FSExport
Flight Simulator 2004
ARINC Export

Flight Simulator Export (or FSExport as its known) is a small internal FS9 (2004) module which allows Flight Simmers to capture their flight in an industry standard format (ARINC file). The captured data can then be used by Flight Operation Quality Assurance (FOQA) software as used by the airline industry. Such pieces of software include FDM360, BAFDA, AirFASE & GRAF, for former of which, I seem to spend most of my life working on, on behalf of my employer FlightDataPeople.com


Basically, FSExport can be used generate data that can be analysed by "real world" FOQA software which many airlines operate.

Because FSExport is an internal FS9 Module, it is quick and invisible to the average simmer. All you see, upon exiting Flight Simulator, is an ARINC file with the extension .FLD in the FSExport subfolder of Flight Simulator.

Maybe one day I will get round to updating this for X-Plane and Flight Simulator 2020 but right now, I'm enjoying simming (especially in VR!) too much! Oh and waiting for the FS2020 SDK to become a little more mature!


Performance:

Originally I used the FSUIPC product to help capture the data but while this gave me access to more parameters, it was quite slow which meant getting data sampled 8 times a second (that's a flight-sim second not a real second) was a little dodgy - especially at say 8x simulation rate !!!

The new internal version of FSExport (v1.4 onward) is now able to capture the full subframe (including some parameters at 8 samples per second) even with a simulation rate of 32x - which equals about 1 sample every 15 milliseconds, or one simulated subframe 32 times per real second!


Testing:

Testing of FSExport has been mostly performed on my development machine, An AMD64 3400+, 1Gb DDR400 RAM, GeForce FX5950 etc. (wow how long ago was that a good spec!?) On today's high spec machines, I wouldn't expect the impact of FSExport to be noticeable, however on slower machines it may be.

Having said that, whilst I havent personally tested it on a "slow" machine, others have, without FSExport noticeably slowing down Fligh Simulator - so maybe I've done something right.

 

Download FSExport
Note: FSExport Setup requires
Windows Installer 2.0

The installation package includes the FSExport module and a GRAF compatible LFD (Logical Frame layout Definition file).

NOTE: I provide no guarantees for FSExport, the data output or its stability.
Please contact me by email or on my forums if you have find any bugs, let me know and I will do my best to fix them!

 

And here is an example of the end result:


The software shown in these screenshots is a rather old version of GRAF (v8.4) (c) 1994-2005 Teledyne Controls Flight Data Company (my former employer).


NOTE: The pictures shown above are examples of how the data produced by FSExport can be viewed. However, the screenshots are extracted from commercial software which is rather expensive to purchase and therefore not available to the general simulation community :(