Goose not passing flight plan to Foreflight if plan contains airports starting with "I"

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‘Talk to Goose’ will create a flight plan and pass it to Foreflight, but Foreflight will not accept the plan (“No Joy”) if it includes an airport with a 3-character designation that begins with “I”. For example…

  • Me: Hey, Goose. Create a flight plan.
  • Goose: Where are you taking off from?
  • Me: India Six Eight
  • Goose: Where are you going?
  • Me: Kilo Mike Whiskey Oscar
  • Goose: Flight plan created from “Key Sixty Nine to…” (I won’t type out the whole response)

Goose first displays “KI68 KMWO” in the Route field and then opens Foreflight in an attempt to pass this as the flight plan. However, Foreflight does not recognize “KI68” and displays a “No Joy. Unable to find: K168” message. (Foreflight will also show an error in the flight plan field if I try to manually enter “KI68”.) If I change the destination to another “I” airport, Goose will update the Route field accordingly but fail again to pass the amended flight plan to Foreflight. For example…

  • Me: Hey, Goose. Change destination to India Six Niner.
  • Goose: You have changed your destination to “Key Sixty Nine, Clermont County Airport.”

Goose first displays “KI68 KI69” in the Route field and then opens Foreflight in an attempt to pass this as the amended flight plan. However, Foreflight does not recognize “KI69” and now displays a “No Joy. Unable to find: K168. Unable to find: KI69” message.

:trophy: A piece of good news is that, when I cancel the flight plan containing “I” airports (using ‘Talk to Goose’) and create a new flight plan containing only “K” airports (also using ‘Talk to Goose’), Goose will successfully pass the new flight plan to Foreflight even though I have not yet acknowledged–pressed “OK” on–the “No Joy” message in Foreflight.

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Hey @PerryQuatro,

With your good description, I was able to reproduce your issue easily.

The “No Joy” message is something that FF throws, when the message can not be processed. An issue we per se have nothing to do with, as that happens on the EFB side of things. What we can do is, to change the message, so the recipient understands it. And we will! Here is some more context about this particular issue:

Unfortunately, that appears to happen with a few smaller airports, that do not have a standardised naming convention (like for example the ICAO 4 letter codes).

From a first analysis, I believe to have found the problem (and potential solution) to this issue.
Here’s my take:

If you are talking to Goose and only give it a three letter code (e.g. OSH), it assumes you mean the airport OSH within the US, hence adding a “k” behind the scenes.

FYI: [Not seeing that problem] We implemented it that way for two reasons:

  • to avoid confusion and/or different airports/destinations/waypoints, etc
  • to improve the voice recognition rate and eliminate false-positives, the added “K” get a unique match or throws an error.

Note: To follow along using the same airports, index CA, FL and WI

If you now were to “create a flight plan” via voice from “SZP” to “OXR”, Goose creates a flight plan from KSZP → KOXR and sends that information to your EFB (i.e. ForeFlight).

If you now tell Goose to change your origin to:

  • “India Six Eight”, Goose will again add a “K” to “I68” => “KI68”
  • “Lima Alpha Lima”, Goose adds “K” => “KLAL”
  • “O S H” => “KOSH”

Within Goose, this works just fine, because that’s our internal syntax. Some EFB providers such as ForeFlight, do not need/have/provide/understand the country identifier “K” in every context.

For testing purposes:
If you now change your flight plan within Goose manually (e.g. remove the “K” from “KI68”) it will update and should push the information “I68” to FF. This time With Joy :wink:

I understand that’s not what we want. I don’t want to promise this to be resolved in V6.1.4 but am confident that this will be addressed & fixed with the following update.
I do wanna brainstorm about the handling with my colleagues first, if we drop the “added K” completely or make it an optional setting. Either way, a solution is coming on a high priority!

Many thanks & Happy Landings

Mirko

3

Thanks @mh_flyhigh ! I’ll use the manual change to remove the “K” in the meantime.

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Just in case it’s helpful. Airports in the continental US, have a three or four-letter FAA identifier. Some of those airports (about 12%) also have an ICAO code beginning with K, usually followed by its three-letter FAA ID. But they never contain numbers. So you can be sure I68 would never be K168.

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