Flight Times.

[Garry Russell]

I went for a Paris New York which meant an turn of about 160 degrees somewhere near Turkey!!

Recently it was East Midlands to Newark which the routing given meant up North and later coming down due south over Chicago

[DaveB]

Sadly.. the default Flightplanner in 2004 (as in previous versions) is complete and utter pony. Get yourself FSNavigator or one of the other payware products mate (PeteP worked on one but I can't remember the name of it for the life of me now!!!!!!). Even these aren't foolproof but they're at least a hundred percent better than the native planner

ATB

DaveB :tab:

[DispatchDragon]

Dave

Was it FS build?? which is pretty good tool


Leif

[DaveB]

I think you've hit the proverbial on the head Leif.. it was FSBuild

Nigel.. I've not got FSBuild (as you can tell as I couldn't even remember what it was called!) but I've seen it working. Had I not already got FSNavigator, I would certainly consider buying FSB. Considering what PeteP does for a living, the fact that he had some part in the final outcome should be recommendation enough

Tks Leif

ATB

DaveB :tab:

[Nigel H-J]

Thanks Dave,

Always nice to know that all Forum members have a great deal more knowledge to enhance FS than MFS does!! :dance: :dance:

[Charlie Bravo]

Thanks Dave,

Always nice to know that all Forum members have a great deal more knowledge to enhance FS than MFS does!! :dance: :dance:

I quite often wonder how much aviation knowledge the MS team have and I come to the same conclusion every time.... not a lot !

[robbie]

To be fair to the FS team, if they had access to 10% of the knowledge content available on this forum their product quality would be awesome!
Let’s hope FSX might have some improvement.

I find ATC so amateurish that I plan all my flights vfr so after T/O I'm left totally alone with no interruptions, as for the planner, I tried a Heathrow- Anchorage once! the flight time given was something like 28 hrs!!.

Robbie

[Charlie Bravo]

To be fair to the FS team, if they had access to 10% of the knowledge content available on this forum their product quality would be awesome!
Let’s hope FSX might have some improvement.
Robbie

This forum is free to join and therefore they do have access to all the knowledge present on the forum.
The mistakes they make in the game are inexcuseable.

[PeteP]

I just ran a few plans STN-EMA to see how they came out. Flight time on an F27 still-air on a "semi-airway" route via BUZAD and HON

Hmmm... Stansted to East Midlands via HON? That's a very odd route, Jon, partly because it's miles out of the way but also because it wouldn't be approved except maybe in the middle of the night at very low level. Flying north on the west side of the Daventry CTA is the aerial equivalent of driving north on the M1 on the southbound carriageway! Which flight planner suggested doing that?

The actual r/w standard route between these airports is:
EGSS (BUZAD SID) BUZAD T420 WELIN PIGOT 1J EGNX

For anyone who wants to fly it, in waypoints that equates to:
EGSS BUZAD OLNEY WELIN VELAG UPDUK PIGOT EGNX

It's possible many flight planners/FMCs will not have caught up with new points such as UPDUK so you might prefer the "old" route of:
EGSS BUZAD OLNEY WELIN SAPCO EME EGNX

Best
Pete

[PeteP]

...I would certainly consider buying FSB. Considering what PeteP does for a living, the fact that he had some part in the final outcome should be recommendation enough

Oh, how very kind, Dave. I'm sitting here blushing a delicate shade of pink. :tab:

I agree completely about the built-in planner which is absolutely useless for anything even vaguely resembling r/w route planning. Fwiw, I'd also endorse FSNav and FSBuild2 as the main candidates in the realistic flight planner stakes.

They have very different approaches to the task, though, with FSNav scoring on its superb (moving) map display and FSBuild being matchless in its ability to output a flight plan into just about every electronic format at a single pass without the need for add-on modules. I use both regularly and they do have their strengths and weaknesses which, fortunately, are complementary. So, if you can run to the cost of both, you'll end up with a very reasonable "suite" of planning programs covering just about all a simmer's needs in this area.

For those who can't or won't get into payware for planning, sites such as http://rfinder.asalink.net/free/ are worth checking out. They're not as r/w accurate as some would have you believe but plenty good enough for general flight sim use.

Best
PP