"Dan Luke" c172rgATbellsouthDOTnet wrote in message ...
"John Harper" wrote:
In two words, don't bother.

Flew today Anacortes (north of Seattle) back home to Palo Alto,
IFR at FL190. The flight plan was pretty complicated, over a dozen
waypoints all carefully entered into my shiny new 530 during climb out.

Are you talking about a flight plan or a clearance? Wouldn't you enter a
flight plan on the ground?

And guess what... I got to fly to exactly one of them. Initially I was
vectored, then given direct to one of them, then I asked direct for
the last one in Seattle's airspace, and they gave me direct Palo Alto.
Very nice of them, and I did appreciate it. But it made all that
twiddling pretty pointless.

I agree about entering a compex flight plan that you've never flown before -
most likely your clearance and route will be different. When I'm given a
multipoint clearance from ATC though, I always load it in the GPS. In the
(unlikely, I admit) event that I lose com in IMC and have to fly my original
clearance, it's right there for me.


look at it as a 'proficiency exercise' for the 530. i know that's how i
learned the kln-89b. had flown apollo gps's, bought a twin that had the
'89b already installed/ifr cert'd. i had heard that they had a really
crummy u/i, but i didn't find it so bad. my first long x/c was from
texas to boston, and from lyh to owd i had my clearance changed 8 times.
by the time i got to owd, i was pretty 'seasoned' at entering flight
plans in the '89b. :-)

g_a