track our flights in real time

We are pleased to announce the use of our new tailor-made OC-POS Real-time Position System as our tool of choice to track our flights, as X-Acars - previously used for real-time position reporting - is no longer available.

OC-POS is a Python-based plugin for X-Plane, which provides similar position reporting capabilities as X-Acars, but has been tailor-made for our virtual airline.

The following page will guide you through the process of downloading, installing and configuring our OC-POS system.

Just click on the button below to download our OC-POS System as a single .ZIP file called air-septimanie-positon-reporting.zip file, which you should save in a directory of your choice.

As mentioned above, the OC-POS System has been developed as a Python plugin and it is therefore available on a cross-platform basis and for both, the 32 and 64-bit versions of X-Plane.

Unfortunately it is necessary to install a few items as pre-requisites before you can start using our plugin.

The first pre-requisite is the installation of the Python 2 programming language on your system. Python is high-level, general-purpose programming language, which is available for a multitude of operating systems and environments.

If Python 2 is already installed on your system, you can skip this step, otherwise you will need to install Python 2 - the latest version currently being 2.7.17.

The official Python 2 web site can be found at: https://www.python.org. It contains Python 2 downloads for a multitude of operating systems and enviroments under https://www.python.org/downloads

Once downloaded, you will need to install Python 2 on your system, e.g. by running the Windows MSI Installer. Please note, that it is very important to install the Python version, which matches your X-Plane installation (32 or 64-bit). Thus if you are still using a 32-bit version of X-Plane, you will need to install the 32-bit version of Python, even on a 64-bit operating system.

Once Python v2.7 has been installed you will need to install Sandy Barbour's X-Plane Python Interface, which provides the link between Python scripts and X-Plane. Furthermore it does also pre-compile Python scripts to increase their performance. The latest version of the X-Plane Python Interface can be found under: http://www.xpluginsdk.org/python_interface_latest_downloads.htm

If the X-Plane Python Interface is already installed on your system, you can obviously skip this step.

Once downloaded, install the X-Plane Python interface as described in the Python Interface user guide available to download under: http://www.xpluginsdk.org/python_interface_downloads.htm.

Once all pre-requisites are in place, you can finally install our OC-POS Real-time Position System. Please unzip the air-septimanie-positon-reporting.zip file downloaded from our web site and store its contents preserving the directory structure in the Resources/Plugins folder within the X-Plane folder, i.e. X-Plane 9/Resources/Plugins, X-Plane 10/Resources/Plugins or X-Plane 11/Resources/Plugins.

Follwing this, you should now have a PythonScripts folder under Resources/Plugins and inside this directory you should have the following files: PI_airSeptimanieRealtimePosition.py and PI_airSeptimanieRealtimePosition.ini

Congratulations ! You have now everything in place to run our OC-POS Real-time Position System.

Although the initial installation may be a bit cumbersome, especially if you do not have Python or the X-Plane Python interface currently installed on your system, the configuration and use of our plugin-in is really simple.

Under the X-Plane Plugins menu, you will find an entry called OC-POS Real-time Positioning. Please select Show Configuration Window to specify all information to start tracking a flight as follows:

• Your Username: Your air septimanie user name
• Your Password: Your air septimanie password
• Your Flight Number: The flight number of the active flight you want to track (i.e. the 9F... number)
• Position Report Interval (seconds): The time interval to send position reports between 15 and 600 seconds (the default is 15 seconds, which corresponds to the update interval of our Virtual Radar)

Once you have entered all information, you are ready to start tracking your air septimanie flight and report its position automatically to our Virtual Radar.

Just click on START TRACKING to initiate the position reporting. Our system will then verify the information entered. If everything is correct, the first position report will be sent to our database server and the Status window will be updated with the status information, e.g. Position Report sent at ...

In case of a validation problem, the Status window will contain some information on the problem encountered, e.g. incorrect flight number, wrong password, ...

Please note, that you can only start the position reporting after you have created the flight on our web site using the function Start New Flight under the Flights menu. Otherwise you may encounter one of the following error messages:

• There are no active flights for your username 'my-username' on our database
• There is no active flight with flight number 9F.... for you

The error message Error sending data to air-septimanie.com at ... indicates that our OC-POS plugin cannot communicate with our web server. Please verify your internet connection and firewall settings to rectify this problem.

If everything is OK, then the Status window will reflect this as shown below:

Please do also note, that you can start the tracking process at nearly all stages of a flight, e.g. if the flight is currently at departure, taxiing or in-flight. The only exception are flights which have already landed !

Once the tracking process has been started, the Status window will be updated every x seconds (as per the Position Report Interval), e.g. every 15 seconds.

Should an error occurr when reporting the latest position, an error message will be displayed in the Status window.

Please note, that the most frequent problem is a communication problem, i.e. that the plugin cannot communicate with our web server. In this case, please verify your internet connection and firewall settings to rectify this problem. The position reporting will automatically be stopped after 3 subsequent failures. Once the problem has been rectified, you can restart the position reporting process by clicking on the START TRACKING button again.

You can manually stop the position reporting by clicking on the STOP TRACKING button in the configuration window. This will then be reflected in the Status window as shown below and the position will no longer be updated on our Virtual Radar facility.

Tracking will be stopped automatically in case of multiple communication errors or once the flight has been completed, i.e. you have landed the aircraft or have closed or aborted the flight on our web site.

We hope you enjoy using our OC-POS Real-Time Position Reporting System and please feel free to contact us in case of errors or problems.