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With the flight plan set the only thing missing before we can enter the cockpit is a set of charts. To quote Johan Andersson: “Everyone loves maps!” Enroute Charts Since I decided to use a rather direct route for my flight (see last posts), I don’t really need any enroute-charts, but I will briefly discuss what is available out there and how I usually use it. Besides the obvious option of having a set of up-to-date official enroute charts, which is probably a bit on the expensive site for an occasional flight or two, there are some ways of getting similar results with online services.

After checking the real world route of Canadian North flight 439, we will now prepare the full flight plan for our trip from Yellowknife (CYZF) to Edmonton (CYEG).

After doing the initial weather check it is now time to prepare the actual flight plan. There are loads of free and payware tools available for this task. You can of course also just continue using SkyVector for this job and do your fuel/vertical navigation planning manually, it really is up to you. Back when I first started flightsimming I just bought used expired enroute-charts from eBay since they never became outdated in FS9 land.

Since X-Plane particularly excels at flying low and slow, doing detailed flight planning, especially fuel planning, is probably a thing rarely done by its users. I also mostly bush fly my GA planes on FSE around anchorage, but every now and then on a weekend I want to take the contents of my “Heavy Metal” out for a spin without having to spend too much time looking for waypoints on skyvector…

In case anyone needs it, I created a PFPX flightplan template that puts the average ISA deviation and average wind speed and direction on the generated flight plans. This information is needed in some FMCs for VNAV/performance calculation. Installation Just put the file into the C:\Users\Public\Documents\PFPX Data\FlightplanTemplates folder (on Microsoft Windows 8), give it any name you like, just keep the .txt suffix. After that you will have an option corresponding to the chosen filename in the OFP drop-down list (see red arrow in picture).

A few days ago I started using PFPX for my X-Plane flights, it’s an amazing fuel and route planning tool. Unfortunately not a lot of people seem to be using it for X-Plane. For example X-Aviation’s fantastic and quite popular Mitsubishi MU-2 isn’t supported yet. So I started creating an aircraft profile for it using the reference charts from the manual. It’s not quite there yet, as flights take a bit longer than anticipated, but this may also be caused by X-Plane’s weak weather engine.

A week ago I finally got out of my way and bought my first large screen LCD TV. Setting it up took me the better part of an evening. I basically had to rewire everything in my flat as I had to move my network switch to the living room considering the TV and accessories needed more switch ports than the devices in my office. Furthermore while plugging in my router, which also had to be moved, a capacitor inside it swelled up and vomited a little, so it had to be replaced…

This is the capacitor I recently had to remove from my Mikrotik RouterBOARD 750G: Dead capacitor As you can see, it is a Su’scon 560µF capacitor. There is at least one thread about bad caps on routerboards on the Mikrotik support forums, they generally seem to be aware of it and it might not be a problem on newer versions. To fix the problem I salvaged a 1000µF capacitor from an old motherboard and it seems to do the trick.

I have been annoyed not to have access to the US market for quite some time now. First there is the multitude of video streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. Here in Germany you can buy “on-demand” movies for about $6 a piece (watchable once) without even featuring the original sound. For the same amount of money you can get a hard copy from the UK. UK and US Television series are mostly not available at all in Germany.

Naval War: Arctic Circle was released yesterday and I found some time to play around a bit and to search for things I don’t like about it.