How much oxygen do you need to make sure you’re not only legal for a planned flight but can also safely provide for crew and passengers in the event of a diversion? Aeronautical Data Systems (ADS), based in Upper Saddle River, N.J., has developed Web-based software that helps answer this question easily and comprehensively.
ADS’s E-Ops (electronic oxygen planning service) software requires an Internet browser that runs a recent version of Java. I tried E-Ops using Google’s Chrome browser, and that worked fine. E-Ops is running as a beta test program for now using a Dassault Falcon 900EX for the calculations. After users log onto the ADS Web site and click on the E-Ops button, a small window pops up with three data fields, for the user ID, password and N-number. A larger window then appears, with fields for aircraft type and tail number (already filled out because the beta uses only this one airplane), flight altitude (which is really diversion altitude), number of crew, number of passengers, equal time point (ETP, to suitable alternate), number of oxygen bottles and size, crew mask type, passenger regulator and passenger mask PSU (the last four are already filled out). The flight altitude field doesn’t let the user input anything higher than the maximum diversion altitude.
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