Recently, Michael 182 posted:

I'm kind of curious - does anyone with more than 100 hours do a
flight plan, with winds and all, before they fly cross country?

As I see it, the main idea of flight planning is to reduce the workload in
the cockpit. So, for any long XC or a trip to a new location, I plan the
heck out of it. Here in the midwest, the land is flat and can be
undifferentiated for as far as you can see and for quite a while, so
getting lost is not all that difficult. There are also lots of Class C & D
airports, so if you fly for 5 minutes in any direction you'll be in
someone's vicinity, and I like as much information about local traffic as
I can get. There's nothing like discovering a flight of F-15s about to
take off from a Class D airport just as you're approaching it (it
happened!).

To make XC planning easier, I've set up an Exel spreadsheet that goes
beyond the paper form, listing all pertinent info; VOR radials, radio
freqs, headings, bearings, fuel status and so forth for each leg of the
trip. The TAFs are usually good enough to plug in the wind factors ahead
of time, and then headings and fuel consumption for all the waypoints are
calculated automatically. I also mark up the sectional to correspond with
the printed Excel pages, and set up my GPS to correspond with both.
Comparing ETAs with against the GPS becomes a simple task that can be done
without needing a calculator. By doing all this, most of the emergency
landing options are determined ahead of time, and I can focus on what's
going on outside the plane and enjoy the trip.

Neil