Aerofly Startgerät

The Auxiliary Power Unit for Aerofly Flight Simulator 4: Improving the main menu with meaningful units and import functionality for weather and flight plans.

Introducing the Aerofly Startgerät as an extended main menu for Aerofly Flight Simulator 4, adding multiple additional options to set-up your flight:

• Change aircraft, livery as well as set-up fuel and payload.
• Time & date
  • Manually set time and date in UTC
  • Manually set time and date for the current departure airport time zone
  • Synchronize the time & date in Aerofly FS4 to to the current time & date.
• Weather
  • Change weather with settings in feet, statute miles and other meaningful units.
  • Import weather for given time, date and departure airport via Aviation Weather Center API. Weather can be imported for up to two weeks in the past, for almost any bigger airport around the globe.
  • Read weather from METAR string
• Flight plans
  • Import flight plans as well as aircraft, airline, time, date and weather settings from SimBrief via API.
  • Import a flight plan from local import directory. See below for supported flight plan file formats.
  • Export a flight plan to a local export directory for later re-import. See below for supported flight plan file formats.

All off these changes are directly written to Aerofly's main.mcf main configuration file and are available on the next start-up of Aerofly FS 4.

In this manner the Aerofly Startgerät combines the capabilities of the Aerofly Wettergerät (but for multiple operating systems) and the Aerofly Missionsgerät (but directly injecting the new flight plan without any extra steps in-between).

The Aerofly Startgerät is a stand-alone application, and is not directly integrated into Aerofly FS 4.

Supported flight plan file formats:

| File Format / API | Import | Export | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | :----: | :----: | | Aerofly FS main.mcf | ✅ | ✅ | | Aerofly FS 4 tmc custom missions | ✅ | ✅ | | Microsoft FS 2020 / 2024 pln | ✅ | | | X-Plane 11 / 12 fms | ✅ | | | Garmin / Infinite Flight fpl | ✅ | | | GeoJSON | | ✅ | | Keyhole Markup Language (KML) | | ✅ | | Markdown Text File (for mission briefing) | | ✅ | | SimBrief API | ✅ | | | Aviation Weather Center METAR API | ✅ | |

Installation & Instructions

The Aerofly Startgerät comes in multiple versions. Refer to the different instruction on how to install and use these:

• The Aerofly Startgerät Graphical User Interface (GUI) app:
  A desktop app with a grahpical user interface (GUI).
• The Aerofly Startgerät Command Line Interface (CLI) Tool:
  A terminal application for automatisations, e.g. importing SimBrief flight plans or importing weather information.
• The Aerofly Startgerät Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server:
  Allow an AI / LLM to create new flight plans & flight settings via this MCP server.

Caveats and notes

[!WARNING] Aerofly FS 4 must not be started while using the Aerofly Startgerät. Settings generated by the Aerofly Startgerät will only be read by Aerofly FS 4 on start-up of the simulator.

• Importing flight plans almost certainly will require to set-up the starting location of you aircraft in Aerofly FS 4, as the parking positions of aircraft are unknown.
• Importing flight plans almost certainly will require to set-up the runways you want to use in Aerofly FS 4, as the runway IDs are unknown.
• Importing of SIDs and STARs is not possible, so you will also need to add these manually in Aerofly FS 4.
• On importing take into account Aerofly's oudated AIRAC 1301 navigation database.
• The Aerofly Startgerät is able to alter the date and a third cloud layer, which both are not editable in Aerofly FS 4.
• The mapping of aircrafts & airlines from Simbrief import relies on the correct ICAO code of the aircraft being chosen.

See also the instructions on how to import flight plans.

The SimBrief API workflow

Enter your SimBrief username and click Fetch. Startgerät automatically injects your active/latest flight plan directly into Aerofly FS 4 in less then a second.

Important Navigation Data Note: SimBrief utilizes the modern AIRAC database 2503 for free users, whereas Aerofly FS 4 relies on a legacy internal AIRAC 1301. Because of this data gap, roughly up to 5% of modern waypoints might be automatically dropped during import. This is completely normal and rarely impacts standard routes. You may simply need to adjust your terminal procedures (SID/STAR) inside the native Aerofly menu before clicking "Fly".

Oceanic Routing (NATs/PACOTs): Aerofly cannot parse compressed track designators (e.g., NAT U). To fix this, take the expanded latitude/longitude coordinates manually from SimBrief's map above, write them by hand into the route text box, re-validate the entire route, generate the Flgihtplan and then fetch the plan via Startgerät, which takes literally seconds to do.

Instructions contributed by AeRodri from RealFlightOps

Other flight planning software workflow

Create your route on any flight planning software, and crucially, manually select AIRAC Cycle 1301 to perfectly align with Aerofly's native database.

Technical stuff

This projects uses the public APIs of the Aviation Weather Center and SimBrief. The usage of these APIs may be restricted or blocked on your local computer.

Status

For a detailed history of changes, see CHANGELOG.md.

Legal stuff

Author: Frank Boës 2026

Copyright & license: See LICENSE.txt

This tool is NOT affiliated with, endorsed, or sponsored by IPACS GbR. As stated in the LICENSE.txt, this tool comes with no warranty and might damage your files.

This software complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as it does not collect nor transmits any personal data to third parties, but for the usage of the Aviation Weather Center API and the SimBrief API. For their data protection statement you might want to check their terms of service.