Real-life flight planning

In a previous article, Paul Folbrecht said:
Heh. Point taken. Do it on the PC at home and there's no real need for
the Palm.

Ok, just one small plug for CoPilot (see
http://xcski.com/~ptomblin/CoPilot/), even though the other posters have
been doing it for me.

A few months ago I was coming back from Muskegeon. That's a long trip for
me, and since I'm flying club planes I haven't "calibrated" the fuel flow
exactly. So I like get on the ground after 3.5 hours, even though
theoretically I could probably get 4.5 hours out of the tanks. I'd done
the flight plan earlier, and put all the appropriate waypoints into
CoPilot. With no wind, I would be nudging my comfort zone, so I made sure
I had the Buffalo approach plates on my knee board on top of the Rochester
ones, and figured I might have to make a refueling stop in Buffalo.

That morning, I called up flight service from my motel room, and got the
weather and winds aloft. Plugging the winds aloft into CoPilot, and I
could see that it would still be 3.6 hours to Rochester, so I filed to
Buffalo. All the time aloft, I was watching the ETAs in CoPilot and
comparing them to reality, and found I was getting better winds than
forecast. I recalculated the winds, found I could make it to Rochester,
so I asked ATC for a diversion to Rochester, and went home.

--
Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
Usenet is a co-operative venture, backed by nasty people -
follow the standards.
-- Chris Rovers

Yep, Timmerman. I actually live just over the line into Racine county
right now, on 7 Mile Rd, which I'm sure you remember.

Good God, man -- Mary (my wife) lived on 7 Mile Rd (just west of Hwy 32)
when I first met her! I must have driven down that road a thousand times...

Small world!

Now go enjoy a Derango's pizza for me, have some perch at Dino's (on 16th
St.), and start your day off right with some pecan kringle from O&H bakery!

:-)
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

"Paul Folbrecht" wrote in message
ink.net...
| Wow, thanks a ton to everyone for all the replies so fast.
|
| A couple things:
|
| 1) I have used duats a lot for wx but not yet for planning.
|
| 2) I have a Garmin 295 GPS and I didn't even know it was possible to
| download route data to it. Damn, that is cool. Gonna have to read that
| manual.

You will like it a lot less once you have tried it.

Recently, Paul Folbrecht posted:

2) I have a Garmin 295 GPS and I didn't even know it was possible to
download route data to it. Damn, that is cool. Gonna have to read
that manual.

I also have a Garmin 295, and find it much easier to just enter the route
during planning.

Neil

Paul Folbrecht wrote in message hlink.net...
1. www.Aeroplanner.com has some really great on-line flight planning
stuff -- including the ability to print out sectionals with your course line
and 10-mile-ticks superimposed. They are fabulous on long trips, cuz
they're on notebook-sized paper and you just "flip" from one map to the
next. No "octopus arms" in the cockpit, fighting to fold a sectional!

Now that is cool- I had wondered if such software (that printed
sectionals with routes) was available and figured that it must be. This
I will have to check out.

FWIW, we tried it out and we didn't like it. I bought a month and
did several long trips (2-3 3 1/2 hr legs) and several short trips.
I deliberately set up the triptiks to be more pages and wider, so
that if we had to deviate or detour maybe we'd stay on the chart.

The problem we had is that even a reasonably straightforward
detour for afternoon t-storms took us off the edge of the triptik.
Strategic replanning for the return trip (the sort where you
wind up flying a totally different route due to wx systems) and
we might as well throw it out.

So I would say, if you try it make sure you have other charts,
at least WACs, to back up your planning.

Of course I suppose you could always just not deviate

Sydney




2. Destination Direct ( www.destdirect.com/ ) is (IMHO) the best stand-alone
PC flight planner. I've used it for years, and was able to flight plan your
trip from Timmerman to Appleton in about five seconds, with fuel burn, ETA,
waypoints, etc.

snip

By the way, where did you train -- Timmerman? I trained in East Troy ten
years ago, and lived in Racine until '97.

Yep, Timmerman. I actually live just over the line into Racine county
right now, on 7 Mile Rd, which I'm sure you remember.

BTW, your establishment is definitely on my list of places to visit at
some point.

More congrats!

As for getting lost...If I can't see Pikes Peak, then I'm lost. Or
else it's too foggy/rainy/snowy to go fly VFR.

(*chortle*)

I use duats ( www.duats.com )
its free and will do your winds, fuel, ground speed, everything, for you.
all you is put in where your at and where your going.

You will see after a few short X-C's by yourself if you really need to do a
nav log. the thing is to do what your comfortable with, do it safely and use
common sense.

