How to Alleviate Your Time Preparing Your Plane as Far as The Flight Plan is Concerned!

Note! We recently modified the following tutorial function of how our own practice evolved!

Aboard a airliner or a smaller plane now, pilots have the convenience of a FMC, that onboard computer which they program before a flight and which largely ease their work. Even if large companies still provide their pilots with a flightplan deviced by their flightplan manager, pilots still have to enter that plan into the FMC. When flying a plane without a FMC, which often is the case, here are that hint to alleviate your time preparing your plane before flight! That will need using some flightplan maker online like, for example, simBrief. In any case, take note that, as far as using a flightplanning site is concerned, a kind of site which generates a complete flight plan, that requires to master their instructions of use and to build a flightplan before your flight. Of importance is that such a flightplanner may save the flightplan into a format directly useable into your FS. Of importance two, is that such a flightplanner really uses the weather data for the time of your flight and not for the time you build the flightplan. Should you plan to start a flight at 9 a.m. in Flight Simulator time, and calculate the flight at 5.30 p.m. the flightplanner might use the weather data for that latter time, hence chose a route (winds in altitude, etc.), runways, SIDs and STARs function of that (that's the case, for example, at the simBrief site). Some sites further do not manage the SIDs nor STARs which oblige to add some waypoints manually. The sole problem is that a flightplanner site will give you a more complete set of data like the fuel, load, taxiing times etc., and closer to the real life as a FS will only provide what the Flight Organizer does. So it seems maybe better to stick to: finding the appropriate METAR and TAF data (the site is fine, but in English) for the FS flight time, or even better, for the time when the airliner's flight manager would use those, which is about at least 2 hours before the flight starts); deducing from that the departure and arrival runway, and the SID and STAR

The hint is simply to prepare a series of flightplans you use often with your airliner. Just parameter your flight inside the flightplanner with the data of importance -- of which, the type of your plane, flight level, etc. for example). Thence just save that flightplan into your FS format. Procede the same with as much flightplans you usually fly. For example, as far as I am concerned, as I currently fly from and to Brussels (EBBR), Belgium, I have deviced and saved a series of flight to and from my favorite destinations. Put those save flightplans into the folder your FS uses for that usage. In FSX, that usually is at path C:\Users\gegui\Documents\Fichiers Flight Simulator X. Thence, for a given destination, when preparing your airliner, just upload the appropriate flightplan through the Flight Organizer! Once gotten the weather and decided which runways, SID and STAR you will fly, you will just have to add the flightplan with waypoints for those! As simple as that! You will of course just need the appropriate charts as that is easily done now with numerous countries having their Aip (varied data related to their terrains) online. Once your flightplan adapted, just save it with another name of course (with, for example, something like "CURRENT" added), which will spare the reference flightplan! Such our method will considerably reduce the time you need to realistically prepare your airliner for a flight! Should a next flight for the same destination use one or more different runways, SID and STAR, you will just have to use that same reference flight plan and add waypoints needed accordingly. A more tiedous technique, in case, is just to determine a series of flightplans by yourself with FS' Flight Organizer. That's without any SID nor STAR of course. Just save those flights and then procede like above, loading a appropriate flightplan and adjusting SIDs and STARs function of the weather and runways in use, with appropriate charts! That may be somewhat more difficult as you might not necessarily find the appropriate first -- and last -- waypoints for the route you saved