Wind & Fuel planning

[Guest Thrust-Master]

Dear groupI'm just wondering how you predict wind component on fuel planning.I am using AS2004.Thanks in advance.

[Guest meyomyx]

It isn't really an answer i suppose but FSMeteo is a fantastic product ....... it goes away gets realtime weather. You can then import your flightplan and it will a) set up the weather all along the route and :( give you the current forecast winds aloft.p.s. no I don't have anything to do with FSMeteo :)'tis good though

[Guest flyinggriffin]

AS2004 gives you winds aloft also. What he wants is to know the headwind component of the winds aloft. Unless you have the winds directly at your 12 O'Clock you will have a crosswind and a headwind/tailwind component. What you need is a small computer program to do wind triangles for you. There are a number of aviation calculators built for doing math, and you can also download a numnber of Palm Pilot programs that give you the headwind component. I know that in flying GA you can do very rough estimates for headwind component, but doing long flights with the airliners will cause the amount of error to be unacceptable. Bob K.

[bobbyjoh 11]

Hi Michael,Good question, but there is not a simple answer. As the others have mentioned you can use FSMeteo and/or ActiveSky 2004 to provide you with a average route wind. However FS has to be loaded for either of these to function properly and as I stated you will get winds at each waypoint and an average wind for the entire route. What still needs computed is what effect the wind component will have on your flight and how much fuel you will need.Having said all that, this is what I do for my flights and it works very well for me. If I am flying in the USA I go to this site: http://adds.aviationweather.gov/ and get the winds for my planned altitude and route. If I am flying outside of the US, I use the winds from this site: http://aviationweather.gov/sitemap/. As on old USAF navigator (KC-135s), I am pretty good at doing a mental calculation on the wind component. For example if the winds are 270/100 and my route from KDEN-KLAX is 220, I may use a wind component of -80, - for headwinds and + for tailwinds.I use FSBuild to do my flight planning. FSB has a section where you input the wind component, which in the above case would be -80. What this does is adds additional time to my flight plan from KDEN to KLAX. FsBuilds knows what the PMDG737 fuel burn is per minute and then calculates the amount of fuel required to fly the route. It also provides input for taxi fuel, alternate, holding and extra. With all those combined your flight plan will have the amount of pounds of fuel to load the NG. After hundreds of hours flying the NG I have never had the fuel at destination be off more than +/- thousand pounds.I hope this sheds some light to your question and helps you in your flight planning.CheersBob

[Guest Thrust-Master]

Thank you very much for your inputs Gents.