How to enter a long flight plan into your GPS...

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.
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. Oakland, when they got hold of me,
soon gave me a different routing - but easy, Point Reyes and the
PYE1 approach to PAO.

Next time, I don't think I'll bother!

(Norcal however was a different story. Has ANYBODY been handled
by Norcal lately without being forgotten about? They failed to give me
a handover, then of course when I finally queried it and they DID hand
me over, to an irate controller on another sector who wanted to know
where I'd been and why I'd ignored his traffic calls. Sigh.)

John

John Harper wrote:

... The flight plan was pretty complicated, over a dozen
waypoints all carefully entered into my shiny new 530 during climb out.
And guess what... I got to fly to exactly one of them....

Last, current and next waypoints are usually all you need.

GPS box peddlers sell features like 500 routes of sixty waypoints like
PBX sellers peddle their list of over a hundred featurs of which our
advanced switching design staff used call forwarding, waiting and
sometimes, transfer...

"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.
--
Dan
C172RG at BFM

Not a big deal. You need the flight plan in case of lost comm, so you have
to enter it. If they give you direct to some place on the plan just bring
up the Flight Plan page, select the item, and press direct. This will leave
the rest of flight plan alone. It happens to me all of the time.

jerry

"

"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