Help needed creating flight plan

[leeflet 0]

Wow - I don't know what happened to the coding of my earlier post. Here goes again.... My proven¹ method of simulating an actual commercial airline flight

¹

I fly side-by-side with the real-time track on Flight Aware and am almost always in

complete lateral and vertical navigation sync until vectoring begins in the approach segment

1) Find a flight you want to simulate

eg. Alaska Airlines flight 300, KSEA - KSFO - from their web site, I can glean aircraft make/model (737-800), pax loads (seating chart offered on the site), departure and expected arrival gates, and estimated push time

2) Find the flight in

FlightAware

eg. FlightAware tells me again about the gates and estimated push time, but also gives me the actual filed route and altitude: HAROB4 ERAVE Q1 PYE at 37,000

3) Generate the basic route in

SimRoute.com

(free online service) and paste the route in the route box. Look for the SIDs and STARs and incorporate them...

eg. HAROB4 ERAVE Q1 PYE tells me that the SID is the HAROB4 departure. SimRoutes has the HAROB3 (close enough) with ERAVE being the transition point to the enroute segment. PYE is a VOR that serves as an entry to either the GOLDEN GATE or PYE arrivals (I can see that from the drop-down menu choices for the STARs). Looking at other flights going into SFO in Flight Aware, I suspect I will be directed onto the PYE STAR and so I will use that. So I pick the HAROB3 SID and PYE1 STAR in the drop down menu and delete those references from the route box (you can leave the transition points) - so the route box only says ERAVE Q1 PYE, or alternatively just Q1.

4) Select the appropriate aircraft in

SimRoutes

, then download flight plans to both PMDG and FSX. In the FSX flight plan, edit it to include the altitude. No editing is necessary for the PMDG flight plan. By downloading the flight plan in both formats, you are ensuring that the FMC profile is in agreement with ATC (whether it be the default FSX ATC or

Radar Contact

). 5) Open

ASA/ASE

and go to the Briefing section, then import the flight plan, edit the True Airspeed (mine defaults to 120) and note the average winds aloft. Use ASE to invoke FSX (or if you use an external frame limiter, invoke FSX with that after filing the brief in ASE) 6) In the main FSX Free Flight menu, select the appropriate aircraft and edit it to show the flight number, select the airport and use the drop down to select the gate, and load the FSX flight plan. When the plan asks if you want to move to the departure airport, say NO. It will place you ate the end of the departure runway and we have already elected instead to be at the gate. 7) Once at the gate, start powering up, bring the jetway up to the door and open the door and cargo hatches. Once at the appropriate point in the checklist to program the FMC, set your position and in the ROUTE section type KSEAKSFO. Don't worry yet about the departure runway. The route will load automatically. Listen to the ATIS for the active runway and incorporate that in the departure procedure. You can put in your best guess for arrival runway at your destination (

Flight Aware

will clearly show the runways in use), but keep in mind that can change especially with longer flights. I sometimes keep that open in the FMC and program it while airborne. 8) If the actual flight is on time, push from the gate at that time. With 50 - 60% commercial air traffic, I am usually airborne after taxiing, waiting and release within a few minutes of the actual flight. Almost all my flights have been pretty accurate with the real counterparts. The beauty of this is that while I use a lot of different resources to bring the information together, most of the resources are free (except ASA/ASE). I did not discuss fuel planning, and of course don't have the actual numbers for cargo. But it's as close as I can get for now. For fuel planning - until I decide on something like TopCat - I am doing well with Milan Puta's B737 Fuel Planner (version 1.5a).I'd love to hear a discussion about

SimRoutes

vs.

VRoutes

. I am hesitant to move to VRoutes because I don't see where one can create their own flight plan - it

seems

(at least from the web site) that all the routes - while voluminous - are pre-configured and not amenable to editing (Is that true????). SimRoutes, while it's database is showing signs of age, is still quite usable and accurate, and it allows the flexibility to copy and paste directly from actual filed flight plans.LeeF