Old booked flights block significant parts of the fleet

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Today 7:06 PM
Hi Guys!

I hope, this matter was not already discussed in another topic, at least i did not found one.

In the past view weeks, i observe the phenomenon, that sometimes all or nearly all of the most commonly used charter planes (B737, B738, A320, currently the DHC6-300 as well) are booked and so not available for other pilots. First i thought, we are so many pilots now that we should think about increasing parts of the charter fleet. But then i saw, that many of these bookings are more than 5 days old and were not yet reported to release the aircraft for booking again. In german we would call these bookings "Karteileichen" - dead files (... ok, i should stop translating such nonsense ;) )

Of course it happens, that a pilot books a flight, then things in real life happen that keep the pilot from flying but makes him forget to unbook the flight (happened to me as well in may, unfortunately with our very only B77F :( ). No big deal about it, that was solved by automatic unbooking when the flight was not reported within three days (at least i think that this was an automated feature).
As you can read above, this automated feature seems not to work for a few weeks now.

I don't know if it is a big deal for the admin of the booking system to take a look over it? It would improve the availability of our fleet (of course i can fake a A321 charter with a B738, but landing in TNCS with anything else than a Twin Otter :? )

Greetings, Tom
 
Karteileichen => removed! :D

You are right, Thomas. This used to be an automated feature and still is and also was supposed to be. When I checked the system, following your post, I found that the cron job wasn't running as it should. Since I couldn't find a plausible reason I called our ISP and it turned out that the crontab manager on the server was bugged. So, for once, not my fault.
;)
They fixed it and it seems to be working fine again. Unfortunately this had also affected our hourly METAR and TAF updates. Now the weather data should be up to date, as well.
As I'm not often checking these things (apologies!) I didn't notice. So thank you very much for reporting this, Tom!
Greatly appreciated if people don't just silently complain but actually post anything that goes wrong ;)
 
Hi Peter!

Wow, that was a very fast response! Thank you very much!

About the metar- and taf-updates:
I made a short test-booking. When i hit the button "update briefing" on booking the flight, there appears a nice and smart decoded metar report below the flightplan part, but when i later hit the button "submit to flightplan", the message "Sorry! No weather at the moment, due to technical problems. Please read the forum for further announcements." appears in red letters - strange.

I would say no need for you or anyone else to hurry on this item, i normally get my weather reports via squawkbox, activesky oder en.allmetsat.com. But somehow the system seems not to know what to do with the metar-report it generated shortly before.

Anyway, thanks very much once more for "realigning" the booking system :)

Greetings, Tom
 
Thanks again, Tom! I really appreciate your help! Found another bug in the weather module, caused by a conflict between php versions. Due to this we had no TAF reports at all since the web server was switched.

The module has been fixed now (hopefully so!), so that briefing and flightplan should reflect the correct METAR and TAF reports. .... fingers crossed ;)
 
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