Text-based flight planning capability

Maybe its me, but MSFS hasn’t ever had any “real-world” way of flight planning, and it appears as if that trend is continuing in the latest release. As a real-world pilot who uses Foreflight and Flight Plan.com for flight planning it would seem logical to include similar ways to enter flight plans in MSFS. Instead we are forced to use a lousy world map, an awful unrealistic means of choosing and IFR flight with poor route selection. The flight plan inserts absurd waypoints that have no meaning whatsoever.

We need the ability to have the map method for those folks who are not real-world pilots and we need a method for those who are. I want to be able to enter a flight plan by simply copying and pasting it into MSFS and have the route ready to go and loaded into the chosen aircraft GPS/FMC.

Flight plans such as:

KLAX-YSSY: ZILLI4 ZILLI LAUER IGOTT FICKY B577 CANOL B577 PASSA B577 TUT B450 DUNAK B450 TEKEP B450 LHI UH258 RIKNI N774 MARLN
-or-
KORD-KLAX: PEKUE PIPPN ROTTN PWE J64 PUB J64 TBC JASSE Q90 DNERO ANJLL4
-or-
KORD-RJTT: PMPKN NEATO DLLAN RONIC BAE GRB YSP 5400N/09000W 5900N/09000W 6500N/09400W 6900N/11000W 7000N/12000W POTAT 6700N/15000W 6500N/16000W ENEGU 5900N/18000E NATES R220 NIKLL R220 NUZAN R220 NUBDA R220 NANAC Y810 OLDIV Y809 LESPO Y809 SUPOK

These should be “no-brainers” for any flight simulator to handle. MS and Asobo need to implement a means for this type of flight planning.

Agreed! Send your thoughts to MSFS developers using Zendesk.

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I agree that FS has never been good at the nuances of real world aviation and it seems to me they think of this as a game more than a true simulator. Hopefully the addon developers will soon release updates for MSFS to help make it what it should be.

Anyway, that’s why I use flight planning software for the simulator. One of them is freeware and I also just read SimBrief now has the capability to create FPs for MSFS 20 as well.

I’ve come to the realization Microsoft just doesn’t model aircraft well. But for me one of the most frustrating issues is the lack of things working. It seems like most of the dials, switches, and buttons are INOP. Even the option to turn off the labels in the cockpit is INOP.

It’s going to be a bumpy ride boys and girls . . .

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You are absolutely correct and I agree. If you select the IFR low route option as I did flying a GA aircraft from KPHX to KLAS it takes me on a totally different route from what I planned out using skyector.com. Using the skyvector flight plan you can add and remove waypoints but that is not ‘cut and paste’ like you can do in X-Plane. Mater of fact it was a bit of a pain to do because the waypoints were not listed even though they were there. How do I know that? You can search for waypoints using the search field on the left and voila, it’s magically there. So I wanted to add several waypoints (like PRFUM) and had to search one by one for the missing waypoints. Select the waypoint, add to route, remove the waypoint that MFS put in that I did not want and do it all over again with the next missing waypoint.

Like you said, some sort of cut and paste method needs to be implemented. Lots of us ‘real’ pilots do our flight planning outside of the sim.

Better days should be ahead right? :wink:

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I agree that MSFS should be able to accept a text string of a flight plan from any flight planning software or utility.

Its a bit of a process but I use a combination of SkyVector and SimBrief to create my plan then I can export the plan out of SimBrief to a file that MSFS can load at the world map screen.

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I agree. it’s a VFR sim right now

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Like ANCRM114, I use SimBrief, create a full flight plan, save to my computer and then load that plan into MSFS. In fact SimBrief has a recent update to save in MSFS format. I’m certain once aircraft from PMDG etc… are available we’ll be able to uplink into the FMC as in P3D etc…

Great options to import flight plans from external source directly into MSFS.

…until you need to amend the route in-flight :roll_eyes:

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In the absence of anything in the simulator, I would wash this through Littlenavmap. Entering the following into LNV:

KLAX ZILLI LAUER IGOTT FICKY B577 TUT B450 LHI UH258 RIKNI N774 MARLN YSSY

This will create the flight plan for me, I can then export this as a PLN file, and pull this into MSFS.

And, if you fly vatsim or any service that has live controllers, you WILL eventually need to amend a clearance while in the air.

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I’ve been using SimBrief to generate plans and import them into MFS. However it still seems to be a work in progress as it won’t always correctly import the right approach info, and whenever I change it to the correct approach the flight sim will change the entire path. VNAV info also doesn’t get imported, but that’s probably because VNAV isn’t complete yet.

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I’ve done it this way as well. One thing I’ve found using SimBrief is that the start position gets set to the instead of a gate or parking spot.

In case you have not yet noticed…

Little Nav Map is another option to generate flight plans for import. I haven’t tested it yet but other people’s reports look promising:

There are several external options to generate flight plans. My point is why do we need to go outside MSFS and do it. Why can’t it be included in the simulator? A simple text box field to paste the flight plan is all that is needed and the code logic to piece it together. Its not rocket science.

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True, you nailed it :wink:

I voted this up as well. The interface and planning capabilities need major improvements.

You are quite right in your expectations for this totally wonderful and in so many ways fantastic sim. But I also think that we could expect an internal flightplanner that takes a further step from the FSX simplistic flight planner and make it possible to search for and implement a valid route directly also when in the plane positioned at a gate. However: To be able to copy and paste a route into the sim is an absolute minimum, in my view.
Regards.

Flight planning would be much easier if we could just enter a series of waypoints as text.
Ex: A textbox where I could enter “PAKT ICK PR YJQ etc” would be SO much easier than the current system of trying to find a point on the map (which doesn’t always appear to load all navaids?) so I can click and add it to the route.

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I wrote a free Flight Planner that (I think) models your idea. You can find it by searching YouTube for “Grand Tour Flight Planner”.

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During flight planning inside the sim, they show us a nice spreadsheet. Can we enter our own arbitrary (but reasonable) waypoints, altitudes and speeds for each waypoint? Just like filling in excel. Or let us save and load from excel. It is a microsoft product. If we enter something the airliner can’t do, it just won’t do it.
I will look at the FMC later today to see if they let me play with altitudes and speeds there.
Thanks.