New FS2002 flight planner survey.

[erict 9]

FSBuild 2.0 that's what I'm looking forward to.Eric

[Guest The Ancient Brit]

Ernie,Since my approach to flight planning puts me in a minority of one I must concede the validity of the points you make.Piper22,Unfortunately I can see no way of including attachments using the Avsim forum method of contacting you by email. You can sample one of my flight plans by downloading 37RTWest from the FS2002 flight plan section of the Avsim library. It contains 1,153 waypoints (I do like to give value for money LOL). Although a flight plan you will find it quite an adventure and I promise you it is full of eye candy and the Wow factor. 337 people have downloaded it and lived to tell the tale. Don

[asquel 2]

Hi Gig,If you want to add something new, try to incorporate the winds aloft in the time of flight and fuel load calculations (which present fuel planners do not take into account), and try to plan the fuel stops for the long distance flights (as a function of runway length also). It would also be interesting to determine at every moment of the flight the nearest airport in case of emergency, or the nearest airport equipped with ILS in case of bad weather for landing. At present, I perform these points "manually", but it would be interesting to include them in the flight plans.Alain

[Guest Twister]

Hi,In my humble opinion, the most important feature for an improved planner would be the possibility to use custom (user-defined) waypoints (latitude & longitude).The default flight planner won't accept waypoints that aren't either airports or navigation aids (VOR / NDB ).When flying VFR, a pilot may want to define a bridge, a junction or a road as a waypoint.Thanks in advance and good luck !Twister

[Guest eko]

Good Luck! This sounds like an ambitious project!I use FSNav and NAV3 for all my flightplanning needs. To be honest, FSNav really get's the job done, IMHO, but the reason I still use NAV3 is because I like to do a lot of my flight planning without having to start up the sim. If FSNav had an .EXE that you could launch offline... I would be in hog heaven.Please don't forget about ACS-GPS export functionality. I don't know how many folks still use this set of gauges, but to me they are indispensable, and FSNav's and NAV3's support for it make it very handy.Example: I set up a short route in FSNav. I can dump that route directly to ACS-GPS without having to even create a file on my HD. I use ACS-GPS as a "poor mans" FMC in the jets this way. I can adjust my flightpaths and dynamically load them to ACS-GPS from FSNav as I plot... unbelievably cool and useful feature.

[Guest]

Gig,As a FSNavigator user I mostly use the visual features as a moving map and as a handy reference for things like NAV Aid frequencies, so if your program could export it's flightplans in FSNAV format that would be fine. I generally plan using the autoroute feature and modify the result to concur with real-world charts and preferred routes if required. I must admit it is easier when you can see the results of modifications immediately on a map but it isn't critical.Regarding real-world planning, in my part of the world (Australia) there are places where there are a number of different routes for the same origin-destination pair, most commonly Jet and Non-Jet routes. Having an editable database of preferred routes would suit this purpose.Being able to enter an airway name and the program to then include the appropriate waypoints in the plan would be very useful.On the weather front, if your program will have a live interface to Flight Sim during flight it would be nice to be able to request a diversion of X many miles left or right of track to avoid bad weather and for the program to suggest an appropriate heading or track to follow to accomplish this diversion and subsequent track back to the filed flightplan once the cell has been passed. I don't know if the weather module in FS or add-on weather program is capable of providing the detail required to do this.RegardsAdrian