Pre-planned routes?

[Nicholas49]

I just wondered whether the route for each commercial flight must be planned individually?

Say for example you're the PIC on a very early short-haul departure and neither you nor the F/O have ever flown this route before. Would you have to plan your route when you get to the airport at 4am while sorting out fuel and everything else, or does the airline provide standard routes for its network which you can use?

Many thanks for your informed replies!
Nick

[Intruder]

In an airline, the flight plan is provided to the crew by the Dispatcher.

[stansted_dan]

In the airline I work for and as is also the case with most others, the ops department will do the flight planning. We create flight plans for each and every flight, and along with weather, plogs, fuel figures, NOTAMS etc we then upload this to a crew website where pilots can access it and print it from home/hotel/airport.

Larger airlines will often have repetitive flight plans, which will file themselves automatically each day on an already planned route. This obviously works well because otherwise they'd need a huge ops department to file hundreds of plans a day, but it can also be inefficient. Airways open/close all the time and so a route which was planned a few months ago might not be the most direct route available today. Several weeks ago I was looking at two large European airlines on a Valencia-London route and one airline was flying about 150nm further than the other, just where one hadn't updated their plans for a long time and were flying a far from direct route!