macsimian

Charts for Departures and Arrivals at AUSTRALIAN airports, along with full details of Navaids, IFR and VFR waypoints and lots more are freely available in PDF format at: http://www.airservicesaustralia.com/aip/aip.asp Read the Copyright notice then click the 'I Agree' button down the screen page. Within the AIP, you'll find the DAP section. Departure and Approach charts for all Australian airports are in the DAP section. Open that, then go to 'Aerodrome and Procedure Charts'. There are lots and lots of these! Another very useful section of the AIP is the DAH - Designated Airspace Handbook. In this you can find lists of controlled airports (therefore mostly bigger and busier), uncertified (minor) aerodromes and airfields, IFR Waypoints (for planning flights in airliners and advanced GA aircraft), and ATS Routes. With practice, you can plan a realistic commercial flight between any two significant Australian airports via these ATS route segments. For less popular routes you might need to work out which ATS routes can be linked together to go from, say, Cairns to Broken Hill. It helps to look carefully at the DAP charts to first find a departure in roughly the right direction, and note the Waypoint (or VOR, NDB etc) where it ends. Then you can find ATS routes which start at that same waypoint, and go towards your destination. Find suitable linkable ATS route segments which take your flight further in the wanted direction. Look at the STAR and other Arrival charts for your destination to find initial waypoints which match the last waypoint in the last ATS segment. Often, for actual airline flights, you can look up the flight number in, say, Flight Aware and get the submitted flight plans. These specify the waypoints to be used - although the actual flown route on the day might change a bit because of weather factors. Also, if you have the graphic track display for the completed flight, zoom in to the departure and arrival; you should then be able to pick which SID or STAR charts were used. Note that ATC will often use radar vectors to modify departures and arrivals, and you often see ATC permitting or offering short-cuts between out-of sequence waypoints enroute. Such track shortening can confuse the issue when you're trying to work out which ATS Routes were the basis of a real-world flight plan. The ERSA (En Route Supplement for Australia) is also useful. It lists aerodromes and their codes, and again IFR and VFR waypoints. I hope this makes sense. If it doesn't, say so. If you get the general drift, but need more explanations, again - say so. My apologies to any FS experts or real-world pilots who find errors in this post. Please tell us about it. This is all just from my FS experience and aviation reading. Best of luck. From Ian, Near YBCG, Australia.