Flight Planning Questions for the "Seasoned" simmers

Time allotments, we all have them. I love it when I've got "all the time in the world" (well, a couple of hours anyway). I get the charts, plan a flight, load the bird, and do the flight. I'd love to just "kick the tires and light the fires" and be gone somewhere without all of the heavy duty preplanning. How do you guys do it? do you have a few presaved, go to flights that you do repetitively or is there favorite program you use to quickly build a flight? How much time do you put into your flight plans? Mine usually takes about 20-30 minutes to plan and get everything ready for a flight. Thoughts?

 

Grandpa Bill Mattson

 

Airspeed, altitude and ideas, bad to run out of all 3 at the same time

Yeah, I'm with you. From the start until takeoff, it's about 45 minutes. That involves looking for a flight on my VA's site to checking whether I have the plane and if there is an updated scenery of either origin or destination, then there is the fuel and pax/cargo loading (it's a good thing I have a spreadsheet that does all the calculating and it is just plug and chug). Seldom has there been a fly and go situation. The only examples I can think of when I "flew and went" was when I met up with someone online and we decide to do a flight together.

To quote an old phrase "as real as it gets"

You don't give an indication of what you're flying, but it's easy enough to jump in the C-172, or Baron, or whatever, set Direct To for whatever destination you want in the GPS, then takeoff and go. You could even just hop in and fly around the local area...

45 seconds at the most then I'm gone. I use the default flight planner or mostly use gps direct. I do have a link to an online flight planner that I use when the default places me way out of the way. Another trick I really like is use the flight planner gps direct then move the line to waypoints to line me up to the runway without any thought.

I also use the default flight planner and I save every flight I've ever done. I often choose a previous flight and use a different aircraft. It's also easy to change the season, time and weather. This saves time and before long you can build an impressive library of flight plans.