I was doing some “research” on various aspects of the FF A320 when I came across a YouTube video by Jeff Favignano where he takes a flight from Orlando to Savannah which is well worth a look.
Near the start of the video he uses a free website called SimBrief.com to create an authentic looking flightplan. It looked good, so I thought I would give it a try. I apologise in advace if you are all familiar with it already, but I thought it was very neat.
I thought I would take a short hop from Larnaca, Cyprus (LCLK) up to Batumi (UGSB), an airport most of us here are familiar with.
SimBrief is pretty straight forward. You start by entering the details of the flight:
You then analyze the route, where the waypoints are checked to make sure they are included in the latest AIRAC database. If it all looks good a rout plot is generated:
At this point you can generate the very detailed flightplan flightplan package. In this case we end up with a 33 page document that includes details on the route, fuel burn, weather and NOTAMS. It looks very similar to the document that ARINC produces when I plan a real flght, and I am sure the airline pilots here would find it very familiar for the most part.
The next step is to export the flight plan for use in the sim. There is a neat utility that you can install that automatically places the flightplan file into the correct folder for the aircraft you are going to be flying (there is a long list of compatible aircraft).
Next, we head to the cockpit. To load the flightplan into the FMS, you just fill in the Departure/Destination field on the INIT page (for the FF A320 at least). You are encouraged to manually reselect the SID and STAR, but the rest of the route should all be there.
Once we are on our way we can pull up the flightplan document on the EFB browser, which is very useful…
Also the route plot:
which you can click on to get the latest real world weather at the destination. This is great for entering the approach/landing performance data:
The fuel calculations seem pretty close too. I landed with about 100kg more fuel than estimated if you take into account that the taxi to the runway at Larnaca was very short.
I am sure there is much more for me to learn with SimBrief, but so far I am very enthusiastic about it.
To finish up, a few shots of Batumi:
