Well, I don’t care about that tablet much and I don’t own any of those planes you mentioned. The only thing I’m looking forward to are T/O performance calculations for all variants. I’m an avid flight plan typer (I don’t need Simbrief import), I load the aircraft via the FMC and the rest is done by GSX.
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That’s the way to go my man
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That why im not enjoying the 7878/10 and the 747…
All of this “entering the simbrief flight plan” is bringing the best out of my dyslexia mixed in with my inability (aka laziness) of checking my flight plan “i didn’t know that this Hong Kong to Singapore flight takes me towards lax…!!!”
But I’m also a sker for punishment…
Hey… we can’t have cookies and cake at the same time can we 
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Completely agree, only nice feature would be able to load winds instead of manually entering them, which can take too long on a long route.
I just enter the winds at TOC. I think that’s pretty standard practice.
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Hello. For a while I have noticed that when I am stopped ok stand, parking brake activated, after few minutes, the 737 has retreated a few metres… does anyone have the same problem?
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The 737 is a short medium haul airplane. You don’t need to enter wind for every point (especially if they’re not too different).
What we normally do in the real airplane is to enter the AVERAGE WIND. You can enter it in CRZ WIND in PERF INIT and it’ll populate your legs page.
I’d only enter winds point by point in a day where fuel is critical. Imagine a day where in the middle of the cruise you get the “USING RESERVE FUEL” message and it’s just for 100Kg. Then I’d enter winds point by point for the remaining route to make a decision to divert to the alternate or to commit to destination (good weather, multiple runways with ILS, etc).
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Thanks. I always enter these and then load winds for cruise from simbrief as well. From now on I will just do the AVG on PERF INIT. But I presume you will still always enter the descent winds? Or maybe not?
Isn’t it the T/C wind in PERF INIT page?
And what about the wind request in the LEGS > RTE DATA page?
Why does the FMC require you to enter the slope of the take-off runway during the PERF INIT process (take-off page)? I figured that value would be contained in the FMC’s data base, just like the ILS frequency and runway heading.
Yeah, depending on the FMC version (or maybe it’s an operator option), PERF INIT may show either T/C WIND or CRZ WIND. Our say T/C WIND (I can’t remember what the PMDG one shows).
Keep in mind this is company procedures, not universal procedures. By the book I would introduce TOC WIND in PERF INIT and AVG WIND in RTE DATA LEGS.
(AVG WIND goes on two or three points after Top of Climb for reasons related to how the FMC would revert to PERF INIT wind if given a direct to an initial point with no introduced wind before having cleared a point with introduced wind… The thing has quirks)
What I see most people do on the line do is to just enter AVG WIND from the OFP right into PERF INIT and they don’t even go to RTE DATA. I don’t do it like that because I’m ocd and I like to follow the book unless there’s a good reason not to.
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That’s not a required entry. Entry points with underscores are optional. Mandatory data entries show boxes. These entries in Take off Ref 2 are only there for cross referencing the data calculated externally either with an OPT (EFB) or by having used airport analysis like not long ago when EFBs weren’t a thing.
When you do your final CDU preparation the figures calculated by the FMC need to be within a certain distance from the figures calculated externally and (hopefully) independently by both pilots. If the numbers in the FMC differ too much from the externally calculated figures then the crew will notice it and look for where a gross error may have been made.
I’ve never entered slope or wind in TAKE OFF REF 2/2 the real FMC but I always set the runway condition for the V1 reduction (DRY/WET/SK-R).
In our case if the figures from the FMC are within 1 knot from the ones calculated externally then we accept the FMC speeds. If the difference between FMC and EFB is greater than 1 knot we use the figures from the EFB provided they are not indicative of an input error.
That way we’re cross-referencing 3 different sources: CAPT EFB, FO EFB and FMC.
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The EFB is now in the last phase of testing! Awesome I can´t wait to see the first screenshot of how this EFB will look like.
There’s a caveat here: the box doesn’t actually use purely your entered average wind component to calculate time and fuel remaining downline. It blends current wind with entered cruise wind using an algorithm that changes over distance. If you’re going to experience a dramatic wind shift at any point in your flight, simply entering one cruise wind value - even if it is an average wind component - isn’t going to yeild results as accurate as if you’d entered all the legs winds. On an hour flight it doesn’t matter much, but on a 5 or 6 hour flight crossing one or more branches of the jetstream, it can make a big difference. The cruise wind uplink feature makes it convenient to grab legs winds, and the PMDG stimulates this pretty well.
All that being said, the 737 is still using an FMC designed for short flights. Good dispatch software is always going to generate more accurate results than the FMC, so it’s wise to trust the flight plan more than the box. Even in a divert scenario, time permitting I’ll always acars or SATCOM dispatch for their fuel burn numbers, and those are usually more accurate. That’s highly dependent on the quality of dispatch software used though; whether it applies trend data fuel factors to individual tail numbers etc. No promises it applies to simbrief. 
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Since most of the time we carry more fuel than we need in our SOPs we choose to enter AVG as our standard turnaround is 25 minutes.
In any case where higher precision in the calculation of remaining fuel is required then we’d enter wind for the individual points. I only do it for the longest flights we do and I do it when we’re in the cruise.
But hey the good thing is in MSFS you can make up your own procedures and simulate that your chief pilot who is a bit extra…
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Cruise wind uplinks are very much SOP at my airline and all the others I know. I’m not sure I’d call it “made up” or “extra”.
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When you don’t have that ACARS functionality entering winds in RTE DATA point by point for a 2 hour flight is the very definition of extra.
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Fortunately, when using Simbrief in conjunction with the Simbrief downloader, the ability to import waypoint-by-waypoints winds aloft into the enroute portion of a PMDG flight plan (on the PC version) works very well.
Of course, Simbrief predicted winds aloft come from the NOAA GFS model while MSFS injected winds aloft come from the MeteoBlue NEMS model, but I find that they are usually quite close.
I usually don’t bother importing winds for a short flight, but normally do on longer flights. I have seen substantial changes in the predicted time enroute and fuel burn on the PROG page after importing winds for coast-to-coast flights.
Hopefully when the EFB finally arrives, upper wind import from Simbrief for the XBox version of the 737 will become possible.
When you do long flights, do you usually Edit Flight and regenerate in Simbrief as you get close to ToD, so as to get the latest wind info?