Briefing

Overview

There are two general types of briefings, Route Briefings and Area Briefings.  Route briefings provide legal briefing information along a specified route of flight.  An example of a command to get a route briefing is below.  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 --header "Authorization: Basic bWVAbGV0bWVpbi5jb206TXlQYXNzdzByZCE=" --data "type=DOMESTIC&flightRules=VFR&aircraftIdentifier=TTTDEMO&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" "https://[Operational or Test Environment URL]/rest/FP/routeBriefing" -v

The simplest briefing we support is called the SIMPLE Briefing Type.  The output of the briefing text has the following conventions:

Note that both Route and Area Briefings provide support for plaintext translation.  This makes the typically cryptic 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).