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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 Back when I first started flightsimming I just bought used expired enroute-charts from eBay since they never became outdated in FS9 land.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.