Guys, when planning short hops, like KSEA - CYVR, or EGLC - EHAM in a business jet like CitationX or Hawker or Lear45, how do you plan/calculate altitudes? What is the most probable altitude to expect getting assigned flying online for such trips/aircrafts?Most of the flightplans I've seen don't give altitudes or in the best case indicate just a range say from FL110 TO FL300, which is understandable. What would be a general approxiamtion for these flights to play it more or less realistic? :)Thanks.

What I like to do is goto FlightAware.com and see what flightplan/altitude similar airacraft are using that day. For example, for your KSEA-CYVR route, looking at FlightAware, an Alaska 737 flew that route at 16,000. So I would probably choose that. I know its not a CX, but its a decent start I guess. Also there may be performance charts around that correspond the route distance with weight to find the optimum altitude for a particular airplane.

I do what air badger does and check what the real world guys are flying.I did a bunch of flights between CYYC - CYEG and the WestJet gang go FL200 - FL270

Thank you very much, guys. Excellent tip.

Guys, what would you recommend for flight planning in Europe? Is there a similar service like FlightAware.com that tracks flights in Europe? FlightAware.com is an excellent addition to the easy flight planning in MSFS. It gives me most of the info I need for creating my flight plans in NA.