Complete Newbie's question about flight plans

[Guest 737pilot]

Hello,I have a question about making a flight plan in FS2004, where I fly from VOR to VOR and from Intersection to Intersection.Is it right to mix VORs and Intersections along the route, or should it be in the format ICAO-VOR-Intersections-VOR-ICAO? Can I also go through a DME during the route?I have not paid much attention to flight plans until now. Hope someone can help and get me going.Thanks in advance.Nico

[victorlima01 2]

Real world airliner flightplans usually involve a departure procedure followed by flying a route made up of pre-existing airways. These airways are ICAO designated "jet lanes" delimited by nav fixes such as intersections and other navaids (VORs NDBs). At certain fixes, two or more different airways may intersect, and you could use these intersections to change airways (similar to leaving a highway at a given exit that leads to another highway going somewhere else). Sometimes, flightplans may also have a DCT (direct)between two fixes. This simply means that there is no existing airway between these two fixes, and the plane will fly a directly form one to another, not following any airway. Let's look at an example of a typical Brazilian flightplan: SBRJ RASA1 MOTOB UW64 LITRE ZEKA SBSPThis plan means that you would leave the Santos Dummont airport (SBRJ) via the rasa1 SID (or departure procedure) and at the MOTOB intersection join airway UW64 all the way to LITRE int. Notice that UW64 contains other fixes between MOTOB and LITRE, but it would be a redundancy to write those down since its been stated already that we'll be flying along that route (UW64) and therefore flying through all the fixes that exist along the route. At LITRE we leave UW64 to join the ZEKA STAR (standard terminal arrival) that will take us all the way to S