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This post will give a short summary of the tools and X-Plane plug-ins I used for the flight presented in the previous series of posts with their current prices. You do not need any of these to have a great time flying in X-Plane, it is just what I used for the flight. In comparison to what I had to pay for the Computer to run it on, it is a steal.

The last blog post left us in cruise enroute from Yellowknife to Edmonton International Airport. Enduring the usual cruise-boredom let us check the current wind and compare it to what we predicted during our pre-flight preparation.

After five blog posts of preparation it is now finally time to take the 732 into the air on our flight from Yellowknife (CYZF) to Edmonton (CYEG). Figure 1: Cleared for Take-Off As expected by the flight planning software, the Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS) announces Runway 34 as active for CYZF. This directly opposite to our travel direction, accordingly we have to do an almost 180° turn after takeoff.

Finally, after four blog posts of preparation, everything is ready and we can launch X-Plane. Keep in mind that everything I described in the previous posts usually only takes a few (speak single digits) minutes. INS Alignment As mentioned in the first post of this series I will use the FlyJSim 737-200 with Philipp Muenzel’s CIVA INS. The INS needs quite some time to warm up and properly align itself. So the first thing I do inside the plane after establishing electrical power is taking care of the INS alignment.

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…

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.