6 hours ago, FlightSimmer68 said:

I think sometimes, simbrief just wants to give you the shortest route..

No - the last person to generate a plan between those two airports wanted to take the shortest route (or the person before them did and they just accepted what was in the box without question).

As I say - what appears in the route box is just what the last person put in there. There's no sanity checking and no validation of those suggested routes - if I generated a plan from JFK to IAD via the North Pole and you were the next person to enter JFK as your departure airfield and IAD as your arrival airfield, you would get my route via the North Pole pop up as a suggested route. 

As I say - Simbrief is a truly amazing piece of software, but it was never originally designed as a route planner - it has some basic tools (like the route finder) which you can use to generate a route and there are some links to services like Flightaware where (in the US) you may be able to find a real world route to paste in, but it is not a fully-featured, highly optimised route planner in the way that PFPX is, for instance.

Thanks for the info everyone.  I cleaned up my PFPX so it shouldnt throw errors in my voxatc flight plans any more and Ill probably stick with that since its more robust.

Not sure if someone mentioned this or not. If I am missing a sid or star, one thing I do is change the runway then change it back. Everytime I change the runway, simbrief queries me if I want simbrief to automatically change the sid/star. That may get it to add it in for you. I generally stick to routes on flightaware though so I don't do that often.

On 1/5/2018 at 7:11 PM, skelsey said:

Do remember with Simbrief that the route that appears by default, and the suggested routes down the right hand side, are not necessarily "validated" or "approved" routes -- they are simply the last five routes that other Simbrief users have generated between those two destinations.

Therefore, depending on who last planned a flight between those two airports you may have a perfectly planned route if it was someone who knew what they were doing, or you may have a load of garbage if it was not. So treat those routes with caution!

The Simbrief "help" page has some more details about the options available to generate and validate routes using the route finder or other linked services such as Flightaware etc.

Interesting. I always assumed that it worked it all out automatically and gave you an appropriate approach according to the weather etc.

Goes a long way to explaining some of the very odd approaches I've had a spate of recently!!

Next time send me a pm and I'll give you a route string from Sabre or Lido then you can use that and input it into Simbrief. 

Simbrief will use a previous users route string so if they created an howler of a route then it will try and give you that.  

I think Simbrief is fantastic for running accurate plogs, but not so good at finding difficult city pairs routings.  But then a lot of real world flightplanning systems also have that problem to be fair

 

Cheers