Flight Simulator Flight Planning Tutorial

About Flight Planning and Flight Preparation.

Preparation for your route is part of virtual airline online flying. Before you start, you should have all the materials you need for your virtual airline flight (charts/approach plates/etc.) easily at hand. Visit the website of the Air Traffic Control sector or sectors you’ll be flying. There is a lot of information on airspace rules, preferred routes, sector boundaries and much more available on these flight simulation websites. While many virtual controllers will be happy to help you with procedures when traffic is slack, do not rely on this. Start your virtual airline flight with a quick visit to the websites of the Simulated ATC sectors and you’ll be on your way to a much more enjoyable virtual airline flight and flight simulation experience!

Connect with your virtual airline's aircraft positioned on a ramp or parking/gate area only when you first connect to a flight simulation network. When connecting to a flight simulation network, a virtual airline pilot should never be on a taxiway, or on a runway. If there is another aircraft on short final for the runway and suddenly another aircraft pops up on the same runway, a landing virtual airline pilot will be quite displeased because they will be asked to go around with their flight simulator.

Creating and Filing your Flight Plan for Online Flying.

Before you can file a flightplan you obviously need to select your virtual airline flight and route first. Unlike when flying offline on Microsoft Flight Simulator it is important to file a preferred route. This will facilitate the flow of virtual airline traffic during busier flight simulation times of the day. You can find flightplans by going to V-Route, Sim Routes and Route Finder for flight simulation and virtual airline use or by going directly to the virtual airline admin area here on SimMiles. Most charts are also provided for pilots by Simmiles in the virtual airline dispatch area. Instrument Flight Rules is discussed in some other sections of these tutorial pages.

There are several ways to obtain charts for flight simulator use: or you know a real world airline pilot and you can obtain his old charts or old Japessen charts are available on the dispatch center at SimMiles. But an alternative solution (for free actually) and excellent for Flight Simulator use is to download the charts you need from Myairplane.com for your virtual airline flights.

Always file a flightplan even when you are VFR on a flight simulation network. Primarily, a flight plan lets the virtual controller know what your plans are. Secondly, it assists the virtual controller in selecting your aircraft on his simulated Air Traffic Control screen.