Load PLN file into avionics of 2020 aircraft in 2024

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I’m not sure if I’ve missed something obvious, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to load a .pln file into the EFB in 2024 and have it load into the avionics of a 2020 aircraft in Free Flight.

‘Send to avionics’ works for 2024 aircraft, but not for 2020 aircraft. ‘Send to ATC’ will load the ATC route into the avionics of most 2020 aircraft, but that’s not the route in the .pln, it’s the one ATC has decided to give me. Custom waypoints, for example, are lost.

What I want to do is, as in 2020, load a .pln file, start free flight, and have that plan - including user waypoints - show up in the G1000, G3000 etc of my compatible 2020 aircraft like the Kodiak 100. I can’t find any way to do this, and frankly entering the plan manually is a pain I’m not willing to go through, especially as entering user waypoints manually in Garmin is painful.

Am I missing something obvious? Or is this just not possible any more? If not, it seems like a pretty big omission, considering that most people have a stable of 2020 aircraft which are supposed to be compatible with 2024.

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The EFB FPL is a different format entirely.

I’ve relied on Little Nav Map since the beginning of 2020 to create plans outside of the sim. Alex Albar (author) has had to split out the export of the .PLN file into 2020 and 2024 specific formats, implying there is a technical and structural difference.

That being said, you might need to resort to the same - using an external EFB that understands both formats. Then load that 2020 specific .PLN into the '24 EFB and then Send to ATC. That has worked consistently for me.

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Interesting. So the Send to ATC is supposed to work with 2020 aircraft but the .pln file has to be in the ‘new’ format for the EFB to send it complete? Presumably ‘send to avionics’ uses hooks that don’t exist in the older avionics used by the 2020 aircraft.

I will give that a try via LNM, and let you know how I get on.

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Right. So far as I can tell, regardless of aircraft, I must export the right file type to the right sim - i.e., 2020 file to 2020, 2024 file to 2024. Honestly, the EFB is getting in the way lol. I know it’s there mostly for the XBox users who don’t have these options, as well as giving everyone who doesn’t have Navigraph access to Charts, but still…

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Nope. It doesn’t work, sadly. It looks like it will - I took the 2020 .pln, loaded it into LittleNavMap and exported it as a 2024 .pln; loaded this into the EFB, and hit ‘send to ATC’, and the route shows up on the world map with the custom waypoints, but when I enter the flight my avionics have only the airport waypoints, and have added an approach that I didn’t ask for or select.

This is in the G3X in the RV14; I don’t have any other 2020 aircraft on this machine (not my main sim machine, which is currently out of use) but I’ll see if I can install G1000 and G3000 aircraft and try with them.

However, ultimately ‘send to ATC’ isn’t what I want, because I’m not going to use the sim ATC. I want to just load a .pln and have it show up in my avionics like it would in 2020, no ATC and no enforced procedures.

I do a lot of group flights (including the official one on Fridays) and I often take a 2020 aircraft because I only fly aircraft that work in my simpit environment - that is, have Air Manager panels etc - so I only fly a few default 2024 aircraft and then I have a number of 2020 aircraft that I use regularly. The flights usually have a .pln file which includes custom waypoints, and there’s no way to load one of these into a 2020 aircraft it seems, so I end up having to import the plan into ForeFlight and watch the map there for routing, which is frankly stupid.

Yet another thing that they’ve taken away from us. Sigh. Unless anyone else knows different?

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Ah, I wonder if it’s those Custom Waypoints.

For flights planned with standard nav/waypoints, I encourage future readers of this thread to triple-check the EFB actually read the plan correctly. Two out of three times I loaded my plan in the flight I’m on right at this moment, and it read it as a point-to-point plan. Which of course caused havoc talking to ATC and understood cruise altitudes. Third time was the charm, and I invoked the plan once more with ATC radio interaction and got things all lined up.

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Ah wait. Does the G3X have a GTN?

Not that it should matter with custom WPs, but for anything else, it won’t accept an IFR plan, a VFR plan it should - at least all the RNAV points. Any VORs, etc. probably not.

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In 2020, whatever PLN file you loaded in the world map would be the ATC plan. There was no distinction between the player’s flight plan and the ATC flight plan for the player. So, this isn’t a change in that requirement/behavior.

Does the RV14 have the AS3X from 2020 or the WT G3X from 2020?

Does the route in the EFB look correct to you? Does it have the auto-selected approach or no?

I can’t think of a reason off the top of my head that anything would be dropped in the 2020 avionics for sync from the ATC/legacy player plan, but it’s something we can investigate.

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Let me set up some tests and I’ll report back.

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Right… I have done some testing, and TLDR I can’t get it to work reliably.

For this test I was using the Fly-In Friday plan for Guyana & Suriname which can be downloaded here: Eugene F. Correia Intl to Zorg en Hoop Airport. This is a 2020-format .pln file which has 5 custom waypoints, grouped in two groups around the departure and destination airports.

I used the FlightFX / Marwan Gharib HJET for this test. This has the 2020-latest G3000 avionics.

Long story short - I can load the .pln and send the route to ATC, but the five custom waypoints are replaced with two in the aircraft avionics. It looks like the custom waypoints are too close together and are being merged somehow.

Also: when I send to ATC, the world map airport selection changes to the start airport and the current live runway is selected for departure. I want to start cold and dark at parking, so I select a parking spot in the world map. When I do this, all of the intermediate waypoints are removed from my plan, and the EFB shows a suggested routing instead and also adds VFR departure and approach procedures. Which is fine for a proper flight planning session, but not at all what I want.

I re-load the .pln into the EFB and Send to ATC again, and then I get the full route and remain at the parking I previously selected. But when I enter the flight, I find that the 5 custom waypoints (which are all displayed on the world map) have become 2 custom waypoints.

If I swap for the default Longitude and follow the same procedure, I get all of the custom waypoints in the flight plan as expected.

I also tested with the Kodiak 100 which has the current 2020 G1000 avionics, and the results were the same as for the HJET except that the custom waypoint names for the merged waypoints were different.

I also sheep-dipped the .pln via LittleNavMap and exported to 2024 format, and tried all of the above again, and got the same results.

Basically, there’s no way to get a .pln with all custom waypoints intact into a 2020 aircraft that I can find. The EFB flight planner is focussed on flight planning - which is the whole purpose of it, of course - but IMHO there needs to be a way to just load a .pln and go, like there is in 2020 from the world map.

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This is definitely a bug. When you start a career flight, for example, you can see the flight path by means of the blue square brackets, but the GPS does not follow this path, but takes a direct course to the destination airport. This is also the case in free flight. Waypoints inserted in between are ignored by the GPS and are not flown.