Real-life flight planning

In a previous article, Paul Folbrecht said:
Heh. Point taken. Do it on the PC at home and there's no real need for
the Palm.

Ok, just one small plug for CoPilot (see
http://xcski.com/~ptomblin/CoPilot/), even though the other posters have
been doing it for me.

A few months ago I was coming back from Muskegeon. That's a long trip for
me, and since I'm flying club planes I haven't "calibrated" the fuel flow
exactly. So I like get on the ground after 3.5 hours, even though
theoretically I could probably get 4.5 hours out of the tanks. I'd done
the flight plan earlier, and put all the appropriate waypoints into
CoPilot. With no wind, I would be nudging my comfort zone, so I made sure
I had the Buffalo approach plates on my knee board on top of the Rochester
ones, and figured I might have to make a refueling stop in Buffalo.

That morning, I called up flight service from my motel room, and got the
weather and winds aloft. Plugging the winds aloft into CoPilot, and I
could see that it would still be 3.6 hours to Rochester, so I filed to
Buffalo. All the time aloft, I was watching the ETAs in CoPilot and
comparing them to reality, and found I was getting better winds than
forecast. I recalculated the winds, found I could make it to Rochester,
so I asked ATC for a diversion to Rochester, and went home.

--
Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
Usenet is a co-operative venture, backed by nasty people -
follow the standards.
-- Chris Rovers