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Flight Planning

Overview

Flying an airliner is usually done using IFR (Instrument Flight Rules). This means that you will be flying with an IFR flight plan. The IFR flight plan is typically created before the flight, and is then loaded into the aircraft's flight management system (FMS).

Flying IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) even in a simulation like Microsoft Flight Simulator always requires some level of flight planning.

In addition to the obvious route planning, there are several other aspects which are critical to any good flight plan:

  • Route Planning
  • Origin and Destination
  • Runways, SID, and STAR
  • Compliance with ATC Requirements
  • Routing and Constraints
  • Fuel Calculation
  • Weather Forecast
  • Wind Profiles
  • Cost and Time Optimization

See Flight Planning on Wikipedia for more information.

Microsoft Flight Simulator tries to offer a simple way to do route planning (World Map before starting a flight) however, this falls short, especially for users wanting a more realistic experience for airliner flying.

There are various ways to load a flight plan into the aircraft. In real life, pilots typically use an external data link to load flight plans made for the flight by their company. Or they use the FMS in the MFD to enter a flight plan manually from their flight briefing documents.

As in real-world aircraft, it is common in flight simulation aircraft to integrate these systems directly with the aircraft's flight management system to be able to import all the relevant planning data. This includes the route, altitudes, constraints, fuel, payload (passengers, cargo), and other data points.

Also see the Preparing the FMS guide for more information. on flight planning especially for the A380X.

Loading a flight plan in the A380X

In the A380X for Microsoft Flight Simulator, we have these options to load a flight plan:

MSFS World Map, MSFS ATC, MSFS VFR MAP are not yet supported in the A380X

As Microsoft Flight Simulator uses a very simplified flight planning system, we have created our own custom FMS (Flight Management System) which is used in the A380X. It is much closer to the FMS in the real aircraft, and it understands and represents real-world flight plans much more accurately.

A custom FMS on the other hand results in issues syncing the flight plan from the aircraft back into the simulator. Therefore, simulator-features as the MSFS ATC or the VFR Map will not always work as expected. Especially flight plans with complex routing may have significant issues if saved backwards or loaded externally through the simulator's simplified flight planning.

This is a general issue for all realistic and complex airliners in Microsoft Flight Simulator and unless the simulator's built-in flight planner and ATC is significantly improved this will always cause problems with realistic airliners.

MSFS World Map Flight Planning, ATC and VFR Map

Depending on how you want to use the A380X in combination with the MSFS' World Map Planning, ATC and VFR Map, you can choose between different methods to load a flight plan into the A380X:

The A380X does not yet support loading a flight plan from MSFS World Map or writing it back to the sim's flight plan for use with the MSFS ATC or the VFR Map.

  • Loading a Flight Plan from the MSFS World Map
  • Using MSFS World Map and MSFS ATC
  • Using a SimBrief Flight Plan and MSFS ATC

Not Using MSFS World Map, MSFS ATC or MSFS VFR Map

This is the ideal setup for users who want to use the A380X in combination with Online ATC services (Vatsim, Ivao, PilotEdge,...), 3rd party ATC add-ons or no ATC at all.

We recommend using our built-in integration with SimBrief for flight planning. This allows you to directly import flight plans from SimBrief into the FMS.

See our SimBrief Integration Guide for more information.

As long as MSFS ATC and VFR Map are not required, the aircraft's flight plan does not have to be synchronized back to the MSFS flight planner (set flyPad's Setting > Sim Options > Sync MSFS Flight Plan to None).

The MSFS ATC and VFR Map will not be aware of the flight plan at all and cannot be used.

Workaround to use MSFS ATC

To still have some use of the built-in MSFS ATC and VFR Map in the A380X you can load an identical flight plan into the MSFS World Map and into the aircraft. You can either manually enter the flight plan into the aircraft's FMS or load it from SimBrief.

Make sure the plan you enter into the MSFS World Map is really identical to the one in the aircraft.