Three messages reach you on the way into the hub: the Connex Info with the connections off your flight, the Arrival PIL — the Passenger Information List — with who is about to miss theirs, and the cost index advisory on whether flying faster would buy any of it back. All three land in your eDesk. This page explains what arrives, when, and what every column means.
Nothing here is triggered by a button. You confirm the final passenger count before off-block, and from then on the messages arrive by themselves, timed against your reported times — not against the plan. A flight that pushed back forty minutes late would otherwise get every message forty minutes too early.
Two things are worth knowing up front. The connection board is built once — about three hours before arrival, or as soon as you are airborne if the whole flight is shorter than that — and everything below is worked out from it. And it all reaches you in the same place: your eDesk. Nothing on this page is sent to the aircraft.
If your destination closes for the night and you are running against it, the alert goes with the early block — at cruise, or half an hour after take-off — and the three-hour rule does not apply to it: the earlier you know, the cheaper every recovered minute is. It says nothing about connections either — it is about the aircraft and the clock.
All of them land in the same place — your eDesk — and every time below is counted from your reported times, not from the plan. The board itself is not one of them: it is what the first two rows are built from.
| Message | Due | What has to be true |
|---|---|---|
| Connex Info | At cruise, else take-off + 30 — never more than 3 h before arrival | A published board for your arrival, and your confirmed PAX number |
| Cost index advisory | At cruise, else take-off + 30 — on a long flight, hours before the table | A reason worth acting on: connections, curfew, duty time, next rotation |
| Fuel check request | The same moment | No usable fuel reading yet, and a reason in sight |
| Curfew alert | The same moment — no 3 h rule | The destination closes before you would be on stand |
| Next leg advisory | With the Connex Info | A next leg with its own OFP, from 10 min of carried-over delay |
| Arrival PIL | 15 min before top of descent, from your OFP — else 35 min before landing | A published board; without one there is nothing to list |
| PAX List | On request, without delay | Your final PAX number confirmed |
A line on an MCDU is 24 characters wide. That is not a style choice, it is the screen — and it is the width the board is built in. The full table with transfer passengers and fuel needs 36; it would wrap into running text in the cockpit, exactly where it is supposed to help. The wide one is the one you read: it reaches your eDesk, set like a printout. Both are below, so you can see what the extra twelve columns buy.
CONNEX INFO ETA 1607Z ARR GATE Z54 ARR POS A54B FLTNBR DES GATE ETD LTOP LH1042 TXL A26 1640 1620 LH620 DXB B44 1650 1600 4Y52 MBJ - 1700 1610 LH622 DXB B48 1930 1840 ACTUAL PAX 180 TRANSFER PAX 35 ACCDF CI REACH 320KG
The ruler above is the point: every line fits, header included. Add one column and it stops fitting — and a wrapped table is unreadable on an MCDU.
CONNEX INFO ETA 1607Z ARR GATE Z54 ARR POS A54B FLTNBR DEST PAX GATE ETD LTOP ACCDF LH1042 TXL 9 A26 1640 1620 140 LH620 DXB 16 B44 1650 1600 320 4Y52 MBJ 4 - 1700 1610 95 LH622 DXB 6 B48 1930 1840 60 ACTUAL PAX CONFIRMED 180 ACCDF UNIT KG / IN CI REACH 320 ADVISORY ONLY - NO CLEARANCE
Same four connections, two more columns: how many of your passengers are on each, and what each one is worth in fuel. The numbers point at the columns explained below.
Four of them you know from any departure board. Two are the reason this board exists at all.
| Column | What it is | Where it comes from | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | FLTNBR | The onward flight your passengers are booked on. | The arrival Connex board |
| 2 | DEST | Where that flight goes. | The board |
| 3 | PAX | How many of your passengers are transferring onto it. | An operations estimate |
| 4 | GATE | Its departure gate. A dash means none published yet. | The board |
| 5 | ETD | Its scheduled off-block, in Zulu. | The board |
| 6 | LTOP | Latest Time On Parking. Be on stand by this time and the connection still works. It is the onward ETD minus the airport's minimum connecting time and the walk between the two gates — Frankfurt has its own gate-to-gate table, elsewhere a terminal change simply adds a supplement. | Calculated |
| 7 | ACCDF | Acceptable Delta Fuel. What it would be economically defensible to burn extra in order to save that one connection. It is a budget, not an instruction. | An operations estimate |
It counts only the connections that are actually at risk at your current delay and still reachable by flying faster. A connection that is comfortably made needs no extra fuel, and one that is already lost cannot be bought back. In the example that is the 320 kg of LH620 — the other three are fine.
