Contacttower
10th Sep 2008, 17:42
I was looking through the Transair catalogue the other day and came across FliteStar which I thought looked like quite a useful IFR flight planning tool....my question is though do many people use it and is really worth the £399 price tag?
julian_storey
10th Sep 2008, 17:50
I've used it and it rarely spits out a route which is accepted straight away.
I find that the best way to get a route accepted is to get a Jepp airways chart and a highlighter pen :)
IO540
10th Sep 2008, 18:41
The tool I use for airways route generation is Autoplan (http://www.autoplan.aero). This is quite new. I find 99% of routes are done completely automatically - it submits a routing to CFMU, looks at any error messages, and iterates automatically. You also get stuff like fly-through waypoints.
The autorouting feature in Flitestar (which I have used many times) just works on airways and their directionality (if any). This works for e.g. EGHH to LEGR and in that general area. It almost never works for e.g. EGHH to LKPR or in the general easterly direction, and often I just gave up after an hour's hacking.
This site (http://rfinder.asalink.net/free/) has been going for some years and appears to be based on some database, and it goes a step beyond Flitestar in that while it works the same way as FS, you can exclude the published route restrictions and re route. But its inability to do fly-through waypoints often gets you into a dead end. It was great in its time but I no longer use it.
Anyway, back to Flitestar IFR. For Eurocontrol IFR ("airways") routes, it's the only game in town (Navbox is no good for airways stuff) so the price is immaterial ;) It is a bit clunky (it is an ex Mac application which Jepp bought in yeas ago, I gather) but you soon suss out how to use it in the necessary basic way. Autoplan can also generate a route which you can paste into FS's Plain Text input - I have just spent a couple of hours planning a long trip and doing all this. Much easier than it used to be...
The thing I currently find slightly annoying with FS is that there are huge bugs in the custom aircraft performance configuration area. I have tried to modify the TB20 model with some real values and no matter what I do, it bombs the program. So, my next flight will have the plog showing minus five USG of fuel at destination :)