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Procedures and Sites

The Procedures and Sites section includes individual help pages for the following topics:

Sites | Standard Procedures | VTOL Procedures | Advanced Procedures | Procedure Time

A Procedure defines an action that the aircraft executes. There are many procedure types that an aircraft can perform, though the exact selection of procedure types available is dependent on the currently selected site and the immediately previous procedure.

The first component of an Aircraft Mission Modeler procedure is the site. The site defines the location (excluding altitude) of the procedure and the types of procedures that are available to select. The exact relationship between the site location and the procedure is dependent on the specific procedure.

The second component of an Aircraft Mission Modeler procedure is the procedure itself. There are three groups of procedures - standard, VTOL, and advanced. Standard procedures are common flight procedures that have no dependency on other STK objects. VTOL procedures model vertical takeoff, hovering, translating, and vertical landing. Advanced procedures generally involve coordination with other STK objects.

Methodology Between Procedures

The methodology of the Enroute procedure is the default methodology used by Aircraft Mission Modeler when calculating a route between procedures, such as traveling from the end of the previous procedure to the beginning of a holding pattern.

Invalid Procedures

Aircraft Mission Modeler validates all procedures in a mission to ensure that it is physically possible to perform them in relation to one another. If you create a procedure or modify a performance model such that it invalidates the mission, a warning message will appear on the screen, and the invalid procedure and each of the procedures after it will be highlighted in red.

Point to Point procedures (Basic Point to Point, Enroute, and Terrain Following) have a greater co-dependency than other procedures that is worth noting. It is necessary for each point to point procedure to know something about the start of the next procedure, and this requires that a sequence of point to point procedures be calculated as one "super procedure". This in turn requires that all point to point procedures in the sequence be properly configured, because a single invalid procedure will cause all of the procedures in the sequence to become invalid. In particular, for Terrain Following procedures it is important to consider that when a sequence of Terrain Following procedures spans two or more mission phases, the Terrain Follow performance model must be selected for all phases or you will invalidate the entire sequence of Terrain Following procedures across all phases.

If your mission becomes invalidated, you will need to edit one or more procedures or performance models to reestablish the mission's validity. The Message Viewer will display more information about the specific nature of the invalidation. When troubleshooting invalid procedures, always pay close attention to the last procedure or phase you modified - don't immediately assume the first invalid procedure, sequentially, is where the problem lies!

Site - Procedure Compatibility

The following table displays the sites available to Aircraft Mission Modeler and which procedures are compatible with each.