As I click and twist knobs to set up way points in the Barron GPS, I wonder if there is a way of doing a flight plan import in Airliners. I just use Simbrief and import it without question, but it suddenly occurred to me that Aircraft manufacturers would not be so pleased with people plugging random USB sticks etc into their FMS’s
How is it actually done, Many years ago I was involved with building display systems airports and they were understandably paranoid about anybody adding random code and were very keen to avoid having any method of importing data at all
Do you mean how we import flight plans in an airliner? Or did you mean how maintenance update the FMS and nav data? Either way, years ago it was done on special floppy disks, now there are specialized thumb drives/data loading devices for the average modern airliner - and from what I hear, it takes a very long time (up to an hour I’m told) for the nav cycle/other functions to properly upload and transfer data into the aircraft. I know certain things can be done wirelessly too. If you were referring to importing a flight plan, at least in the 737 we simply request the data in the CDU which recalls a plan number (flight plan identifier) from the Dispatch flight plan system. The FMC will check certain variables before allowing you to downlink the plan (such as registration, flight ID) then we confirm and proceed to verify everything has downloaded correctly.
I was thinking about the FMS import, i guess the FMS code is bespoke, so a random hacking the WI-fi is unlikely 
THankyou for you anwer. I don’t feel so bad about just Importing Simbrief !!!
We had to open the case and enable the BIOS and connect an internal Drive I am sure it would be done differently now !!
Could be requested via datalink in some airlines, company routes could also be stored directly in the FMS and retrieved.