Airport Randomiser...is there one?

[Swanoir]

Hello all, sorry in advance if I've posted this in the wrong place (I'll work it out one day)...

I've been thinking for a while that it would be nice if for a change, instead of me actually trying to think of flights to do, wouldn't it be nice if there was some way of just clicking on a magic button and generating two random airports to fly between?

When I say random, I actually mean I want to be able to supply the program with a list of airports to choose from so that I know roughly where I'll be (e.g. only in the UK).

I suppose I want a virtual 'Pick two names out of a hat' sort of thing. The only online randomisers I've found just shuffle a list of words (in my case airports) that you give it. This sort of works for what I want, in that I can start with airport number one and fly to airport number two, but it would be nicer to just have something that gives me two randomly chosen airports at a time.

Any one know of anything that fits the bill? Not the end of the world if not, just one of those things I've been idly pondering for a while.

Thanks

[DaveG]

I'm sure I saw something on either Avsim or FlightSim that was something like that
Let me have a quick look.

[DaveG]

There's "Destination Finder" on Flightsim.com. That's a stand-alone program where you input your starting airfield & optionally, distance and/or direction and it gives you a list based on that.
"World Airports Spreadsheet" (Avsim) is an Excel spreadsheet. Again you supply your start & min / max distance and it gives you a random list of 20(?) destinations.
Then there's "Flight trip Chooser", which is also and excel spreadsheet, but I couldn't seem to get that one working properly (may have been me, I only tried for a minute or so!)

Can't find anything that matches your needs exactly, although I don't suppose it would be too difficult to do something in Excel.

[Tako_Kichi]

I have bought a couple of aircraft from Just Flight recently in their sales and both came with a folder containing over 1500 pre-made flights. More than enough choice there I would have thought and I'm convinced there must be some way of generating these flights as I bet a human didn't sit down and plan them all out especially as they include way-points and/or en-route fixes.

[Swanoir]

Excellent, thanks for the suggestions guys. Dave, I couldn't get Flight Trip Chooser to behave either, but World Airports Spreadsheet seems easy enough to use. I was quite impressed with Destination Finder and although ironically it's not as 'simple' as I need it to be, I quite like the various parameters and filters you can set, so I look forward to having a proper play with it at the weekend!
Thanks for your help, much appreciated

[basys]

Hi Folks

Had already been thinking about similar,
so having had a quick play with the 3 products that Dave had identified.

Prioritised by avoid product.

* World Airports Spreadsheet -
Avoid entirely -
From the readme, it only uses a dataset of 9,300 airports, (versus FSX default's 24,490).
Only works with recent versions of Excel, (xlsx filetype).

* Flight trip Chooser -
Name sounds great -
Unfortunately it only utilises ICAOs. -
It just uses an ICAO INPUT FIELD, and a static list of default FSX airports, alphasorted by ICAO, as a results table.
You input an ICAO, it then lists all 24,490 DESTINATION ICAO, DISTANCE, & BEARING, from your originating ICAO.
Relies entirely on you already knowing the CONTINENT, COUNTRY, STATE, CITY, AIRPORTNAME, where the destination ICAOs reside.

* Destination Finder -
Best of the bunch.
Unfortunately again, initial input only utilises ICAOs. -
Only useful IF you already know the ICAO you wish to start from.
ENSURE the HEADING (DEG) field is empty, (normally pre-populated @ 90deg).



HTH
ATB
Paul

EDIT - Swanoir
You'd repliedto Dave, whilst I was still composing.

[Vancouver]

Nothing like what you are suggesting however here they have a Flight of the Month feature which can often be quite interesting.

http://www.toomuchfs.com/

http://www.toomuchfs.com/currentfotm.htm

[Vancouver]

How 'bout this one

http://www.fourflights.com/

[Swanoir]

Thanks Paul, I agree with your appraisal! Vancouver - thanks for the suggestions, very interesting. I especially like the look of Four Flights. Looks like I'm in for a busy weekend! Thanks again everyone.

[J0hn]

If you know the area you want to fly in, just write down the names or codes for every aerodrome in that region - or type them into a word processor and print them out - then cut them out and put them in a bowl or such like. pull out two and you have your flight.

you won't get two flights the same, if you keep the ones you chose out of the bowl, and you can put them all back in once you've flown the lot