Maybe this has been asked before, but I couldn't find any reference to it.With the upcomming NGX, will a fuelplanner be incorporated in the package? Would be great to have something that you can tell ZFW, distance, prevailing winds, etc and get a realisticly calculated required fuel load.

Hi,That would surprise me, as a realistic fuel plan is a complicated and separate software project. :) As far as I know there is only one Flight Planner package that offers "realistic' fuel load estimates based upon a specific aircraft. Flight Operations Center (FOC) uses extensive data from both test flights and aircraft specifications to create realistic fuel burn tables based upon flight time weather, climb rates and cruise altitudes. Every thing else I have used is a 'rough' guess relative to fuel load. Bob Price

Hopefully PMDG can give their performance data to the guys at TOPCAT before release, so we can have it fully supported by the time we get our grubby little hands on it!

This is Christian's reply on the NGX for TOPCAT, TOPCAT NGX

Hopefully PMDG can give their performance data to the guys at TOPCAT before release, so we can have it fully supported by the time we get our grubby little hands on it!

You seem to forget that TOPCAT doesn't care what the addon's performance is, it uses RW data, and hopes that the developer did a good job. In order to export fuel/weight to the aircraft, TOPCAT just needs to have a config file that tells it what payload stations to use.

And that TOPCAT really is not that realistic at all of a fuel planner. I prefer to use vRoute myself, but will not take a look at FOC due to the previous post about it.

Right, Scott. Christian already wrote it many times in his forum that Topcat is not a fuel and flightplanner.About Topcat and addons, if all aircraft developers (this is not for PMDG and Leveld-D) were making aircrafts with their "as real as it gets" words then there shouldn't be so much differences in the figures of the aircrafts. I use Topcat when I fly the MD-11 (I don't fly other heavies since its release) and I never had any false figures since then. Seems that the PMDG's (B-747 and MD-11) and the Level-D are the closest aircrafts to the Topcat figures. I know not all engines are available like only the GE for the MD but this has nothing to do with Topcat. A lot of people maybe don't know that Christian is a real pilot. It's a great and a must have addon. FYI I am only a Topcat user and have nothing to do with the developers.

I consider TOPCAT a fantastic addon. I don´t know how I could have simmed years without it. However it fails to deliver when fuel planning is concerned, it´s just way too simple. For the NG series, I consider FSBuild to be spot on when calculaiton fuel. I use FSbuild for flight planning and when flying the original NG I also use its fuel figures, which are always spot on. Since fuel consumption is probably not going to change that much between the orignal NG and NGX I plan to continue using FSBuild for fuel planning services. Also, some brave soul could put together an NGX profile and update it to FSBuild so we´ll have an even better planner.