Knowledge Base

Category: Product development

  • Searching for a saved search

    This is a sneak peek at an upcoming feature, due to be released later this month (September).

    On the homepage, you can currently search for and launch an aircraft profile or a company profile. But if you want to launch a saved search, you have to navigate to the Saved Search page. In the next release (assuming testing is successful), we’re adding a third search box on the homepage. This will search all saved searches (yours, those shared with you, and those created by FlightGlobal). The results dropdown will show the owner of the saved search, as well as the relevant section.Continue reading

  • Release Notes v8.15

    Features added and bugs fixed in this release:

    • Aircraft family
    • Operator Groups
    • Serial Number data in export incorrectly formatted

    Aircraft Family

    In this release, we have added another level to the aircraft hierarchy, i.e. Aircraft Family. This sits between Manufacturer and Type. You will find Aircraft Family wherever the aircraft hierarchy is available e.g. columns, filters, groups etc.Continue reading

  • Product Maintenance

    At 14:30 UK time (09:30 ET, 06:30 PDT, 21:30 HKT) on Wednesday 23rd August there will be a small disruption to Fleets Analyzer while an upgrade is in progress.

    Extent of the disruption

    Starting at around 14:30, both the Quick Profile Search (QPS) and Quick Filter Search (QFS) will be unavailable, over the following 1hr, both the QFS and QPS will start to populate with values, by the end of the hour, both should be fully populated.Continue reading

  • MSN formatting in Excel

    In July this year, we discovered a bug in the MSN column of the Fleets Analyzer export. The column was formatted as “number” and therefore any preceding zeros were being stripped away e.g. 00123 would become 123. A fix was put in place and included in the release on 27th July. Unfortunately, the fix was not satisfactory and caused further issues for our users e.g VLOOKUP no longer worked on cells that contained an MSN.

    A new fix was developed where we forced the cell to have the format of “General”, this is identical to how the column is formatted in the existing exports from Ascend Fleets. It’s worth noting, however, that Excel will continue to show the “The number in this cell is formatted as text or preceded by an apostrophe” message against cells that Excel considers to contain a numeric value, and, selecting the cell, then clicking in the formula bar, and then selecting a cell (any cell) will result in Excel converting the text to a number, and stripping out any preceding zeros, this a feature of Excel.

    The updated fix is due to go live this Wednesday (23rd August). I would personally like to apologise for any inconvenience this issue has caused to our users.

  • Release Notes v8.14

    Features added and bugs fixed in this release:

    • Ascend Aircraft Class
    • Serial number data in Excel exports incorrectly formatted

    Ascend Aircraft Class

    The Aircraft Class filter option that is available in Ascend Fleets has now been made available in Fleets Analyzer. In addition to adding the filter, this is also available as a grouping option. The Ascend Aircraft Class differs from the existing Fleets Analyzer Market Grouping in that Fleets Analyzer defines the classifications down to sub-series level, whereas Ascend is less granular (down to Type level). Although the Fleets Analyzer solution is superior, there are many uses still dependent upon the Ascend version. For that reason, this feature has been added to Fleets Analyzer.Continue reading

  • Release Notes v8.12

    Features added during this release:

    • Aircraft Base Location
    • Minor Variant added to aircraft profile history grid

    Aircraft base location is described in a separate article.

    Minor Variant added to aircraft profile history grid

    On the History tab of individual aircraft profiles, we’ve added the Minor Variant column to the grid, so that you can see any changes to the minor variant caused by individual events within an aircraft’s history.

    Figure 1. Minor Variant column on the history tab of an individual aircraft profile (click to view full size).

     

  • Aircraft Base Location

    Based on requests from customers, we are pleased to announce we have released individual aircraft base locations for our business aviation and helicopter data sets.

    This new data point is based upon the airport or helipad where the individual aircraft is most frequently known to be operating. We have built and researched this data by speaking to operators and OEMs, using flight tracking software, and monitoring enthusiast sources.Continue reading

  • How we have improved the Export capability in Fleets Analyzer

    Exporting data is a key feature of any data tool, and this is true of Fleets Analyzer. When we designed the export feature we increased (compared to previous products) the limit on the number of exportable rows to 100,000 and placed no limit on the number of columns. We also made sure that the exported Excel file is an exact copy of the results grid, including the column order.

    What we didn’t have access to when designing the export solution for Fleets Analyser was data on the export habits of users of our previous products (ACAS and ASO Fleets). It’s clear now that we underestimated the frequency with which Fleets Analyzer users export data, and also the size of those exports.Continue reading

  • “Run search” button – questionnaire results

    We recently (March 2017) solicited feedback from users regarding the possibility of including a “Run search” button. At the moment, a search is initiated after each filter has been added via the Quick Filter Select (QFS).

    Why did we ask the question?

    There are two reasons why we were considering making this change:

    • We had received a request from a user who suggested we do so.
    • It would reduce the number of queries being sent to our servers, and therefore reduce the server load.

    The mock-up below shows how this could look if implemented. In the mock-up the selected filters are no longer in sync with the results (as a new filter has been added since the search was last run), so the results are “disabled”, and a “Run search” button has been added.

    Figure 1. A mock-up showing the “Run search” button (click image to view full size)

    Continue reading

  • Defining the age of an aircraft

    Defining age

    The age of an aircraft in Fleets Analyzer is defined as follows:

    • If the aircraft at the query date has the status “Retired” or “Written Off”, the aircraft age will be null (shown as “-” on detail grids).
    • In all other cases, the aircraft age will be the number of years between the query date and the Aircraft Start of Life Date.
    • The Aircraft Start of Life Date will be one of the following dates (in order of precedence, i.e. the first in the list that is available will be used), rounded nearest to one decimal place:
      • First Flight Date.
      • The earliest date the aircraft reached either status “In Service” or “Storage”.
    • If the Aircraft Start of Life Date is null, the aircraft age will be null (shown as “-” on detail grids) e.g. for aircraft with a status of “On order”.
    • If the Aircraft Start of Life Date is greater than the query date, the aircraft age will be null (shown as “-” on detail grids)

    Continue reading

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Welcome to the knowledge base

What you can expect to find here: tips for users to get the most out of Fleets Analyzer, tricks for power users who are already in the know, product updates including sneak peeks and new features, and news about new data sets and taxonomy changes.

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