Virtual Airline Integration

StableApproach allows Virtual Airlines (VAs) to create custom aircraft profiles and receive approach/landing reports.

Setup for VA members

If you don't have StableApproach installed yet, see here: Installation
When you have StableApproach installed and running successfully:

1. In X-Plane, open Plugins->StableApproach->Settings
2. General tab: You'll find a text box to enter your VAs GitHub repository name, like: {va_username}/StableApproach
3. Apply + Save, a green OK should appear next to the text box, indicating a successful connection
4. You can close the settings window, everything else is automatic

Setup a new VA

At the moment, there are two main features for VAs supported by StableApproach:

• VA specific aircraft profiles
• Receiving reports from StableApproach

Both of these features can be used independently.
For example, you might want to receive reports from your pilots, but don't want to have the hassle taking care of aircraft profiles. This can be set up using configuration files.

In general, configuration files and aircraft profiles are stored and managed on GitHub, for StableApproach itself, but also for virtual airlines.

1. To register a VA to be used with StableApproach, please create a free GitHub account for your VA. I recommend selecting your VA name as a username, since your members have to enter this username into StableApproach.
   In this documentation, I'll use {va_username} as the GitHub username of your account.
2. After registering an account, you need to create a FORK from this GitHub repository. A fork is basically a copy of a present repository.
   To create your own fork of the StableApproach config, simply press the Fork button on the top right of this page.
3. The site which opens is your fork, at the top left, it should show:
   {va_username}/StableApproach
forked from Clamb94/StableApproach\
4. Different VAs may support different features of StableApproach. Those features are defined in the plugin_version.json
   See below for explanation of this file
   
   Note: Your fork contains at least two so-called "branches", called MAIN and BETA.
   These are basically two independent versions of all files. When using a beta version of StableApproach (e.g. 1.2.0-beta.4), it will use the files within your BETA branch. Stable-releases of StableApproach (e.g. 1.2.0) will use the MAIN branch of your fork.
   There may be an additional ALPHA fork, this one is only used for internal testing and can be ignored.

plugin_version.json

As different VAs may support different StableApproach features, each VA can define it own settings within the plugin_version.json file within their own fork. This file is loaded when StableApproach launches and is used to activate/deactivate certain StableApproach features. It's parsed as pretty simple JSON and should be easy to edit. You, as an VA, can edit those values within the "va" section:

report_server.enabled: false or true. Disable or enable sending of landing reports to your VA server. See below what is required to set this up

aircraft_profiles.use_custom: false or true. true = Uses the VAs aircraft profiles (if available) located in the aircraftConfigs folder in your fork.
aircraft_profiles.revert_to_default: false or true. true = If there is no profile available for this aircraft in your aircraftConfigs folder, it will try downloading the "official" StableApproach profile for this aircraft

VA aircraft profiles

In case your VA uses other stabilized approach criteria as those defined by default within StableApproach, you can offer your own profiles to your members. Make sure to set va.aircraft_profiles.use_custom in the plugin_version.json to true. StableApproach will then use the profiles provided within your own fork.

Receive reports

StableApproach can send the generated report to any serer of your choice, allowing it to be integrated into your VAs management/reporting system.

Special thanks to @FatihKoz for his integration into phpVMS v7.
If your VA is using phpVMS v7, make sure to check out his integration for StableApproach.

If you want to receive reports on your own VA management system, that's possible as well!
StableApproach sends the report as an HTTPS POST request, formatted as JSON, to any server of your choice.
Feel free to contact me on Discord for more details :)