Introduction

Dispatch Planner X  is something that I have been trying to find for a little while to add more realism to my virtual airline flights.  Dispatch Planner is an all in one tool that provides information about your flight in printed form, the same form that commercial pilots would get from their dispatchers.  It allows for weather information for arrival, departure and alternate airports, load sheets and even tankering fuel. 

Blushing Sheep Flight Simulation Software Design and Development was formed in January 2008 with the aim of providing high quality add-ons to the FS community. Formed by the team behind the 'Dispatch Planner' series of add-ons, Blushing Sheep aims to continue the tradition of high quality software with second-to-none support to quote there website.

Installation and Documentation

Installation is simple, download the installer after purchase, and follow the prompts once you have started the installer.  It asks the usual questions as to where you want to install the software.

An Adobe PDF file is included and this covers the workings of Dispatch Planner.  It is comprehensive and covers the usage of Dispatch Planner well, so well it didn’t leave any questions for me in how to use it to best effect.

Once Dispatch Planner has been installed, and you run it for the first time it brings up the settings box, this is done to make sure that it has the latest aircraft data from Flight Simulator.  You can also set your preferred units of measure, your dispatcher and pilot names, and your home base.

Let's Plan Some Flights

Using Dispatch Planner X is simplicity in itself. When you start the program you are given the main opening screen, here you can select to open an existing flight plan, or create a new one.  You can also go to the options page and change the set up of Dispatch Planner.  So, let’s jump straight in and plan a flight and get the load sheets.

You start by opening the flight planner page, which allows you to enter your basic flight details, including departure, arrival and  alternate airports, passenger number, and flight route.  All the airports are entered with the ICAO codes, if you don’t know them there is a link to a web page that will allow you to enter your airport by name and will give you it’s ICAO code. Here in the flight route field is where you enter your flight plan details, if you know them, enter them here, if you don’t you can click on the no flight plan click here link.  This will open a web page which allows you to enter your departure and arrival airports.  The page allows you to select different options for your flight, and what version of ARAIC cycle to use.  Once you select your options, you then select find flight plan. The flight plan will then be displayed which you can cut and paste back into Flight Planner X.  under the Pax and FS section you select the type of aircraft, Flight Sim version (FSX or FS2004), number of passengers and crew. 

There is a tick box which allows you to include the weather report for your flight.  This will download and include real world weather from the NOAA website.  This is where one of the limitations of the program comes up. It isn’t really a limitation of the program as such, but by using the NOAA website for the weather data you are limited to airports that are included on the site for real world weather. One of the flight plans I did was a New Zealand flight from an International airport to a regional airport it wouldn’t allow me to continue until I had removed the weather selection.  This is because that the regional New Zealand airports are not included in NOAA’s data, in fact just for New Zealand, only the three major airports Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch are included.

This is a limitation and admittedly a frustrating one, but I can see why the data has been used as it provides most of the major airports that use this type of flight planning.  David from Blushing Sheep has told me that he is always looking for new data but admits that the NOAA site is the best all in one he can find at the moment.

Once you have concluded your basic flight data entry, you can create your dispatch plans, or go to advanced planning, which is where we will head next.

The Advanced Planning option allow you to add more to your flight and dispatch reports.  The first tab that opens when you go to the advanced planning area is the introduction. This gives you details on what the following pages do and a bit of general information on the advanced planning.  Make sure you click on the green tick before you select the next tab as that saves and updates the information.

The next tab covers the flight route and time to fly legs.  Before this information is displayed, you have to make the software calculate the route by pressing the calculator button, a warning box comes up to warn you that it may take time if you have a lot of legs in your flight plan. Once you have calculated the flight times you get the waypoints, airways, track, distance in nautical miles, coordinates and frequencies if any for the navigational device/waypoint.

Payload, fuel and tankering is the next tab.  This is where as it suggests you can change your fuel, and check your weights for your upcoming flight.  The tankering box allows you to add, or tanker more fuel.  It allows you to change the amount you want to tanker, it will then display how much extra endurance it will give you.  It will also update the weights of the aircraft. If you enter to much fuel in the tankering box and the aircraft is overweight, it will display the weights it red to alert you to the fact the aircraft is overweight.

The last tab allows you to check the flight pan against Eurocontrol CFMU website to see if it meets the real world stringent controls set for real world flights. The website is a resource that real world pilots and ATC use to check that flight plans meet the standards set by authorities.  As such, the flight plan has to be accurate and using the latest navdata, if not it won’t be validated. This doesn’t cause a problem, it just adds to the realism.

 Printed Dispatch Reports

The first report displayed is the Dispatch report. This report shows your departure and arrival airports, your estimated departure and arrival times.  Below this information is the fuel and weights and what type of units they are in, who the dispatcher is (the name you entered in the settings) and FMC information. Below that there is lines to write any ATC info that you are provided, i.e. squawk codes, clearance info etc. also included is the passenger and crew information, any dispatch information and the ATS route.

If you don’t print the report out, there are editable areas on the form which you can click on and type the information in the fields, there is also a show/hide editable areas click area that highlights the editable areas green for you to know where to type.

Next report that is displayed is the Load Sheet. This sheet has all of the weights for the aircraft. This includes the zero fuel weight, take off fuel, trip fuel and landing weight. There is an area for any last minute changes that may happen and balance and seating conditions. This makes the report look and act exactly like the real reports the pilots get. 

This will allow you to load the aircraft in flight simulator, as Dispatch Planner X does not do this at this point.  You must load the aircraft and fuel yourself.  This is another disappointing aspect to Dispatch Planner, it would be great to have your aircraft loaded as per the load sheet automatically.

The last report is the weather report.  This report shows the weather in METAR form, this covers your departure and arrival airports, and alternate airports.

Editor

The last part of dispatch Planner X is an editor for aircraft information.  This covers the speeds and rates and limits.  The speeds and rates cover the climb speed, cruise speed, descent speed.  Also covered in this area are the cruise fuel flow and climb and descent rates in feet per minute.  The limits cover the maximum takeoff weight, maximum landing weight, maximum zero fuel weight and maximum tank capacity.  The editor does not change the config file of the aircraft.

Summary / Closing Remarks

This is a hard one for me to review, it is very hard to write about a simple program.  It is a simple and easy to use program and does produce realistic reports.  It is let down by the fact that the weather reporting does not cover all of the airports and that the program doesn’t load your aircraft.  Being fair the weather is not a fault of the program, more a limitation on what can be found in one source.  Would I pay €19.00 for it, probably not, as there are programs do this and more as well.  But it will be interesting to see how the product develops into the future, and to see how it develops with new features for the future of flight simulator.  It is not a bad product and does everything it say it does with ease.

I would like to add that the support I have received from David at Blushing Sheep was outstanding and he was very helpful.

What I Like About Dispatch X

• Beautiful interface
• Customer Support

What I Don't Like About Dispatch X

• Window Mode only.
• Some minor things, most of them where solved on the update.