Was planning a flight from KRSW to MWCR.

 

I auto planned the route, coming up with CSHEL5 LAL DCT RSW DCT TADPO UG448 ATUVI GORAN3.

 

The SID was  CSHEL5  and the TRANS used was LAL.

 

Following this departure route, it increased the overall length by 50%. Further, the LAL to TADPO was a 180 degree turn.

 

In scenarios such as this, would a SID even be used? Would their be modification to make it more efficient in both distance and turns?

 

 

 

if you have a look at the charts for those SIDS you'll see that they all basically start with vectors. i think it's highly unlikely you would be assigned that SID in the first place unless your route was to the north. right now the wind is 070 @9knots so if you assume runway 06 is active and file EYW DCT TADPO UG448 ATUVI then you would just get vectored to EYW after complying with the assigned SID.. which is basically runway heading until vectors, or turn to 100 then vectors, depending on which one.. i don't know in real life if they would do mooky2 or scuby5 but the runway06 ones are functionally very similar from all three of the ones besides cshel.

please take my response with a huge grain of salt i am not an expert by any means.

cheers

-andy crosby

What Andy said is correct. The CHESL5 SID is really only intended for flights destined for points to the north of RSW. In your case, using the SID basically has you heading up to Lakeland, then turning around and coming right back the way you came. A better choice would be to use one of the three non-RNAV SIDS, ALICO, SCUBY or MOOKY. In a real word departure using those SIDs, ATC would vector you south to your first enroute waypoint after takeoff.

You didn't mention what you used to autoplan the route?  That's not an airline route, basically you have all discretion you want within constraints. As Jim mentioned, you wouldn't pick that DP but your first fix would be something like CYY to join J41 instead of TADPO, which was selected by your route planner because it is a fix at the airspace boundary. Also, you are overflying Cuba so you need to read up on all the things to know before entering that airspace.

 

You don't need to file DPs (departure procedures), in fact you can put NO SIDs in your remarks section of the flight plan that you file and be perfectly legal.  ATC will assign you a route to their liking almost regardless of what you file. The trick is to try to anticipate what ATC is going to throw at you and then try to plan and file accordingly. In this case, I defer to Jim who has a better handle on this part of the world.

Auto routing does not always work right, if you can get a plan off flightaware go with that

 

I am not familiar with that airport but here is a flight from MIA

 

MNATE MTH G448 TADPO UG448 ATUVI GORAN3

 

Similar routing

 

You do not always have the best direct routes between airports, especially in the Caribbean you have a small number of set routes

 

- David Lee

EDIT

 

Oops. I just saw that someone has posted a similar suggestion prior to my hitting the return key

 

END EDIT

 

Just as a suggestion, for flights in North America, you might want to use

 

http://flightaware.com/statistics/ifr-route/

 

to assist your planning. It provides real world routes currently in use and seems much more reliable than some of the usual flight sim-oriented tools.

 

In this case, there apparently were no recent real world flights from Ft. Meyers to the Caymans, so I looked around at nearby airports and found that there were flights from Tampa, KTPA, to your desired destination. One such route is

 

GANDY7 SABEE RSW MTH G448 TADPO UG448 ATUVI GORAN3

 

As you can see, this route goes straight over the RSW VOR which is collocated with KRSW. So you can ignore the first three items and your route becomes

 

MTH G448 TADPO UG448 ATUVI GORAN3

 

which takes you over Marathon in the Florida Keys, across Cuba on an airway, and southwards to the Caymans with minimal mileage in excess of a great circle distance.

 

Hope this helps,

 

John

You didn't mention what you used to autoplan the route?  That's not an airline route, basically you have all discretion you want within constraints. As Jim mentioned, you wouldn't pick that DP but your first fix would be something like CYY to join J41 instead of TADPO, which was selected by your route planner because it is a fix at the airspace boundary. Also, you are overflying Cuba so you need to read up on all the things to know before entering that airspace.

 

You don't need to file DPs (departure procedures), in fact you can put NO SIDs in your remarks section of the flight plan that you file and be perfectly legal.  ATC will assign you a route to their liking almost regardless of what you file. The trick is to try to anticipate what ATC is going to throw at you and then try to plan and file accordingly. In this case, I defer to Jim who has a better handle on this part of the world.

 

I used PFPX.

 

Thanks for the rest of the information.