Wednesday morning, I am flying from las vegas to the los angeles basin, I
have 6 hours of fuel on board so I dont care about fuel usage, I know it
takes me about an hour to get there, so all I am concerned about is what
altitude will I get the best ground speed and smoothest ride.


Paul Folbrecht wrote:

Being newly licenced (yesterday), I've started thinking about the type
of VFR flight-planning I'll do in the real, post-student world, and what
tools I'll use.

As a student, of course, I did everything by hand, and meticulously, and
eschewed GPS navigation as well. Some of my observations from my brief
XC experience thus far:

1) Winds aloft forecasts are never right- usually not close.

2) There's no need to produce a nav log, etc. with checkpoints when the
route is familiar.

So, for a route that is now familiar to me- say, Timmmerman (MWC) to
Appleton (ATW) (about 75nm), of course I get a briefing, and check the
winds aloft, but I'm not going to produce a nav log. I'm going to fly
by pilotage with my GPS to back me up and with a VOR receiver to back
that up. And, of course, if I encounter particularly unexpected
weather, I'm going to turn back.

For new routes, I am going to produce a nav log, knowing full well that
my heading will not likely match the precomputed values due to differing
winds aloft. No matter. But, of course, for such flights, I'm not
going to be doing things the old-fashioned way anymore. I want some
good software to make it easy.

So, I think I have two questions: 1) Does this make sense? and 2) What's
the best flight-planning software out there? I've used AOPA's tool and
I like it, but I don't really know what's out there (and yeah I can do a
google search but then you don't know if you're hearing about the latest
& greatest). I do have a Palm 5 device so PC software that has a Palm
component too would be a plus.

~Paul

P.S. Hope this isn't too much of a "newbie" post for this forum.
Thought it was more appropriate here than over at .student.

Heh. Actually I'm quite a bit west of where you were- 8707 7 Mile Road
to be exact, 4.5 miles west of 94. So, I think about 8-10 miles west of 32.

Maybe you can talk me into flying some cringle out to the hotel some
time this summer. :-) As for me- I have not been able to touch the
stuff since I ate a whole one by myself when I was about 12. No lie.

~Paul

Jay Honeck wrote:
Yep, Timmerman. I actually live just over the line into Racine county
right now, on 7 Mile Rd, which I'm sure you remember.


Good God, man -- Mary (my wife) lived on 7 Mile Rd (just west of Hwy 32)
when I first met her! I must have driven down that road a thousand times...

Small world!

Now go enjoy a Derango's pizza for me, have some perch at Dino's (on 16th
St.), and start your day off right with some pecan kringle from O&H bakery!

:-)

***************************************
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT
***************************************

Razor's Edge Software is changing its product pricing for AirPlan.
Previously, sectional charts were sold as an add-on supplement to
AirPlan. In order to provide greater product value and a higher level
of service to existing AirPlan customers and future AirPlan customers,
the product will now include sectionals chart chunks as part of the
base product.

The new pricing for AirPlan is as follows:

AirPlan on CD ROM with U.S. Sectionals: $99.00
AirPlan and sectionals by download only: $79.00

Purchase includes 1 year of updates by download for both the database
and sectional charts.

After the first year, each additional year of updates by download is
$20.00. A set of CD ROM updates can be obtained for $25.00

Any current AirPlan customers who purchased sectional charts with
AirPlan or have subscribed to sectional charts by download after July
1 2003 will have additional years of update service added to their
accounts equivalent to the price differential. Charts sold prior to
July 1 2003 were derived from Softchart International so no such
compensation can be offered. Look for individual emails regarding
your adjustment.

Razor's Edge Software hopes that our existing customers will find
AirPlan to be of greater value to them with this increase in service.
Any customers who have purchased AirPlan in the past but are not
current on their update subscriptions are welcome to renew their
subscriptions and download charts.
http://www.razorsedgesoft.com/renew.htm

As always, word of mouth referrals are appreciated. As you may be
aware, the market for flight planning software is limited in size
(yes, we pilots are a rare breed). At the same time, advertising
rates in aviation magazines are quite high. In order to keep AirPlan
at a reasonable price point, we limit our advertising to the internet
and aviation events.

Look for our booth at the Airventure fly-in at Oshkosh in 2004!
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So I would say, if you try it make sure you have other charts,
at least WACs, to back up your planning.

Yeah, we kept the WACs on board when using the Trip Ticks, just in case.

Didn't need 'em, though. We never went off the maps, even when diverting
around icing (on our way back from Sun N Fun last year) -- those maps are
pretty wide. You musta diverted pretty far!
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"