Flight Plan - Avoid "Shortest Route" for Wind

Hi, all. I do most of my flying on long-haul airliner routes and, although the flight planning system sometimes gives me a few options, they’re always the ‘shortest routes’ in terms of distance. I’m often left flying with minimal tailwind or insane headwinds, as I have no way of routing around a jetstream or other weather.

Any tips on how to rectify this? I’ve tried manually replacing waypoints but can’t find a way to do that.

(Let’s ignore the lack of ability to get en-route winds aloft or check weather at my destination while flying…I’ve landed downwind too many times following ATC’s directions but I guess it is what it is.)

Hello,

my personal opinion is to define FPL manually. Reasons? Typical FPL can bypass route restrictions and therefore generated FPL can be wrong in principle. Of course, this requires FPL cfg and routes knowledge to specific place/country. Typical FPL create your route as short as possible, due set maybe of LOW/HIGH routes but here that error can be inserted and complete FPL can be wrong. Now sry, not to be sure if I understand you correctly, in case of bypass bad weather or change route, it is only avoid procedure, only if ATC change your route then maybe pilot intervention to FPL is required.

Would you just do this by manually entering waypoints into the FMC, or is there a way to do this during the set-up phase so that it imports everything automatically?

It depends to aircraft,

what is correct procedure to add FPL inside it. Best steps are create FPL in some app or web service, export it to useful format and load to aircraft. In case you can’t then hard manual work is expected only :slight_smile:

I would set it up in Simbrief or some other external program. Then, in some aircraft, notably the Fly By Wire A32NX mod, you can connect it to Simbrief and download the flight plan directly into the FMC. Alternatively, you can export the flight plan from Simbrief into a MSFS plan file, which you load in the world map.

Thanks. I’ve started using SimBrief.

Another question: when I took off from ZRH, EWR was using Runway 22L/R, so I filed my flight plan for that. However, they switched to 04L/R as I came in over Boston. Am I unable to change my flight plan for that approach while in-flight? Is my only option to wait until I get the ATC clearance at which point I can request a different one? That didn’t give me enough time to descent and get ready for the new approach.

Someone more familiar with the FMC can help with the specifics, but yes, you would modify your flight plan “on the fly” (heheheh) and change to the newly-assigned procedure (unless you opt to request a different approach from ATC as you said). I typically fly GA, but I can use the “PROC” button on any of the Garmin avionics to select a new approach when this happens.

I’m using SimBrief now and am mostly happy with it. However, it starts me on the runway every time. If I try to load the plan and then select a gate for the starting point, it removes the flight plan and creates a new, default one. Any ideas on a solution?

Select the gate as you’re doing, then when you get into the plane, connect it to simbrief in the MCDU and load the plan from there (in the A32NX).

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