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The purpose of planning is to get general idea of how you going to fly from your origin to your destination. We will divide flight planning into three major parts:
Let us start to plan your flight route. First thing to do is to decide which will be your origin and destination airport. In this example, we will fly from Tehran IKA airport to Dubai. Therefore, now we can get the ICAO codes of these airports, they are OIIE and OMDB accordingly. |
Now when we have codes we need to make up our route. To figure it out we need the navigational points (fixes) and airways that connects them. There are two ways to plan your route - use route charts or use route-finding software. Find your route on the chart is a bit difficult and require some time, so we will use automatic route finder provided here and the result of our route will be as below:
You can also use other route finders such as the one here.
As you can see, it consist of waypoints (EGVEL, SYZ, KUPTO, ORSAR, PEBAT, DESDI) and airways (P574, G666, A418, R784, B416). We will need this to navigate manually or with autopilot. After we had determined our route, we have to decide what altitude we will maintain during the flight. The rules are simple – if you fly westbound, your altitude should be even and if you fly eastbound, it should be odd. In Iran, we use Reduced Vertical Separation Minimums this means that the difference between opposite-directional routes will be 1000 ft. To visualize the principle of vertical separation we prepare a small table for you, the numbers may down till the ground and up to 66 000 ft.
| WESTBOUND (179° - 360°) | EASTBOUND (001° - 180°) |
|---|---|
| FL320 (32 000ft) | |
| FL310 (31 000ft) | |
| FL300 (30 000ft) | |
| FL290 (29 000ft) | |
| FL280 (28 000ft) |
Our route goes eastbound so our flight level should be odd. We pick the number accordingly to the type of aircraft we fly – the bigger the aircraft, the higher it can fly. For example, if we fly Boeing 737 we can easily take an altitude of 29,000 ft., which corresponds to flight level 290 (just cut the last two symbols from the number). Final step is to file flight plan and send it to VATSIM. No matter what type of flight you perform, if you are going to take off – you must file a flight plan. There are two ways to file the flight plan, either in your client when you are already connected to the server with your simulator or through the web-service here. In any case, the fields will be the same, let us divide them:
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