Aviator90 Episode 29

Chris Palmer: [0:58] Welcome to another episode of “Aviator 90″ from Angle of
Attack. I am Chris Palmer and this is episode 30 of “Aviator 90″,
and this is our flight planning. We’re going to try to keep this
one pretty brief. I’m going to talk about what my decision was
today that affected everything and we’ll just discuss that a little
bit quartile here. And I have some points that I will make along
the way.
[1:13] So let me show you the screen because that will be easier to
explain what’s going on. Brighten it up here, for you guys.
Focus…

[1:49] All right, today as you can see there’s some weather up
here, and we came from this area which is my home base. We’re going
up here to North Dakota. Now, usually we would have gone up this
direction and over. But because of this weather, I just decided to
go direct, and that worked out better for us. Now, usually I keep
the route over some VORs and some airports, just for safety
reasons. And that would be better for us – just a safer situation.

[2:08] Performance was pretty good today because it’s still…
Well, it’s spring now, but the performance is still pretty damn
good. We don’t have to worry about… Well we do have to worry in
certain situations, but density and altitude isn’t as much of a
concern, because the temperature is so cold.

[2:43] The one thing we did have to be concerned with was obviously
the weather, as you guys can see. I’ll get in a little closer
there, and so, yeah, performance has been great. We got into our
cruise pretty quick. If it was summer, this would have been a
different story. It would have been a different flight. We wouldn’t
have gotten to our cruise altitude as fast because of the density
altitude and the warmer air, and therefore we would have burned
more fuel, so that is certainly a consideration.

[3:25] Now, I’ve done this trip many times. I know that I can fly 3
-1/2 hours without needing to refuel, and I’ll show you the fuel
range rings here so you can see… Sorry about that. I kicked it
off. I’ll show you the fuel range rings here. So here, as I
discussed earlier, this is our reserves ring right here. That shows
where we will start cutting into our reserve, and this darker green
ring is the zero fuel ring. It’s very important that we don’t use
our reserve fuel, that we keep that as reserve for obvious reasons.

So today we’re going IFR simple. We don’t have to deal with a lot
of maps or anything. But you know, this is a map in and of itself.
It’s great to have a GPS like this where I can just follow
things… to show you how detailed it can get, but follow things on
a pretty detailed basis here [inaudible 3: [4:13] 56] range, and
you’ll see you start seeing airways and VORs and everything, so you
get down into here. There’s Billings, Montana [indecipherable 4:08]
. Sorry this is so shaky, guys. It’s just a little bumpy up here.

Let’s talk about FS, flight simulator. [inaudible 4: [4:37] 23] you
guys over here. I’ll pull this back a little bit so you don’t have
to see my bug up close. I think that should be good. If not, you’re
going to be looking at my nose hair or something.

[5:16] All right, so there are some sources you can use for a
flight simulator to do some flight planning. One great one I like
is CheckWX.com. What that is, is a website where you can pull up
weather for any airport really quick. You can get an idea of what
the weather will be there. That’s very nice. I really like “Real
World Weather” when I’m flying in “Flight Simulator” for a program
like “Active Sky”, which you can find at HiFiSim.com, or “Real
Environment X”, which you can find at RealEnvironmentXtreme.com, I
believe.

[5:48] Just google it. Those two both have a weather generation
program. I like REX better, because it’s just more simple for me.
It doesn’t have a lot of whiz-bang features. I can load up a flight
and do it quickly and it also has the best texturing for “Flight
Simulator”. It has clouds, it has runway textures, it has different
sun textures, different water textures, and that is integrated with
the weather engine.

[6:18] Another great source, and I know the maker of this has
followed our blog a little bit, is “Plan-G”. I’ve just barely
started getting into “Plan-G”, but I really like it. It’s a great
free program. I’ve actually been flight planning with it quite a
bit for some of the “Aviator 90″ stuff I’ve been doing. You guys
are definitely going to see that, because I like it a lot. But
google that if you want to look at it now, “Plan-G”.

[6:48] Another one, more complex, maybe if you’re a big metal,
heavy metal airliner guy this one would be better for you. It’s
called “FSBuild”. It’s great for everything, too. It’ll
automatically generate a route for you based on what you punch in.
Great program, it’s been around for years. I really like it, I use
it for all my PMDG stuff and all my airliner flying I do, when I do
that.

[7:00] Another real world source that a lot of guys use for flight
simulator is FlightAware.com and you guys can actually track my
flights on Flight Aware as they’re happening.

[7:31] The cool thing is that other airlines are all on there too
but they have to file the route on there so you can pick up that
route. You can put it in your FMC or whatever. Or if you want to do
a single engine one, there’s a feature on their website where you
can search to airports. So you can if someone was flying from the
airport you want to go to and then see what they filed for their
route. That’s another way to get it.

[8:00] Really that’s about it, I mean, we’re going to get into
flight planning more as we go along here to a certain extent. As
you have noticed throughout these last several episodes, I’m not
huge into getting really detailed about flight plans. I think it’s
useless. You can’t just calculate every knot of wind, every
deviation, every thing that’s going to happen in your flight. It
seems unrealistic.

[8:19] For example, earlier we were flying near Jackson Hole,
Wyoming, just about an hour ago and I started to pick up ice. I
didn’t want to stay in the ice and so I requested from air traffic
control that we deviate 30 degrees to the right to get around the
weather and then from there we got direct again.

[8:48] But you know that’s something you don’t plan on and the
reason why we couldn’t have planned on it is because that dang
icing report wasn’t even there. There wasn’t even a notification.
How can you plan on something you don’t know about? We talked a lot
about that, the up plan, being prepared for what’s coming at you,
taking it as it comes, and in a lot of ways that’s more important
than a perfectly planned out flight plan.

[8:59] You need to have some certain amount of flight planning. You
need to know what the heck you’re doing. That does it for this
episode and we’re done with the flight planning stuff guys.

[9:20] Now we’re going to get into the part that I’ve been waiting
for since episode one, this whole time, which is actually doing
some cool flights with you guys and doing the 10 cross country
flights for Aviator 90. So that’s it for this for this episode of
Aviator 90. Until next time, throttle on.

Transcription by CastingWords