At night, at an airport without a feed, or simply before the board is published, there is no Connex Info at all. That is how it reads in real operations: for a late flight there are no connections, and then nothing is printed. The arrival gate is unaffected — it comes with the telex either way.
If the telex already carried the full table, that is the message. Only when the numbers could not be attached does a separate Connex Info follow — same columns, one channel later.
PIL is the Passenger Information List. The Connex board answers “which connections exist”; the PIL answers “what do I say to the cabin”. It arrives 15 minutes before your top of descent — taken from the OFP, so a long descent gets the same head start as a short one — and is built like the real thing: four blocks, in the order you read them out. Where the plan names no descent point, it falls back to 35 minutes before landing.
The printout itself never spells the name out, and that is deliberate: it is modelled on the real template, and the real one does not either.
ARRIVAL PIL LH441 EDDF LAST UPDATE 1544Z ETA 1607Z ARR GATE Z54 ARR POS A54B CGI FLTNBR DEST ETD GTE RMKS LH1042 TXL 1640 A26 LH620 DXB 1650 B44 C 4Y52 MBJ 1700 LH622 DXB 1930 B48 C CRITICAL END OF CGI HUB CONNEX FLTNBR DST ETD MIN PAX LH1042 TXL 1640 13 9 LH620 DXB 1650 -7 16 RBKD LH622 1930 B48 4Y52 MBJ 1700 3 4 LH622 DXB 1930 153 6 PERSONAL REBOOKING INFO SEAT STS DEST FLIGHT REBOOKED 12A HON DXB LH620 > LH622 1930 B48 14C SEN DXB LH620 > LH622 1930 B48 27F MEMBER DXB LH620 > LH622 1930 B48 31A NONE DXB LH620 > LH622 1930 B48 TRANSFER PAX 35 OF 180 MIN = MINUTES BETWEEN EXPECTED ON BLOCK AND LTOP SEATS AND PAX DISTRIBUTION ARE OPS ESTIMATES. END OF PIL
The same figures the ground staff are working from, with the time they were last updated.
The connections sorted by departure time — the cabin reads this like a departure board. C marks a connection that is critical at the moment. G appears only if an earlier board really did name a different gate; an invented G sends passengers across the terminal for nothing.
MIN is the minutes between your expected on-block and that connection's LTOP — negative means it is gone at the current estimate. Underneath a lost connection sits RBKD — rebooked — with the next real departure to the same destination, taken from the same board. If there is none, it says so rather than inventing one.
With 160 passengers the full list would be unreadable, and only the rebookings matter for the announcement. Twelve cases at most; beyond that it points you at the PAX List.
They come from a generic seat grid for the type, not from your add-on. If the aircraft you are flying has a different layout, the add-on and its loadsheet are the truth — the PIL says so in its own last lines.
The long version, and the only one you ask for yourself. Once the final passenger count is confirmed, a PAX LIST RQST button appears in Preflight; it delivers a full simulated manifest to the eDesk — every passenger with status, cabin, seat, destination and connection.
PAX LIST / SIMULATED FLIGHT DLH441 EDDM-EDDF ACTUAL PAX CONFIRMED 180 ID STS C SEAT DEST CONNEX PAX0001 HON F 02A DXB LH620 PAX0002 SEN C 04C TXL LH1042 PAX0003 MEMBER E 14C DXB LH620 PAX0004 NONE E 27F EDDF LOCAL PAX0005 MEMBER E 31A DXB LH620 … CONNECTING FLIGHTS FROM THE ARRIVAL CONNEX BOARD. NAMES, STATUS AND SEATS ARE SIMULATED. SEATS USE A GENERIC TYPE GRID; THE ADD-ON AIRCRAFT IS THE TRUTH. USE THE ADD-ON/LOADSHEET SEAT IF IT DIFFERS FROM THIS LIST.
| STS | Status: HON, SEN, FTL, MEMBER or NONE. |
| C | Cabin: F, C or E. |
| DEST | Where that passenger is actually going. |
| CONNEX | The onward flight — or LOCAL for anyone whose journey ends at your destination. |
Requested at the gate, the list has no connections yet — the arrival board does not exist that early, and it says so at the bottom. Request it a second time in the cruise and the connections are filled in.
