Can sombody tell me how to workout the correct head or tail wind componant in order to imput in to the fuel quantity calculator accurately and realisticly as done by the real pilots of a long haul flight when taking in to account head and tail winds. My maths is not all that good and the problem i encounter is trying to find an equation to find the H/W or T/W componant.Having watched cockpit videos starting in the dispatch office i saw the captain find the wind componant of each leg of the trip ie heading and speed of the wind (which i get from FS active sky for the purposes of FS no probs) but my question is how you calculate this info to obtain the vital data head or tail wind of however many knots. I first of all started to get an average wind speed and average wind direction of all the legs and then realised that this would not be acurate unless all the legs were the same length which of course the rarely are and even with this data how do you work out for example what the effect of a heavy cross wind will be on a long haul flight accurately. Is there an equation to work all this out or an FS utility or calculator that can do these calculations, so how is it done in the real world.PMDG have mentioned that there will be a flight dispatch center included in the new 744 which sounds great but i would like to know if it will deal with wind factors with perhaps an import option to FS active sky or fs realworld winds aloft data via fsuipc as it is vital to get this info accurate for correct fuel quantity estimations, any comments PMDG on this one.How do all you Guys out there do it at present cos i end up just quessing and adding more to be safe which is certainly not as real as it getsAnyone got the answer?thanks in advance for any responsesKavan

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Hi Kavan,Here is a formula for calculating headwind/tailwind/crosswind.Head- and cross-wind components. HW= WS*cos(WD-RD) (tailwind negative) XW= WS*sin(WD-RD) (positive= wind from right)where HW, XW, WS are the headwind, crosswind and wind speed. WD and RD are the wind direction (from) and runway direction.As usual, unless you have a version of sin and cos available that takes degree arguments, you'll need to convert to radians.Example: Wind 060 @ 20 departing Runway 3. WS=20 knots WD=60 degrees = 60*pi/180 radians RD=30 degrees = 30*pi/180 radians Plugging in: Headwind=17.32 knots Crosswind = 10 knots (from right)Also, the chart below provides a handy reference when printed out.http://www.glenndale.net/images/crosswindcomponentchart.GIF

If you search around using Google or Copernic you can find a number of excel spreadsheets that will help you flight plan. If you own a PDA there are some freeware programs floating about that let you figure in head/tail wind component.I would be conservative when it comes to headwind/tailwinds. I always found in real life that the headwinds were always greater than forcast and tailwinds allways less. Bob. K.