Folks

 

I suspect the answer is yes, but would appreciate if someone could confirm. I use FlightAware and Skyvector for most of my flight planning for tube flights. This is fine in the US as the routes are in FlightAware. For Europe, I plot my way around the airways maze, finding SIDs & STARs that connect to airways that are headed the right way. But honestly, I'm making a fairly educated guess at the route and there's a bit of time consuming trial and error involved. And this doesn't take weather into account. Does PFPX do the donkey work for me with this?

 

Cheers

 

Mike

I suspect the answer is yes, but would appreciate if someone could confirm. I use FlightAware and Skyvector for most of my flight planning for tube flights. This is fine in the US as the routes are in FlightAware. For Europe, I plot my way around the airways maze, finding SIDs & STARs that connect to airways that are headed the right way. But honestly, I'm making a fairly educated guess at the route and there's a bit of time consuming trial and error involved. And this doesn't take weather into account. Does PFPX do the donkey work for me with this?

 

 

Pretty much, yes, PFX does everything. But if you are interested in real world plans, anywhere I think (certainly Europe), try http://www.edi-gla.co.uk/fpl/. You have to register, but it's free. You get  the main plan, the one you'd send to ATC. You choose your SIDs and STARs separately, based on the weather of course.

 

Pete

FlightAware works pertty good in europe, too. But PFPX is just amazing. It drasticly reduces the ammount of planning.

PFPX is fantastic in Europe, but in North America it fairly often creates silly routes (30%  to 100% longer than great circle distance). Still, even with this fault it is a great program.

 

Cheers,

Peter

As the others have said it works well in auto mode (it has an auto route button).

 

You can also manually add your routes (I too use FlightAware and manually enter the plansfor my North American routes, based on how they are flying today).

 

With PFPX in a few clicks you have an entire route package and can start flying. Including the fuel calculations, payload, weather, SID/STAR and so on...

If you push the validate button when done calculating your route, you will know if it would pass CMFU European airspace regulations. If you don't pass, your route is technically unrealistic. Flightaware has ATC routes flights going from US to Europe but not routes within Europe. Instead of giving myself the headache of meeting cmfu validation (it's a huge PITA), I usually borrow euro plans from vataware. They almost always pass cmfu validation and I feel its the closest you can get to realistic European routes.

Thanks guys. I'm registering with edi-gla (thanks Pete). It'll serve my needs well enough without having to splash out a reasonable amount of coin for PFPX. It's on the wish list, but I can't spend as much on the sim as I used to! I'll check out vat aware ad well.

 

Thanks again

 

Mike