The 'accuracy' of your OFP, is more often dependant on your Nav office or whoever has responsibility for the maintenance and set-up of your flight planning system and route builds, than it is the day to day operations/flight dispatch people- although of course they should have the ability to adjust that as required on the day. The 'default' settings for fuel requirements/bias/aircraft registration in the flight planning system are rarely communicated to the crews in my experience, let alone the operations/dispatchers. Direct routings in place of SIDS/STARS may often (should) have an increased distance bias which in fact considers the longest track distances for a given airport/runway, which is of course conservative and correct. Further, your nav people should be monitoring the completed flight PLOGS to ensure the OFP's going out are accurate and any fuel degradation for a given airframe is built into the system. But crucially, pilots must give their feedback regarding routings, fuel burns etc. in order to refine the data in the system, and on the otherhand, I think it is important for you to understand the system defaults.
Last edited by no sig; 26th Nov 2009 at 16:19.