A company route is defined by a list of records that include airports, procedures, airways, and/or waypoints satisfying regulatory authorities regarding the flight of an aircraft. Essentially, a company route is a description of the flight path to be followed by an aircraft as it flies between origin and destination airports. This flight path is designed specifically to fit the requirements of airline operators who operate between origin and destination points.
A company route is typically designed on the ground by navigation personnel, who receive the requirements from the airline operators. The navigation personnel use a list of waypoints between origin and destination airports along the flight path as inputs so as to produce the company route. The design of a company route is a mostly manual process and it is certainly time-consuming. As a result, the process is error prone. Also, the design process is textually oriented, which makes it difficult for the navigation personnel to visualize the actual company route, which is made even more difficult because, during this design process, the designer has no idea about the terrain and obstacles which may present along the designed company route.
As can be seen, the step by step process that is necessary to create a company route is complex. The source airport, the departure, runway transitions, common transitions, en-route transitions, waypoint fixes, airways, arrival transitions, approach transitions, and the actual approach all/few need to be selected and specified based on defined criteria and stringed together in a way that forms the record of the company route. At each selection point, the navigation personnel use multiple sources (charts, Aeronautical Information Packages (AIPs), etc.) to select the desired points of interest. Because so many sources are needed to provide the information required for designing a company route, there is a distinct possibility of making mistakes, and the designer will not have any leverage to view the sources together. Also, during this whole process, the designer has no idea about the terrain and obstacles which may be present along the designed route. Moreover, text based route design provides little means to select an optimal path.
Therefore, there is a need for an interactive and graphical navigation system that interactively provides navigation personnel with a graphical view of a company route as it is being designed, along with additional information such as information about terrain, obstacles, airports, airways, etc. This system can be used by navigation personnel on the ground and can be arranged to empower them to be more aware of the choices of the route at a particular fix (a real time view of the route on a world map backdrop if a choice is selected), to compare different choices so that they can make better decisions quicker, to be aware of terrain and obstacle information, and to verify the company route by viewing a virtual fly through of the route.
The relevant choices (e.g., fixes, airways, procedures, etc.) relative to a particular fix can be shown graphically, and the user can make selections based on the graphics so as to construct the company route. This company route can then be verified by virtually flying through the coded route with underlaid terrain and obstacles.