Fuel Required

Okay - somewhat unrelated to the FSX game so I can't use anything within the game but I need a forumalar to calculate required fuel for a specific route

 

say

 

LAX-NYC 772 + 10%

or

ICN-ORD 744 +10%

 

Any ideas on how I can work this out?

 

Not just ample fuel but an idea of how much I'll actually need.

It would really help to understand the concept of fuel planning.

 

To know roughly how much you need just for the trip, you can try Fuelplanner but I highly suggest that you do your own calculations of your aircraft's burn.

Cheers, yeah I'm familiar with these terms. Don't want to go into detail on regulations and alternates just an idea of fuel burn over a specific disance and equipment type

Set yourself up a test flight. Cruise altitude for your particular plane, cruise speed, ISA standard day, 50% pax/cargo weight aboard, 50% fuel aboard. Cruise along for a specific time, like 1 hour. Measure how much fuel you used up. Divide by the number of engines you have, and voila! You now know the fuel burn for each engine.

Lots of things can affect the fuel burn, don't forget. Winds, head, tail, various cross, weight aboard, temperature, pressure, humidity, altitude, the list goes on.

 

Alternative, install a fuel usage gauge, which will tell you how much fuel you're burning under any given condition. The best I've found for that is RKG_Fuelstat.gau. I can't seem to find it alone, but it's included in a lot of panels. I found it first in the Minipanelv3.1 I use. You can separate it out, and then look through the minipanel.cfg file to find to appropriate way to use it. It is available for single, double, and quad engine planes, jet, prop, and turboprops. I really like it, and find it most useful. Not for fuel planning the flight I'm on, but on a similar flight, since I now have an approximate burn stat for the plane I'm using.

 

Hope this is of some help...

Pat☺

Real simple and free one here:

 

http://www.csgnetwork.com/fuelconsumpgphcalc.html

 

scroll down to "fuel required for trip."

 

But bear in mind that this is the digital equivalent of back-of-napkin calculations. It fails to take aircraft weight, altitude, and headwinds into account. So if your jet burns 200 lb/hr at FL450 but for whatever reason you have to stay down at FL200, or there are massive headwinds, it will throw the calculation off.

 

You can compensate for the headwind problem by dividing your true airspeed (calculate that here: http://www.csgnetwork.com/tasinfocalc.html) by your ground airspeed (which if your plane lacks the appropriate gauge, you calculate by subtracting the headwind speed from your true airspeed) If that, for instance, returns 1.15, then you know you need around 15% more fuel for the same flight plan at 0 headwind.