Trev's place

Month: August 2007

  • Courseplanner tutorials

    Re-produced to remove problem with hackers

    The Wiki at MyOddWeb Wiki has had a not to bright individual damage the great information at the site relating to thier Courseplanner software. I managed to find what I think is the original info on the tutorials and have re-posted it here where it’s not so likely to get damaged by vandals.

    The two main parts are “Creating a Flight Plan” and “Exporting a flight plan from Flight Simulator”. Just click on the readmore link to get to the interesting part (unless of course you are already seeing it).

    Creating a flight plan

    This is the tutorial to create a basic flight plan.

    1. Start Courseplanner
    2. Go to the third Tab – “Flight Plan”. Courseplanner automatically reloads the last flight so, if there is already a flight simply press the “New/Clear” button on the toolbar, (second one from left).
    3. Look for the departure airport. SCCI. Press “Ctrl-F” and enter “SCCI”, double click on the airport and Courseplanner will take you there.
    4. Click on the airport, (see note below about cursors). A list of all the runways is now show, select runway 07. This means that you will be taking-off heading 07.
    5. You should now see two new points in the flight plan, one called “SCCI” for the airport and another called “USER” to make sure that you fly straight for 3 miles before you turn toward the next point, (whatever that point might be).
      You can remove the extra point by un/checking the “Add Extra Waypoints” below the flight plan.
    6. Same as number 3, look for SCGZ, when you click on the airport you will see that along with the list of possible runways you also get 4 intersections and one VOR.
      Select runway 08 for landing. Landing is opposite to take-off, so you will be landing heading 26.

    Adding routes

    So that’s a “basic” plan. Now let’s assume that you want to use some routes between your two airports.

    1. Repeat steps 1 to 5 above. (I will assume that De-clutter is ON to make it easier).
    2. Incidentally you will see two routes going from the airport to ALMIR, (use the Ctrl-F option above to locate it).
      Click on the intersection and select either the Jet or Victor airway.
    3. Select one of the routes.
    4. Select the airport to land as point number 6 above.

    Note about cursors

    • Courseplanner has 2 cursors, an “Arrow” and a “Hand”, to toggle between the two simply right-click on the map.
    • The hand is used to grab and move the map, where the arrow is used to select points or select an area.

    Note on routes

    • If you cannot see some routes then some of the setting were changed either by yourself of during previous installs.
    • Look for “Almir”, (Ctrl-f), if Courseplanner can find it but you cannot see it on the map, (white triangle), then your data is corrupt. Download the latest version to get a new uncorrupted route database.

    Note on plans

    • On the first tab you can give you plan a unique name. To ‘create’ the plan select the red ‘check’ button next to the find button. And all the files will be moved to your flight sim directory for you.

    Modifying a flight plan created in flight simulator

    By default flight simulator does not include SID or STAR and neither does it line-up the plane for proper landing. You can use Courseplanner to update your flights and insert flight plans.

    Create a plan with flight simulator.

    In this example we will assume that you already have a flight plan created by flight simulator.

    Select a flight from FADN(Durban Intl) to FAJS(Johannesburg Intl).

    1. select the IFR plan
    2. Press ‘Find Route’ using VOR to VOR, (it doesn’t really matter what you choose).
    3. The plane and/or weather you choose is immaterial as this can be updated with Courseplanner.
    4. Save the flight plan

    Updating the Flight plan

    In our example the plan created was FADN -> USER->DNV->LYV->WDV->HGV->JSV->FAJS

    The two main problems are that there is no SID and STAR and that the final 2 VORs will cause the plane to fly over the runways after take-off and just before landing.

    Selecting a new SID

    By default there is no SID/STAR selected, but you can go to the [[Landing]] tab to change the departure SID.

    Selecting a new STAR

    Same as with the SID, you can go to the [[Landing]] tab to change the Landing STAR.

    Don’t fly to all the Navaids

    In many flights it might be useful to use a navaid as a reference without actually flying to that point.

    A good example is the DNV after departure, although it might be a good reference to know how far we are from the airport, it is not actually useful to fly to that point itself, (that is why we are using a SID).

    See the [[Flight Plan]] tab for more information on how this can be done.

    Re-create the plan

    Once you are happy with the changes then simply create the flight plan. See the [[main toolbar]] for more information.

    ”’NB”’: The plan will be moved to the directory you chose in the [[config general|configuration]]

    If you find something wrong with this, I’d be interested in hearing from you. Also if the original author doesn’t want this appearing here, please let me know. It’s posted for other people like myself to still have the ability to get the info needed to make use of a product like Courseplanner from MyOddWeb