A high cost index buys time with fuel. The advisory works out whether that trade is worth making on this flight. Without a reason to act it stays silent; with one it always answers, even when the answer is that speed cannot recover this. How the number is calculated stays in the house — what follows is what the message tells you and how to read it.
Not a rule of thumb, and not one aircraft's table applied to the rest of the fleet. The curve was measured — from real flight plans, flown across the whole fleet.
And the finding that keeps the model small: the strongest number does not come from the model at all — it comes from your own flight plan, which already carries its own sensitivity for exactly the aircraft, weight, route and wind you are flying today.
OPS INFO / DELAY RECOVERY DRIVER: 1 CONNECTION AT RISK / 16 PAX DELAY 24 MIN PLANNED CI 20 RECOMMENDED CI 64 (+44) TIME RECOVERED 7 MIN EXPECTED BURN + 420 KG USABLE SURPLUS 980 KG EFFECTIVE ACCDF 320 KG RECOMMENDATION RESOLVES THE DRIVER. FUEL BASIS: LATEST COCKPIT FUEL CHECK FINAL RESERVE, ALTERNATE, CONTINGENCY AND EDTO FUEL PROTECTED. ADVISORY ONLY - COMMANDER RETAINS FINAL AUTHORITY.
| DRIVER | Why anyone is suggesting this. “Two connections are wobbling” and “you land after the curfew” are completely different urgencies, so the message names its reason instead of just showing numbers. |
| DELAY | How late you currently are. |
| PLANNED CI | The cost index your OFP was built with. |
| RECOMMENDED CI | What to set instead, with the difference in brackets. |
| TIME RECOVERED | What that is expected to win back. |
| EXPECTED BURN | What it costs in fuel. |
| USABLE SURPLUS | What you have available above everything that is protected. |
| EFFECTIVE ACCDF | Only on connection cases: what saving them is worth. |
The advisory never fires “because you are late”. It fires because being late costs something specific, and that something has a name.
The only driver with a measured budget: the ACCDF of the connections that are genuinely at risk.
A diversion costs a multiple of any tank of fuel, so this one may spend the whole usable surplus.
The FDP — flight duty period — is a legal edge: a broken one ends the rotation, not just the flight.
A late follow-on flight propagates through the rest of the day.
Three honest limits, all of them written into the message itself.
Across every measured type the largest recovery is around ten to eleven minutes. Beyond roughly that much delay, speed does not catch it up — and the message says NOT SUFFICIENT with the shortfall instead of promising a rescue.
Final reserve, alternate, contingency, EDTO and any extra the commander loaded stay locked. Only fuel above all of that can become recovery fuel.
Under ATC regulation the speed would have no effect, and on a weather diversion the detour is the problem, not the speed. In both cases no recommendation goes out.
Without a reading from the tanks the calculation falls back on the OFP's planned landing fuel — a number from before departure. Recommending several hundred kilograms on that basis is exactly the advice nobody wants, so when a driver appears and no check is on file, OPS asks for one first and the advisory follows afterwards. The message tells you which basis it used in its FUEL BASIS line.
If the delay carries into your next flight, a separate Next leg fuel advisory arrives before landing rather than after it — the extra fuel has to be ordered while the aircraft is being refuelled, not once it is airborne. It works with the delay that actually transfers, not the one you have now: a generous turnaround often swallows the lot.
Everything on this page follows from these. There is no switch to arm, and nothing to answer.
