In article ,
"Nasir" wrote:

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?

There's really only two important questions for the vast majority of
flights most private pilots take:

1) Am I going to run into any weather I can't handle?

2) Am I going to have enough fuel to get there? Corellary: can I buy
fuel there, or do I need to plan on enough to get back too?

There are other things to answer, but those are the big ones. Everything
else you do is to make sure you can answer those two questions.

I certainly see no reason to slog over computing wind correction angles
and groundspeed for each individual leg by hand. Let a computer crunch
the numbers for you. I use the feee planner available on DUATs, but
there's lots of alternatives to pick from.

You certainly want to look at a chart and make sure your proposed route
makes sense. Most flight planners are perfectly happy to tell you, to
the minute and the 1/10th of a gallon, what it takes to fly direct from
Atlantic City to Block Island, but a quick glance at a sectional will
make it obvious you're proposing a flight over open ocean. Likewise,
you want to know about stuff like mountain ranges, airspace, etc.

I'm a big fan of visual flying. Sure, VOR or GPS will get you where you
want to go, but I think picking out landmarks on a chart and finding
them from the air is a big part of the fun of flying.