Operations
Introduction
As flight simulation enthusiast you are usually all
in one, which means you are your own dispatcher,
ground crew, captain and first flight officer.
As in real live also for
a simulator flight careful flight
preparation is essential. Flight preparation starts with route
planning, checking the observed and predicted
weather, and the performance and fuel calculation. There
are quite a lot of tools available
with the intention to support you in one or the other
way. Some try to support all aspects,
others are specialized for route planning or
performance calculations only. Some of them are
payware, others are free or available for a small
donation respectively. I do not pay so much
attention whether a tool is for free or not, the
important thing is that the tool enhances the
process of flight preparation with the focus on
professionalism and time saving.
IFR Route Planning
FP2FMC
For route planning I personally prefer FP2FMC and
FlightplanPro.
FP2FMC uses the
route generator
of rfinder, a well-known web
based route planning tool. FP2FMC has the option to save the flight plan in
booth FS9 and IVAO compatible format.
FP2FMC generated flight route from EGSS to EDDS
Click the icon to see FP2FMC full size.
FP2FMC needs the PMDG AIRAC-CYCLES from Navigraph for the final route calculation. You don't need to have installed PMDG for that, only the nav data has to be available in the required structure than PMDG would be installed.
Preview of an IVAO flight plan as stored in the
IVAO flight plan directory
I have installed the flight plan tools on my home office PC, so I can make the flight planning Independent of the flight simulator power-up status. The created flight plans are stored on a network storage devices and with start-up of the flight simulator the flight plans are automatically deployed to the IvAp and to the FS9 flight plan directories. The deploying process is performed by a small script which is executed during the FS9 startup phase.
During preflight preparation I load the FS9 compatible flight plan into the PM CDU (pressing twice the RTE button on the CDU) and the IVAO flight plan into IvAp.
Links:
FP2FMC:
http://volkerundgerd.de/fp2fmc/fp2fmc.php
rfinder:
http://rfinder.asalink.net/free/
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