Standard CPDLC#1665
Make CPDLC according the worldwide standard, so all aircraft developers can implement this standard one time and you are compatible with everyone. Now every aircraft developer has to implement your special rules which not all will do.
Agreed
Heyo! Our CPDLC implementation follows Hoppie’s general message format, albeit not GOLD, this has been successfully supported by all major aircraft developers for a number of years in the simulator community.
We do not have any ‘special rules’ differently to what is already expected by the majority of aircraft developers and in most cases a small configuration change is required to get CPDLC working with BATC. We made this decision as currently no aircraft developer on the market (bar I believe PMDG) supports GOLD standards for CPDLC and we wanted to get CPDLC in the hands of BATC users as quickly as possible without waiting a considerable length of time for aircraft developers to update their avionics to comply with a GOLD standard system.
We have not ruled out improving CPDLC integration to align more closely on the backend with the GOLD standard - it’s a very robust and powerful standard that would benefit all developers in the industry. However, this CPDLC system was in planning with the major aircraft developers over 6 months ago and no concerns were raised at the time around our integration, we are a small team and with VFR on the horizon we have had to shift focus elsewhere at this time.
For the end user, the effect of this integration is largely the same regardless of choosing this path or a fully GOLD compliant technical system - where possible all of our CPDLC messages that are sent to the plane use the same language and response codes that can found in the GOLD standard, found here -> https://www.caa.co.uk/media/2cdpufa4/gold_2edition.pdf - changing our system would primarily be a backend change where the data sent between the plane and BATC is more compliant with GOLD on a technical scale, requiring massive refactors to every single aircraft developers avionics, rather then what the pilot themselves can see on their screen, this does not mean a technically compliant system should not be the goal but it leaned into our decision of not pushing a real world standard that most developers do not support, especially when we had no pushback on the design of this system when first proposed to the major aircraft developers we approached.
As it stands, any developer that supports Hoppie will be able to use BeyondATC with not much change in code - we’ve already had most major developers integrate BATC with their CPDLC system and more to come - this ease of integration for existing developers was how it was designed, if such an existing integration didn’t already exist - we’d have designed our integration around GOLD - any idea that we have special made up CPDLC rules or our own standard isn’t the case.
Hope that clears things up!
TLDR: We follow Hoppie’s message format, any aircraft dev supporting Hoppie can support BATC, we have not made up our own standard, we have not ruled out making a GOLD standard CPDLC but we’re a small team and other priorities need to be worked on before we come back to a system that was designed and sent to the major aircraft developers in early summer 2025, months before rollout - with no concerns raised by any of them at that time.
