Tempatures and Winds Aloft For MD11

[pcubine 143]

I fly the MD11F on long hauls only. Therfore I have a lot of waypoints on every flight with the most being 91 from Bangkok to Helsinki. I have been entering a average headwind or tailwind on the F-PLN INIT page of the MCDU as opposed to entering this information in page 2 of 2 on the ACT F-PLN for each waypoint. Is this an acceptable practoce?Thank you, Michael Cubine

[KCA9304 0]

I fly the MD11F on long hauls only. Therfore I have a lot of waypoints on every flight with the most being 91 from Bangkok to Helsinki. I have been entering a average headwind or tailwind on the F-PLN INIT page of the MCDU as opposed to entering this information in page 2 of 2 on the ACT F-PLN for each waypoint. Is this an acceptable practoce?Thank you, Michael Cubine

Michael,Yes, it is an acceptable practice.1- The very first tutorial enters a temp/tailwind component for the flight. Entering winds during preflight for all waypoints is not required. It is a short flight however, but basically you don't have to enter all waypoint winds.2- In (my) real world operation of the MD11 we also just entered these temp/wind component on the INIT PAGE from the flight plan during preflight. Once en-route there are several options to finetune the FMS as you like.Regards,Harry

[NGXfanatic 85]

I am currently in cruise on a carefully prepared long haul flight from Amsterdam EHAM to Toronto CYYZ. I am a stickler for the details, and I find that using the average expected headwind or tailwind and temperature is more than sufficient, even for long hauls, but I will then follow up by entering the winds for each cruise altitude waypoint from a weatherlog. I get my expected winds for each waypoint from Hifi Simulation's Active Sky Advanced, it makes the job easy. What is not so easy is the actual inputting of the winds in FMC, which can be tedious to say the least. But I find its worth it, and again, it fine tunes the FMC's destination ETA and remaining fuel, which the average wind in the Init page already does a good job of estimating.One more question though, in regards to inputting each waypoint's wind and temp. In the real world, does the flight crew manually type each entry, or is it automatically populated by ACARS?And if they do input each datapoint, is it preflight, or when things are quiet up in cruise?When in cruise, can they request updated winds from operations, or do they just rely on the flight plan generated winds done on the ground?