Before off-block, in LHV Ops → eDesk → Preflight. The add-on aircraft is the truth about seats and weights — SimBrief profiles are a performance variant, not a reliable seating plan. flySmart! reminds you with a single line until it is done.
eDesk → Preflight → Final PAX ReportIn the Flightplan tab of flySmart!, at the waypoint you are passing. It is what turns the advisory from a plan estimate into a real one — and it is useful on its own.
flySmart! → FlightplanThe button sits where the confirm button was. Ask once at the gate for the manifest, and again after the Connex Info if you want the connections filled in.
eDesk → Preflight → PAX LIST RQSTEvery message on this page ends the same way, and it means it: the commander decides. LTOP, ACCDF and the recommended cost index are operations advice, worked out from estimates — weather, ATC and the loadsheet outrank all of them.
Three things have to line up: an OFP for this flight, your final PAX number confirmed before off-block, and a connection board published for your arrival. Without the OFP nothing is worked out at all — the whole calculation rests on it. Without the PAX number there are no transfer figures, so no Connex Info and no PIL. Without a board there are no connections to report; the cost index advisory can still reach you, because a curfew, your duty time or the next rotation are reason enough on their own.
That is the design. Confirming starts the calculation quietly; the results arrive later as eDesk messages, timed against your reported times — the first of them once you are in the cruise, or half an hour after take-off if no flight state is available.
Then no connection board was published for your arrival — at night, at an airport without a feed, or simply not yet. Nothing is invented to fill the gap. The arrival gate still reaches you, because it travels with the telex rather than with the table.
It is not sent to the aircraft. It is built at the three-hour mark, in the MCDU width it has always had, and what it contains reaches you as the Connex Info in your eDesk — with the transfer figures and ACCDF added, in the wide format that needs 36 columns.
Then there was no connection board for your arrival — and without one there is nothing to list. A short flight is no longer a reason: the PIL used to be dropped when it fell within three quarters of an hour of the Connex Info, and that rule is gone. It now comes on every flight that has a board, if necessary close behind the Connex Info. The two say different things — the Connex Info how tight it is, the PIL what you read to the cabin.
Passenger Information List. The name comes from the real datalink
template this is modelled on, and it is why the printout says only ARRIVAL PIL —
the original does not spell it out either.
Latest Time On Parking — be on stand by then and the connection still works. It is the onward departure time minus the minimum connecting time for that airport and the walk between the two gates. Frankfurt has its own gate-to-gate table; elsewhere a terminal change adds a supplement.
Acceptable Delta Fuel: what it would be economically defensible to burn extra to save that one connection. It is a budget, not an instruction, and it is an operations estimate.
Because it is not the sum. It counts only the connections that are at risk at your current delay and still reachable by flying faster. Connections you will make comfortably need nothing, and ones already lost cannot be bought back.
At the current estimate, yes — you would reach the stand after its LTOP. That is why the line underneath carries RBKD with the next real departure to the same destination. It can still turn around if you make up time.
The gate changed since an earlier board. It only ever appears when a previous board genuinely named a different gate — nobody wants passengers sent across a terminal on a guess.
They come from a generic seat grid for the type. Your add-on and its loadsheet are the truth; the list says so itself in its closing lines.
That stays in the house. What is public is the shape of it: the flight plan you loaded already carries its own sensitivity — what a very low and a very high cost index would each have cost on that same run — and the recommendation is worked out from that, against the fuel you actually have spare.
Several honest reasons: being late may not cost anything specific on this flight, speed may not win enough to matter, there may be no usable surplus above the protected fuel, or you are under ATC regulation or a weather diversion — in both of those the speed is not what is holding you up.
Because the shortfall is worth knowing. Across every type measured, the largest recovery is around ten to eleven minutes; beyond that the message tells you how many minutes remain rather than pretending the problem is solved.
No. Final reserve, alternate, contingency, EDTO and any extra loaded by the commander are protected. Only fuel above all of that can ever be spent on recovery, and the message states that in its own last lines.
No. Every one of these messages is advisory and says so. The commander retains final authority, and weather, ATC and the loadsheet outrank all of it.
Without a reading the calculation uses the OFP's planned landing fuel — a figure from before departure. Recommending several hundred kilograms on that basis would be the wrong advice, so the request comes first and the advisory follows once the check is on file.
The same idea one flight ahead. It arrives before landing, because additional fuel has to be ordered while the aircraft is being refuelled. It works with the delay that actually transfers to the next leg, not the one you have right now — a long turnaround often absorbs it entirely.
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