Over the past year, I have collected a lot of .pln files from many group flights and other places.
I have them kind-of organized by folders, by the multiplayer group that i flew them with. But, if i want to revisit them, going by the name really doesn’t tell me where they are, how long they are, or if they were any good.
I’m looking for an app that can do all this:
show the plans all at once on a world map, with pan/zoom tools
allow me to apply 1-5 star rating
filter by min/max distance or time, based on a cruise speed
record other info such as Group flown with, & allow filtering on that data
maybe a field for sceneries needed/recommended for a .pln
Is there anything out there like this? Can some talented developer make one?? Or if these features could be made part of little nav map or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Simbrief is completely free and stored your flight plans for you (online database).
They only keep the last few plans active / pdf available but they do keep the rest of your flights in same list and you can just select it and regenerate the plan.
Except for point 1, you could probably do this yourself with a (free) database tool, or even in a spreadsheet. If it were I, SQLite and a free GUI would be the way I would go.
You would have to enter the fields manually, and have a field for the name of the .pln file. If you want something that scans the .pln file and calculates the data, that would be hard.
As for point 1: I’m not sure that it would be useful to display all the FPs at once on one world map. It would be very crowded. If you color coded the waypoints/airports/routes you would quickly run out of colors.
However, I think you could arrange a DB GUI so that you could click on a plan and it would invoke a program (like mine, LNM, etc, etc) where the .pln file is input. That pgm would give a map display and other information about the FP would be easily browsed. Again, multiple plans on one map would not be easy (or useful, IMHO).
My (free) flight planner has a nice summary report. You could generate that and put the filename in your database. I could probably add a comment field without too much trouble.
There is no flight plan manager app… However, if you use the built-in logbook, select a flight, an option is displayed to fly the route again. But the logbook needs a manager!
I, too, have a large number of flight plans. I use a naming convention of “IFR/VFR, Departure, Arrival, and then the approach, the specific aircraft or other notes”. Windows is my flight plan “manager”. For example, to select all the IFR flight plans departing LAX, I search for files beginning with “IFR_KLAX_*.pln” and this file list can be sorted by Arrival or date. Windows search is powerful because it can search on data within the files. For example, to find all the flight plans with waypoint ABCDE, put ABCDE in the search box.
I also use subfolders to manage my flight plans. I create a subfolder for each event I plan.
I have found that some of my older flight plan files don’t work because of either MSFS changing the internal structure of the flight plan or navigation database updates such as VOR no longer in service or airport runway changes.
I used the program FileMeta to set up a couple fields for pln files, and i can edit them from explorer’s properties panel. Should be enough for what i need.
That application is interesting, I can see a lot of uses for it. In the meantime, I was interested in your original post, it seemed like a good idea so I starting working on a small application. I’ll probably have an initial beta, maybe as early as this weekend. It is a fun app that I am learning a few things which is always fun.
Nice! Will definitely check it out once youre done.
In the meantime ive been running with the custom properties method, probably about halfway done with the 400 or so plans i have. bonus is that the data is visible from the msfs load flightplan screen.
I’ve uploaded an initial version of a new flight plan manager. I’m still trying to decide what columns to add (suggestions welcome), for example, I see above “Author” which might nice. I also want to add the ability to choose which columns to show and add filtering, but I’ve at least got a start.
it seems to complain if i have multiple plans with the same start/end.. i know theres a few like that but they have different waypoints in between. should be ok to import them separate.
could the map view show all of them at once? maybe not put balloons on the waypoints, it will get messy.. and when you click a line on the map it highlights the row it came from.
Thanks, its been fun to work on and I learned how to display a map in a windows form. I’m always looking for new ideas to work on for fun rather than work and I enjoy giving back to the community as I use so many tools from others.
It bases the duplicate on the title in the plan file:
KGWO to 7M1
I added this so if you tried to import the same plan again, it wouldn’t insert a duplicate. I could change the check to look at filename instead which should cover your use case.
I can play with map a bit more, I think displaying all could get unusable quickly but the click/hi-light is an interesting idea. I also want to change so the map can stay open and whatever you click in the grid will update the map
maybe the map can show just a number icon of the count of plans over the area if youre zoomed out too far, and as you zoom in they resolve to the track lines to reduce data. maybe just a green balloon for the start and red for arrival, and the zigzagging line in between with no balloons.
i may be thinking too much of my own plans, most of which are ~200mi but there should be options to change the way it scales for folks that do 4000mi crosscountry trips so they can see theirs easily also
another question-- once imported, can the original .pln file be deleted? and then when you want to fly it, just hit export, correct?
I’ll think about the mapping suggestions. Some of them would take more time than I currently have to allocate to this application and may be for a very specific/unique use case. I do have some ideas for improving the map functionality but not as big as that.
As for the .pln files, yes they can be deleted as the plan is stored in the application database. I would ask that you test it out a bit as I have done very limited testing in that area and would hate for you to lose plans. I have tried a couple of import/export and compared them and they all seem to have 2 very minor differences:
The XML line (1st line in file) in the new file has utf-8 instead of UTF-8
All of the other lines in the files have less whitespace at the beginning
Neither of these should have any affect on the usage of the plan, but as I said, I would prefer for you to do your own test to verify it works as you expect.
