updates during the flight
- Send events like, "boarding, taxiing, stall, aircraft failure"

[Michael Blakely]

More good progress this weekend on integrating SIMACARS.

I finished these items from my todo list:
- Capture messaging for non-standard situations such as log-in errors, server timeouts, simulator crashes, duplicate FREPs, etc.
- Update AAVirtual for the SIMACARS messages for pilot log-in.

Next steps:
- Still need to Update AAVirtual for SIMACARS messages to receive the flight data.

[Michael Blakely]

woo hoo!

Just filed the first FREP from SIMACARS to AAVirtual!

Still lots of cleanup and testing to do, but this was a great milestone.

[Michael Blakely]

SIM ACARS is running perfectly on my local machine.

Today I tried to deploy to our test server, but my traffic was blocked by the web host firewall. I bet all my development activity this weekend flagged my home IP as suspicious. They should have the firewall updated in a few days and then I can try again.

[Michael Blakely]

More GREAT news!

Our hosting provider fixed their firewall rules and I was able to submit a FREP from SIM ACARS to the test version I have of our website.

Now I need to port to the main site, test, create some user documentation, and release.

Getting real close now!

[Fareed Abdool]

More GREAT news!

Our hosting provider fixed their firewall rules and I was able to submit a FREP from SIM ACARS to the test version I have of our website.

Now I need to port to the main site, test, create some user documentation, and release.

Getting real close now!

Looking forward to trying it out.

[Harold Henderson]

Saw a post on the net that SIMACARS is compatible with MSFS 2020. It does require the new FSUIPC v7 currently available free as a beta product.