"Nasir" wrote in message
news
Having received my PPL recently and been on several cross countries, I was
wondering how extensive of a flight plan do people prepare before the
trip?

Nasir,

I am a relatively low-time pilot and just made a small cross country just
yesterday. My experience has been that I still do some flight planning
manually, but I let my computer do the number crunching.

My flight planning consisted of looking on my sectional for a destination,
drawing a line, making note of landmarks for checkpoints, measuring the
distance and True Heading and estimating time en route with my E-6B. This
took all of 10 minutes (It would have been shorter, but the Sunday morning
news was on and I would plan during the commercial breaks).

Then, I went to my computer, started up the AOPA's free flight planner,
typed in my departure and arrival points and voila, my flight was planned.
All the wind correction, magnetic variation, fuel calcs and times are
computed almost instantly (for both forth and hence), saving me many minutes
of planning.

Here's the important step: I checked over the Navigation log to make sure
that it somewhat matched my crude manual numbers. This way, if I made a
mistake somewhere, it would be a red flag telling me to look over my plan
again. I then went to AOPA's AFD and printed out my destination's info and
diagram.

I let the computer's flight planner do the wind correction angle, fuel
calculations, fuel at each leg, time en route etc. Manually, doing these
calculations is the most time consuming part of flight planning.

I usually fly totally by pilotage since I don't have a GPS. I rarely even
use the VOR, since most of my flights are over the country to small
airports. Some day, I'll get a GPS though, because I think it would be a
great insurance policy against that sinking feeling that you've just passed
your destination airport and you've got to turn around (or do you?).

-Trent
PP-ASEL