FlightSim.Com Reviews: FlightSim Planner 98

FlightSim Planner 98

by Lee Degenstein (22 June 1998)

fter spending many hours flying around the Chicago and Los Angeles areas of MS Flight Simulator 98, I started to get a little bored. After all, how many trips can one make from Meigs to Champaign Illinois, or from San Catalina Island to Van Nuys California?

If you try to make your flights more interesting by using the maps provided by Microsoft in the MS Flight Simulator 98 Pilots Handbook, you will soon get equally bored as well. What if you wanted to fly from La Guardia in New York City to Dulles International in Washington DC? You are out of luck if you try to find a route in the Pilots Handbook. The answer is a flight planner.

There are several flight planning programs to choose from on this web site as well as others on the net. I recently downloaded a demo of FlightSim Planner 98, developed by Sascha Felix. Be aware, the full version of the program will cost you $25, and there are other programs out there that have many of the same features and are available for free. The demo version includes the European database only!

FlightSimPlanner 98

FlightSim Planner 98, is a professionally developed program created by a reliable, helpful person. I was somewhat reluctant to order the full version over the net, but I threw caution to the wind, and went ahead anyway. I was pleased with the result. FlightSim Planner 98, is a well thought out, practical program that is not too hard to figure out and therefore fairly easy to use. There is not a lot of documentation, just the basic nuts and bolts. There is no material available in this program about navigation in general. But even if you do not know the first thing about flight planning or navigation, you can enter in a starting point and destination and let the program do the rest.

Installation

I am the kind of game user that likes to download, unzip and play without reading a lot of documentation. I was easily able to accomplish this with this program. In fact, compared to the other flight planning programs I have seen this one is laid out better, more straight forward, as well as aesthetically pleasing to look at.

Once you have the full version (after forking over the $25) you can download data for the USA, Europe, Japan and most places that are covered by Flight Simulator 98. Version 3.0 has recently been released and available to registered users of version 2.0. The program has a fairly easy to use GPS system and you can track your progress on the map as the program is linked to the flight simulator program.

Using The Planner

The only thing I didn't like about FlightSim Planner 98 is the unusually long time the program takes to start up. If you have the entire US database loaded or European Database selected you could have a couple of minutes waiting time until the program loads. This is somewhat understandable, as there is a lot of data included. I am the impatient type however.

There are a lot of flight planning programs out there. FlightSim Planner 98 is worth the $25 if you want to pay for a program of this type. However, the very popular Nav 1.8 program is free and does about 95% of what FlightSim Planner 98 does.

Conclusion

I had a few problems getting the full version to work but Sascha Felix, the developer, was available by e-mail to help me along the way. In fact he usually responded to my e-mail questions in under 24 hours. This kind of support is not available with other programs. Considering this is a program I found on the net I found Mr. Felix to be reliable, helpful and genuinely friendly.

All in all I would recommend FlightSim Planner 98, for those who want a bit more in a sophisticated flight planning package.

Lee Degenstein
Email: bizradio@worldnet.att.net

Download the trial version of FlightSim Planner 98.
Visit developer Sascha Felix's FTP site.

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