Executive Aircraft Flight Planning

[Courtman]

How do executive aircraft operators perform flight planning? Do you manually plan everything yourself, or is it done through a computer system? Do you receive a flight briefing pack, including weather, NOTAMs etc.?

If a flight planner is employed, what are the requirements for qualifications? Experience or an FAA Dispatch licence?

Let me know what happens at your organisation. I currently work in an Ops room for an airline, and would be interested to know how the executive side of things works, especially in the UK and Europe with the Brussels routing schemes etc.

Thanks!

[Check 6]

In the U.S., it varies. The really large corporations have Dispatchers who conduct the flight planning. Other operators pay commercial companies for overseas trip planning; Universal Weather, Jeppesen, etc. Some may have their pilots do their own planning.

FlightSafety International offer a International Procedures Course (IPC) to train pilots on planning flights across the ponds.

Here, our pilots do their own flight planning, using very sophisticated proprietary software as necessary.

Hope this helps.

[pilot dude]

Jeppesen offers a worldwide planning service for pilots that are to bussy flying, Aspecially handy for organising airportslots for the big airports of europe.

PD

[ 29 October 2001: Message edited by: pilot dude ]

[noax2grind]

As PD says Jeppeson offer a full service, also Universal wil assign a team to you who can provide full computer flight planning/ met briefing service. They will also arrange handling services through their worldwide network of FBO`s.
Most corporate a/c work on this system because the crews dont have the time or resources to do it themselves. There are larger operations that do charter work that might need the services of an ops officer. Otherwise you could consider working for one of the FBO`. In UK for example Metro at Luton or STN
Cheers

[Will Rogers]

In our company we have an ops. dep. that does everything. They have the same computers to "talk" to Brussels as all the airlines do.

When we go fly we receive all the information (nav log, performance/GWC, Wx, NOTAMS and so on...) from them. So all we are left with are the remaining duties of a corporate pilot i.e. setting up the aircraft, loading bags and taking care of the pax.

Hope it helps!

Will

[bearcat88]

Our flight department is mostly local (North America) so we crunch our own numbers but, when we travel afar, we utilize Jeppesan for trip paks and enroute support. Never had a problem. This isn't an endorsement for one company over another but rather just the system that I inherited. Universal et al may be equally proficient or even better.
88

[hairy_kiwi]

When I was flying for a Private Co (BE20) we used BaseOps at Gatwick. Only a mob tel call away for delays, filing ready msg etc and flight briefing pack incl notams and wx faxed to hotel, etc.

Only a small no of employees there, but a friendly bunch, give them a call. No number handy sorry.

h_k