10.0 SW Release

The LM AFSS PilotWeb and Web Services will be down for maintenance on 7/19, Zulu.  The maintenance event is expected to start at 0200Z and the web services expected outage is expected to last approximately 2 hours.  The outage is to deploy the 10.0 SW Release.

10.0 includes the following changes relevant to Web Services.  For more details regarding the updated features, please review the web service documentation available here on the effective date: https://www.1800wxbrief.com/Website/resources/doc/WebService.xml

New Features:

• Tailless briefings – Vendors that make use of weather, NOTAM, and UOA data currently retrieved from briefings for differing scenarios unrelated to the filing of a flight plan now have the option of omitting a tail number.  This is done by setting the ‘notABriefing’ flag in the Route or Area Briefing types to ‘true’ (will default to false, if absent).  When this occurs, the Aircraft Identifier is optional.  In your response, you will see a disclaimer that the response should not be considered a briefing for the purposes of flight planning.  Furthermore, the response will not be retained in our system as a briefing artifact for accident reconstruction.  Vendors that are currently using our web services in such a manner are asked to migrate to using this new option in the next release.
• SIDs and STAR optional fields for Victor Airway search in RouteSearchRequest – for the victor airway search, you can now specify a SID and/or STAR with an appropriate transition fix to get a victor airway response that would include the chosen SID or STAR.
• A new value is available in the RetrieveFlightPlan operation.  If there is a proposed route from ATC based on other recently cleared flight plans, you can see this proposed flight plan route in the expectedRoute field of the RetrieveFlightPlan response.  You will need to step up to the latest version of the WS response (20160303 for the versionRequested field) to get this value in the response.
• Email Briefing End Point Deprecated - The EmailBriefing type  capability is being folded back into the Route and AreaBriefing web services.  To request an email briefing, indicate that the type is EMAIL.  Also, you can include additional recipients by adding email addresses in the recipientEmailAddresses element.

Enhancements and Behavior Changes:

• ICAO Other Information Field Changes – Moving forward, the only acceptable characters for the ICAO Field 18 will be Uppercase letters, numbers, spaces, and the forward slash.  This is to improve the chances that IFR flight plans will be accepted by ATC.
• Foreign Departure Flight Plans – LMFS will no longer permit filing, amending to, or activating flight plans departing foreign locations, except for Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Bahamas, Pacific Rim, Turks & Caicos, or the US Virgin Islands.  Briefings will continue to be permitted.
• Briefing Preferences for Area and Route Briefings – Previously, the only way to get a briefing with only a subset of the requested data was to do an email-based briefing.  10.0 has rolled out the capability for all of our briefing types to use the briefingPreferences parameter.  Please review the Web Service documentation for additional information.
• Outlook AIRMETs and Convective SIGMETs are Adverse Conditions – Outlook AIRMETs and Convective SIGMETs are now considered adverse conditions for the purposes of briefing organization.

Defects Fixed:

• When a route or area briefing times out, you previously were given a notification that the request failed due to some unexpected error.  This has been corrected to give you a more appropriate Webservice.TimeOut response.
• Post 9.9 there was an increase in the number of ‘brief-all’ NOTAMs, that is the NOTAMs that we cannot determine a geographic location for and include in all briefings.  This has been reduced in this release.
• For those using our NGB Briefing type, we previously did not properly account for Mach Airspeeds with regards to passing times of the weather phenomenon.  This has been updated in 10.0.  The documentation for the web service has been further updated to better document how to specify a mach speed in your briefing request.
• Multipart Volcanic Ash Advisories should now appear in a NGB Briefing Type response
• Those that are working or will be working on utilizing the push notification web services – the expected notification response has been the JSON string {‘success’ : ‘true’} but additional whitespace has not been permitted and the string had to match exactly.  This restriction has been lifted and the details are available in the web service documentation.
• SOAP-based Route Briefings will now properly calculate passing times for weather phenomenon.
• FRZ Detection for Alternate Destinations - Previously, alternate airports would cause a FRZ violation in a direct line from the alternate airport straight line to the route.  This has been fixed.  FRZ detection will only be triggered for alternate destinations if those destinations are inside the FRZ.
• Other stability and performance improvements