Is there a way to prescribe some waypoints for flight planning? E.g. with very strong winds like at the moment for longer flights like 800 miles trips one could fly a detour to encounter less headwind. There is an “include wind forecast” button in Autorouter but it doesn’t change anything on my routes. I played around a bit with routing and found some alternatives that are shorter in time than the route proposals, but I’m unable to find a mechanism that includes that in flight planning. So I was asking whether one could define e.g. one fly-over waypoint.
O.K. one could use airports and plan from start field to an intermediate airfield and a second plan from that field to destination.
UdoR wrote:
So I was asking whether one could define e.g. one fly-over waypoint.
Yes.
Oh dear, I had tomatoes on my eyes. I was looking like half an hour in the settings, fiddled around with potential routes and haven’t seen it.
Thank you @boscomantico and @lionel
Edit: It’s even much better than what I wanted, because you can set a fly-by waypoint and define the maximum allowed distance to it. Nice!
This AR feature needs to be used with care, because you can easily get no route at all.
Firstly, the majority of waypoints one picks are not valid for getting a valid “through” route, so you need to leave a generous distance to it; say 25nm or 50nm so the tool can still find a route. If you set 0nm, mostly no route will be found.
And how will you be picking these waypoints? It’s easy enough on a PC where you can see the “big picture” easily, on some IFR chart. I have used Skyvector for this kind of thing but the chart in AR is OK too.
Years ago people asked for a rubberband feature on AR. It was thought unviable because most such routes would not validate, plus you have the considerable routing time (can be a minute plus).
It is a handy feature for a crude route shaping e.g. to route around the Alps. You can also achieve that one by setting FL100 max
FF – I have no idea.
Peter wrote:
It is a handy feature for a crude route shaping
Yes that’s what I need it for. E.g. for a flight to Spain via Switzerland instead over boring mid France.
I have „shaped“ dozens of complex flightplans using this feature. It is easy.
To complete, ForeFlight has similar feature with “Include Waypoints” or exclude waypoints in the route option (can’t post snapshot I am on my phone and couldn’t figure out how to do that on this forum?)
About figuring out waypoints that will work, one trick I use is to find a route to an arbitrary airport in the direction I want, then pick a waypoint on that route to include in the final route, that maximises the chance it will find a valid route.
Peter: thank you! I didn’t know that.
Here is the snapshot