How to plan and execute a VFR flight in Microsoft Flight Simulator (Part 1 - Planning)

hello everyone my name is peter and today i'm going to be covering how to plan and execute a vfr flight in microsoft flight simulator this is perhaps the most impressive feature of microsoft flight simulator the ability to fly vfr anywhere in the world right out of the box with no add-ons vfr for those of you don't know stands for visual flight rules and in this context what it means is the ability to navigate only by what you see out the window with no instruments now microsoft flight simulator does have some features which help us to carry out these vfr flights and if you've done the training missions or any of these bush trips you'll have you'll have seen them they are the vfr map and the nav log unfortunately there's no instructions anywhere on how to use these features in your own flights and that is what i'd like to cover today in addition to that i find personally that the act of planning a flight gives that flight a sense of purpose and intent which for me at least makes it a much more satisfying and enjoyable experience so today i'm going to cover how to plan the flight the steps that i take the tools that i use and then finally i'm going to carry out that flight and show you how it all comes together so let's get started [Music] the first thing you need to do when planning a vfr flight is to choose where to fly so i'm going to open the world map and there are various tools out there which help you choose interesting places in the world to fly but there's really nothing wrong with just picking an area that you're interested in and going there and for the purposes of this video i'm going to choose this area here on the border of england and wales in herefordshire and i already know that i want to go to shopton airfield echo gulf bravo sierra now you'll notice as we zoom in we get this gray background and even if we switch to the uh satellite layer we don't really get any useful information for planning our vfr flight so we need to turn to other tools to do that so i'm going to make a note of the icao code egbs and i'm going to switch to bing maps now there are three reasons why i'm choosing to use bing maps to help plan our flight the first of which is that bing maps actually has some rather nice features for planning flights which we'll get to in a bit the second is that bing maps has the aerial photography from which the microsoft flight simulator scenery was built so if we want to get an idea of how well represented a certain feature is we can switch the aerial photography and that gives us a good idea of what it will look like in the simulator and then finally in the uk at least we have this ordnance survey option which is the very detailed maps that hikers or walkers will use to navigate the countryside so it contains lots of detailed information that can help us plan our vfr flight so i'll enter into the search the icao code of the airfield egbs and it comes up straight away here we are zoomed in on the aerodrome i'll zoom out a bit so we can see what's in the area and clearly for a vfr flight we need some sights to see and just looking at this i think what i'd like to do is head west over to this hill here rednell forest and then maybe loot background over the top back to the air dream so that'll be our general flight today we're going west looping background via dream now when you're planning a vfr flight what you'd like to do is break it up into easily navigable legs uh which are either quite short or quite well defined by 10 in terms of landscape features so that you know that you can follow them without getting lost and so in order to get west whilst we could just fly a heading of west and eventually we'll probably find this hill a more reliable thing to do would be to perhaps follow this road down here into the town of kington which will be a very obvious uh landmark then from kingston we can head northwest following this a road here uh up to the hill and equally instead of just doing a loop around the top we could say that what we want to do is fly northeast up to this town here of knighton and then following the road to the east to this corner here and then back down southeast uh until we get to this junction and then back to the aerodrome so those are the legs i'm gonna choose today and to measure them out what i'm going to use is the measure distance tool so i'm going to right click on the aerodrome and i'm going to click left click measure distance this will bring up a line starting from the aerodrome which will tell me how far away uh things are from it so if our first leg is gonna be down to kingdom i'll put the marker over kington and that will tell us in the top left that it's about 6.1 miles away which is a pretty good distance you don't want to make vfr legs too far unless you've got a very obvious landmark to follow such as a river or a road because you want to know as soon as possible whether you've got lost that you can try to rectify it without going too far of course so we come down to kington i'm going to left click here to put another like a node in our route and then from kington we're going to come north west up to red north forest i'm going to put a mark there and then from radnor forest we said we're going to come north east up to knighton and then from there we say we're going to follow the road east to this corner and then down south east to this junction and then back down the air air drain so i left click here and i'm going to click done and just you'll see that in the top left then we've got this this routing and it also tells us how far that is 37 miles uh which should take us about 20 minutes in our cessna 152 great we've got our route planned out and now we need to transfer that into the flight planner in the simulator so i'm going to switch back to microsoft flight simulator now and by left clicking on shoplin i'm going to set it as both the departure and the arrival airfield but you'll see that even if we zoom in there's no easy way for us to transcribe that routing that we just created into the flight planner but there is a way around that i'm going to alt tab back into bing maps and i'm going to right click near our first waypoint and you'll see that in this menu at the bottom is the latitude and longitude of the waypoint in the format we need for the simulator so i'm going to press copy which doesn't actually copy it just selects it so that i can press ctrl c to copy it i'm going to go back into the simulator and in this search bar i can press ctrl v to paste it and here it comes up as a custom waypoint where it should now i'm going to add that to our routing and i'm going to repeat that process for the remaining waypoints so right click copy copy paste click and add and copy copy paste click and add copy copy paste click and add and finally copy copy paste click and add now you'll see that microsoft flight simulator hasn't respected the order in which we added these waypoints and because they don't actually appear in the routing up here there's no way for us to switch them around at all in the simulator hopefully this is something that can be fixed in the future but there is a way around this it requires some manual editing of the plan file and i'm going to show you how to do that now i'm going to press load save and then save i'm going to go to my desktop i'm just going to save it as shopton save and now if i open notepad i can press file open go to my desktop and then if i select all files you'll see that it's created these four files and i want the dot pln file i'll open that and this is an xml document of that route we just created and our particular interest is this section down here which starts with the atc waypoints here so these are in order of what the flight plan has we see we start agbs we enter agbs and we have one two three four five custom waypoints as we'd expect the simulators also helpfully added these extra waypoints which i don't want so i'm going to delete both of those just by selecting the block in which they appear and deleting now this is where it gets a bit janky because as far as i can tell there isn't a whole lot of sense to the order in which they appear in the plan file here and we need to determine which waypoint is which from our flight plan and the way that we can do that is if we zoom in on the airfield in the simulator the way that the routing is drawn is that it goes from the end of the departing runway it goes round and then it comes back at the end to the start of the arriving runway so what we can tell is because at the end of runway 26 it goes up to our last waypoint we know that the switch back to notepad we know that this waypoint this top one here is actually way point five so i can rename this i'm gonna call this custom five just because uh just so that i can remember which one's which and we can see that on the routing it goes from five to four to three to one to two and so that's the order in which they appear so i'm going to put those in five to four to three to one to two and now it's my job to rearrange these custom waypoints uh in the plan file so they appear in the correct order so i'm gonna um it seems the easiest way to do that is to take three i'm gonna cut that put it below two and i'm going to take four put it below three i take five play four and now i'll delete spaces and i can press ctrl or press file save and now if i go back into here i press load save again i will load this from the desktop the plan file and now here we have the routing as we'd expect if we go to the nav log we'll see that this appears as we would like it goes from shoplin to custom one to custom two and then it has these intermediate ones then custom three four and five brilliant so it looks like we're ready to fly and that's what we'll get to next just before we do i'm going to set up the flight conditions we're flying the cessna 152 from runway 26 and for the weather i'm going to take a custom set it to live time seems good and then i want to base it off a few clouds and i want this um cloud layer to start above 4000 feet just so it doesn't get in our way so i'm gonna move that up and then that we should be good to go press flight conditions and fly

Channel: pgtrots

Views: 26,347

Keywords: Microsoft Flight Simulator, VFR, Flight Planning, Tutorial

Id: IkQ6mKo1cO0

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 23 2020