Content Comparison

Overview

There are two general types of briefings, Area Route Briefings and Route Briefings.  Area Briefings provide information about weather, adverse conditions, and other information specific to a particular geographic location, such as an airport.  Route briefings provide legal briefing information along a specified route of flight.  An example of a command to get a route briefing is below.  You'll note that it is similar to many of the other types of filings:Area Briefings provide information about weather, adverse conditions, and other information specific to a particular geographic location, such as an airport.

$ /usr/bin/curl -k -A "Mozilla/5.0" -i -c cookies/cookies. --header "Authorization: Basic bWVAbGV0bWVpbi5jb206TXlQYXNzdzByZCE=" --data "type=DOMESTIC&flightRules=VFR&aircraftIdentifier=DOMCTTTDEMO&departure=HOU&destination=MIA&departureInstant=2015-03-04T15:06:00.0&flightDuration=PT1H30M&route=LEV%20Q102%20CYY%20SSCOT&altDestination1=LAX&altDestination2=SEA&briefingType=SIMPLE&altitudeFL=35&routeCorridorWidth=100&includeCodedMessages=true" "httphttps://www.elabs.testafss.net/Website2/[Operational or Test Environment URL]/rest/FP/routeBriefing" -v

Currently the only un-deprecated briefing type is SIMPLEThe simplest briefing we support is called the SIMPLE Briefing Type.  The output of the briefing text is too long to be useful in this this format has the following conventions:

Note that both Route and Area and Route Briefings provide support for plaintext translation.  This makes the typically cryptic announcements notifications in a briefing easier to read.  You can get this data by setting the plaintext parameter to true.  Also, If LMFS has not received any Weather Data for 1-15 minutes, a short-term weather outage warning will appear in the notices section of a route/area briefing: ” Weather/NOTAM data may not be current due to loss of incoming data at [Zulu time] Z. A recheck of data prior to departure may be warranted.”  After 15 minutes of no weather data, the long-term weather outage will force the web service to return a failure status with the error message “No Weather/NOTAM data currently available due to loss of incoming data at [time] Z. You may file a flight plan or access the system later for full service.”  Once weather is recovered the warning will no longer display in the briefing (for a short-term outage) or the briefings will resume processing with success as true and the briefing will include a message indicating that there had been a weather outage in the notices section (for a long-term outage).

We also provide a briefing of type NGB (Next Generation Briefing) which provides far more detailed information in a structured format (XML for SOAP, JSON for REST).  A number of the items that are provided include the geometry of the briefing artifact, the plaintext translation, the time period in flight in which the phenomenon could impact you, and a number of others.  If you are in a position to support a more elaborate briefing, it is highly recommended that you use this briefing type.

Features

NGBV2 Standard and Abbreviated Briefings

An NGBv2 briefing is considered a “Standard Briefing” when briefingType is NGBV2 and the ‘items’ keyword is not present. Tailoring options can be applied if desired.

In addition, it will not be a standard briefing if any of the following conditions are met:

• notABriefing is true
• outlookBriefing is true
• departureInstant is more than 6 hours in the future

An NGBV2 briefing is considered an “Abbreviated” briefing if the ‘items’ keyword is used.

Briefing Preferences

A briefing, due to the large amount of data that we provide, is obviously long and complex.  If your user base prefers, there are a number of options you can avail yourself of by adding the briefingPreference parameter, which is a JSON dictionary.  The tailoring key is an array of strings that include:

• PLAINTEXT_ONLY - Include plaintext, encoded text field will contain encoded text
• ENCODED_ONLY - Include encoded data, plain text field will also contain encoded text
• NO_GEOMETRY - Do not include Geometry data
• NO_SUMMARIZATION_PASSING_TIMES - Do not include Summarization and passing times
• NO_NOTAM_CATEGORIZATION - Do not include inside/outside corridor categorization for NOTAMs
• NO_TFR_NOTAM_RECORD - Do not include NotamRecord for TFRs
• NO_FIX_LIST - Do not include the fix list in a NGB Weather Briefing object        

 these options reduce the size of the briefing or speed up the time that it takes to generate a the briefing (or both).