Hi,

I plan to do some ultra long range flights and have the problem that flying the airways/navaids along the great circle route or close to it is not the optimal route. Prevailing winds may make another route, possibly thousands of miles away, a better choice. For instance, Delhi-San Francisco great circle route goes North over Western China, to the Kazakh-Mongolia border, the Central Siberian Plateau and out to the East Siberian Sea, touching the American continent at the North-Western tip of Alaska, along the Alaska/Canada West Coast down to California.

However, the route really flown by planes is about 3,500 miles further South for the Delhi-San Francisco route, going over Myanmar, the Beijing region, Southern Japan and over the Pacific. The San Francisco-Delhi flights route go the other way around, heading North-East toward Alberta and Baffin Island in Canada, Greenland, the Northern tip of Norway, slightly East of Moscow, down into Kazakhstan and Afghanistan, and on to Delhi.

The reason is of course weather/winds (there are slight variations to these routings, but it's always in a corridor around these routes). And there are plenty of routes who fly far away from the GCR

Now: all the tools for flight simulation that calculate routes automatically try to match the GCR. But with the wind patterns that wouldn't be the best route. Is there any tool (desktop app or online) that finds routes optimizing for wind and weather?

Thanks, Chris

PFPX is aimed at exactly this use. I have been a very satisfied customer for my long-hauls for many years.

HTH

I use ActiveSky (ASP4) "wind overlay" at my flight level to find the most favorable winds for a long distance route.   That still means I have to do my own wx avoidance routing to some extent.

To use the example you mention, over the NorPac that usually means a mid-latitude route instead of GC, going eastbound. 

That would be a neat program that could intelligently load in wx data and give the best routing.  I'm not familiar with PFPX enough to comment on it.

Another vote for pfpx. It pulls live weather and then works out the best routing and flight level.

Chris

My understanding is that PFPX take only winds aloft into account.  It will not route you around bad weather if that's what you're asking.  Many times you'll see significant variations from a normal route due to weather on Flightaware.  I sometimes choose to import from there for greater reality.

I use the Simbrief website for long haul flight planning. Once it displays it's SUGGESTED route, you have the option of selecting the most current route being used by real-world aircraft flying it.  Click on the FlightAware tab that is available next to the suggested route.  It will give you the most current flight plan the real-world aircraft are using, retrieved from the FlightAware website, which has normally taken into consideration the real-world weather the flight would encounter at the time of the scheduled departure (the flight plan WAS developed by the real-world Dispatcher for the associated airline).  As in the real world, you may still have to make some inflight adjustments during your long-haul flight, as over longer time frames the forecasted weather could change on you during your extended flight. But you shouldn't encounter too drastic an inflight route change even if you need to make one during the flight.