I often times make flight paths for sections of cities I fly over. I notice that occasionally when I “add a waypoint”, instead of making the most obvious flight path to reach said waypoint, it often times connects with a prior waypoint making the flight path I’m designing go haywire.
I’ve made a video to describe what I’m encountering. The arrival and destination is fine, the first added waypoint which is Mission High School was fine. The 2nd waypoint I added, Arleta High School, also seemed to work for the most convenient flight path as well.
However at around the 1:40 mark of the video, you’ll notice when I try to add Robert H Lewis High School waypoint, instead of continuing the Southeast flight path, it makes Robert H Lewis high school as the 1st waypoint, which is stupid and extra flying.
At first this was very annoying, but to get around this, I have started to “learn the city” in a way where I don’t need the waypoints and instead can eyeball certain landmarks, but some cities/areas are harder than others to do that.
I think the idea is to highlight the appropriate leg by clicking on it. The leg should then have a white border, and when you add a waypoint, it will be inserted between the two points at each end of this leg.
In practice, this doesn’t always work for me - I often cannot highlight the leg in this way. Unfortunately another of the minor bugs which Asobo will never get around to fixing.
I’m super ignorant when it comes to comprehending the solution given. I glanced at the link but it’s completely foreign to me.
I’m one of those that has to have someone tell me step by step what to do before I comprehend it. Reading “how to instructions” or watching someone, still is hard for me to grasp.
There is a free PLN program that you can find in the MS store that is pretty good for basic planning. It has full satellite mapping cover so you can see where you are placing the waypoints, and it’s easy to adjust their order. It only shows airports and not any navaids, so what I do is create the main plan in FS, save it as a .pln file, then open in the PLN program to add other waypoints and POIs.
I find it a lot easier to use than Little Navmap. It is very basic, but it’s fine for VFR stuff.
If you are referring to PLN Flight Planner, I just tried that out. I experienced 2x noop without message when I forgot to put an ICAO destination and a CTD when reading the same PLN generated with ICAO destination. Inspecting it closely, it seems PLN Flight Planner allows for multiple waypoints with the same ID. All beginners errors, but when I corrected things manually, it still crashed. I’m not sure yet about the precise cause of this second crash, but apparently PLN Flight Planner allows you to save invalid .PLN files. It should check and validate and it does not do that. So beware…
I’ve had a couple of plans that crashed with it, but I emailed the developer for support and he kindly sorted out my faulty plans and said he was working on an update to the program.
Little NavMap is extremely comprehensive, but it’s a steep learning curve and the interface is not the most intuitive to use. A little cosmetic makeover on the front end would make it a lot easier to get your head around.
If you have LNM, you might like to try this … (LNM now does a very good job in outputting MSFS Valid Flight Plans)
However you are creating your Flight Plan, when you have finished making it, IMPORT it into LNM, and then EXPORT a new copy from LNM, and use that exported version.
If you really want to deep dive into this, compare your original ,pln file with the one Exported by LNM. (you can view these .pln files, as text files in Notepad, or any Non-Word-Processor text editor,
Modify flight plan,works great ! right click on the map, menu Add position to flight plan. Export to MSFS and load it. Nice to have all details at hand on the map.
LNM is brilliant. A flight planner, enhanced sectional and moving map in one. Plus the ability to define Performance files so you can get darn close in-sim fuel block projections.
For VFR, nothing beats the ability of LNM to define a custom approach into an uncontrolled field with no IAPs. Problems finding that little grass strip claiming to be an aerodrome? Set up a five mile approach in the plan and you’ll be lined up with plenty of spacing to get an optimal GS.
I’m a simple man with a simple mind. A lot of the suggestions, while I’m sure they would work, they are too much for me to comprehend.
However, if you can record a step by step “how to” so I can watch exactly how it’s done from start to finish, I could pick up what ya’ll are laying down much easier.
I just made a thread on a free app that allows you to record anything on your pc-
I being tracked now
