can anyone tell me what s/c on a flight plan means.its marked the same as the t/ d and t/c thank you

S/C i believe stands for Step Climb. hope this helpsAndrew

When you set up your flight plan, and enter the data into the FMC, you enter an initial cruising altitude based on where the aircraft is most efficient and economical based on its current weight. Once the aircraft has burnt off some of its initial weight, it can climb higher to where its even more efficient, therefore increasing the range. These points are your step climb points, and automatically calculated by the FMC.I usually start flights at or around FL290-330, and climb higher as the flight progresses, stepping at the ICAO default of 4000ft. You can obvisously change the step climb height when initialising the FMC or on 'on the fly' :-)

As Alastair said this marks your optimum (first) step climb point.Alastair :Since I guess you fly in the US you should be using 2000 not ICAO. US airspace is RVSM (reduced vertical separation minima) for quite some time now. In fact the only two areas in the world that feeature ICAO type airspace above 30000 ft are Russia and Africa (excluding Egypt).By reading a lot of the topics posted here I see that a lot of our "Captains" are arguably not quite familiar with vertical airspaces, high altitude performance of the 747-400 and most importantly with "step-climbs". The latter is a vital element for the efficient operation of this very long range aircraft. We ventured to model every single advanced aspect of them. Pity not to take advantage of it. I think the next PMDG TC (training course) post will cover these issues.Best,Vangelis===================================== E. M. Vaos Precision Manuals Development Group www.precisionmanuals.com=====================================

"We ventured to model every single advanced aspect of them. Pity not to take advantage of it."Yeah but we're still missing wind entry in LEGS page... ACARS ??? :9

Thanks for the tip, will start using 2000. Looking forward to these training docs :-)I actually base most of my flying out of or to the UK (since i'm English :( ), but I guess the same applies here LOLAnd as Easy2K said, where are the winds and ACARS features? :-lol

Dear Fritz,LEGS/RTE DATA. Enter wind/heading in scratchpad. Upload using R1-R5(yes I know...) It even does wind mixing for downstream calculations.By the way, the PMDG 747-400 does model eveything related to step climbs in the book -- automatic, manual input step + automatic, S-type entries in LEGS page + automatic, including all the logic (lots of it) accompanying that. In fact aside from PS1 this is the only sim that models all this stuff, common pretty much to any big Boeing Honeywell unit. Do you know of any other ? :9Best,Vangelis===================================== E. M. Vaos Precision Manuals Development Group www.precisionmanuals.com=====================================

Dear Vangelis,Thanx for clearing things up... I'll try that.I hope you'll do the "real" winds entry pages in the next update anyway... maybe with some kind of tutorial because all these "automatic, manual input step + automatic, S-type entries in LEGS page + automatic, including all the logic (lots of it)" are NEW to me... Peace !

still cruising. ??solid clouds. ??sete cientos. ??should continue. ??shouldn't contiunue. ??