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Flight Planning

Is Essential to Fly Without Stress

With even a simple flight plan, actually flying an aircraft is considerably easier than if no flight plan at all is prepared. In the real world, one would add "and much safer", and under IFR, a flight plan is mandatory. The flight plan being discussed here is the flight plan for the pilot, and may be alternatively called the "Pilot's Log". The flight plan required for VATSIM is for the benefit of the Air Traffic Controller. They are slightly different, but the VATSIM flight plan is simpler and can be quickly generated from the Pilot's flight plan using the built in Flight Plan forms included with the VATSIM & IVAO Pilot Client software.
The spreadsheets, designed by a Club member, can be opened in Microsoft Office/Excel, Open Office or Libre Office.

Flight Planning Tools

Plan-G

This is an excellent free flight planning tool, written by Club member Tim Arnot. Based mainly on a database which it builds from your Flight Simulator together with a mapping resource, it provides everything the Virtual pilot requires, including flight tracking, and other aircraft are displayed when connected to VATSIM or IVAO.

Little NavMap

This is another excellent free flight planning tool, deveeloped more recently than Plan-G. It has very similar functionality, and uses the same base maps - either OpenStreetMap or OpenTopoMap for the geographical base map. Its main advantage over Plan-G is that it is still in current (2019) development.

Flight Planner 818

This is a flight planning spreadsheet with a built in database. The database contains over 1000 records including most UK airfields, VORs and NDBs, Visual Reference Points and over 100 farm strips. However, there are more modern electronic tools available nowadays, so you may prefer those. Enter your departure and destination aerodromes, en route waypoints and winds and the programme creates your flight plan and a Pilots Log which can be printed out. It comes with a separate Instruction document (pdf file). The most recent version (28/06/10) consists of Software Version 8.10 and Database version 8.18.

Pilots Log

A simple spreadsheet form for use as a Pilot's log (PLOG) including entry boxes for aircraft type, fuel and endurance, brakes off, brakes on, radio frequencies, weather etc. for Departure En-route and Arrival phases of flight. A5 landscape format makes it handy to put on the desk alongside yoke or joystick. Prints two forms to an A4 page.

Drift Calculator

A very simple spreadsheet to do the wind calculation. Enter airspeed, track, wind speed and direction, it gives you the drift angle, the heading to steer and the groundspeed.

Flight Formulae

Speed/Distance table, inches/Mb conversion, fuel unit conversions & weight and several other useful formulae in this simple spreadsheet. Current version 3.8 adds a DME Arc calculator with user input cells, rather than the table of values in V3.7.