AeroPlus Flightplan App for iPhone / iPad Released

A good example of dropping down a level:

EGKA-EDDK is no problem at FL140 etc. WIZAD M140 DVR L9 KONAN L607 LNO M170 NOR is 3% over GC.

But coming back, EDDK-EGKA, takes you way up north, with a long water crossing, or possibly way down south with a tour of France...

Unless you file for FL070, in which case you get NOR M170 LNO L607 KONAN DCT LYD with a 4% overhead. And I would bet you can ask for any level on the day, anyway, if you have to climb higher to stay in VMC.

However if I try to autoroute this (in FPP) using F140 preferred, F060 minimum, F190 maximum, it never finds that option even though my F060 minimum ought to enable the discovery.

Maybe the drop from F140 to F070 is considered to be too aggressive, but my recollection of Autoplan is that it would just do it.

You're right, it doesn't have to be SPR, but it seems to have become more difficult to file anything else since about a year ago. I know it has to do with the different LS 'rules' but it sure isn't easy. Same thing when flying back. One has to change to VFR quite a bit out typically as the obvious changeover point SPR is more or less right on the ILS for GEneva...

Tomjnx, thanks for your offer to help out with the FPLs, but I usually find a way. As said earlier the Flight Plan Pro nails 99% of IFR or VFR destinations, but I'm interested in finding an alternative way of doing it with only Internet access. I use Homebriefing as a basis. The filing / delaying etc is easy but it's route finder is a bit sketchy from time to time, so you cannot fully trust it if one is away without the FPP app on a computer. I usually prepare my ATS fltplan for the return trip even before flying out (FPP again) as there are so many CDRs that keep changing here around day by day so it's best to nail everything before leaving. But as said, it would be nice to have an alternative that can be accessed directly via e.g. iPhone or iPad while abroad. And no, I don't want to pay the RR fee when already subscribing to Homebriefing and the Aeroplus app... :-)

With the preferred level model (and a penalty of 2% for each level off), I get your route: N0148F070 NOR M170 LNO L607 KONAN DCT LDY DCT LARCK 291NM, with the Mooney performance model I have this takes 02:01, and uses 21.4 USG fuel.

With the Mooney performance model and optimization for shortest time, I get: N0173F190 NOR M170 LNO L607 GILOM M624 NIK L179 ERING Y76 DET/N0167F160 DCT SHM 315NM, 01:57, 23.5 USG fuel.

So the higher TAS higher up overcompensates the longer route.

If I say optimize for fuel with the Mooney model, I get the F070 route too.

This is all with no wind and ISA. Travelling tomorrow would take half an hour longer on the F190 route due wind. I guess I should add wind-aware routing. Does anyone know of a good source of digital winds aloft data (for a large region over multiple layers, not just for a single route)?

So the higher TAS higher up overcompensates the longer route.

I suppose that if you are turbo + pressurised then you can play that game effectively, but in say the TB20 one will just climb up to VMC and sit there, say 2000ft above the tops. The best MPG is obtained in the FL100-140 range. And ATC don't seem to care how high you are, so long as you are high enough (and FL140 would take care of that).

So in this case I just want a route I can file, not necessarily fly. The FL140 down to FL070 stepdown will never actually happen in reality.

Does anyone know of a good source of digital winds aloft data (for a large region over multiple layers, not just for a single route)?

You could contact this chap. He is a friend of mine and I have put him in touch with some flight planning software vendors already. The data is from GFS of course - like everybody else's.

The best MPG is obtained in the FL100-140 range. And ATC don't seem to care how high you are, so long as you are high enough (and FL140 would take care of that).

That's why my router has a configuration option whether you want least time or least fuel :)

You could contact this chap.

I've already been in contact with him.

It looks like I can get wind data for a route, but it doesn't seem to me that the current API can serve wind data for a region, or did I miss something? The wind tag appears to take only a list of points, no rectangle. With 800k edges in the routing graph, the list of points would be rather large 8-)

I could also get the wind data out of GFS GRIB2 files. I already have a parser for this, but it's a bit impractical do download 3.5GBytes of data every 6 hours

Now if you also had a youtube video on how to run your app on Linux and on how to use that data by a computer program, that would be even better 8-)

The Winds Aloft data is available for free from NOAA

Where exactly? I can't find it on ADDS (http://www.aviationweather.gov/adds/dataserver/current)