After Hours – Champagne Services’ Flight Planner

The Penultimate Simulation: Flight Planning From Champagne Pc Services

The title gives the subject away. I was considering stringing readers along with a fancy story about a fabulous flight and reveal part way through that the subject of this article is an Australian produced flight planning software suite. However, in the interest of intellectual honesty, lets launch directly into the review. Have you considered what it is you do when you submit a flight plan? In essence, you have an objective and a mission. In the planning process you project your mind along the route, anticipating the weather, fuel state, payload and so forth. The tedious part comes when you have to capture all the details and put them on paper for your own use and for the CAA. They use your information to tell other people when and where you will be. You use the information for flight management to ensure you reach your destination with sufficient fuel and within the aircraft’s limits. Making the calculations and filling in the boxes on the form is boring work, and if a computer can do it for you, then so much the better. The good news is that the computer, armed with Champagne’s software, does it very well, right down to the point of completing the form. There is even an interface with NAIPS. Loading the software is a simple matter, as it all comes on a single disc – albeit compressed. On my computer, it takes a skerrick over a megabyte, which is quite slim for modern software. The programme is DOS based and can be run inside Windows, but does not use Windows features. Being DOS software can be an advantage if you have a laptop and wish to take the plan with you, or have a slow computer with an 8086 or 80286 processor. Running the programme launches you straight into the planning process, where you are invited to load a previously saved plan, or start anew. If you have defined an aircraft, you can select the one of your choice and apply it to the plan you have chosen. This is a simple and direct way to get you started. I decided to try to run the programme without reading the documentation as this is a good way to test how “user friendly” (read “idiot proof”) the work is. After just a few minutes of puzzling and a couple of false starts, I had a working plan ready to print. I liked the way you could type in a name in most formats, (eg ASCB or just Canberra) and the programme will ask for your desired destination by giving you a list of alternatives. If you wish, you can define, name and store your own waypoints. You next proceed to add heights, speeds and fuel flows, and the programme makes the necessary calculations and prints the plan. However, if you use the software in this simple way, you are missing a lot of the value embedded in the programme and its data files. Champagne PC Services has gone to a lot of trouble to automate all aspects of planning a flight, and there are many features to make the plan more accurate and useful. I decided to insert the full details of a Quickie Q-200 I am finishing as a homebuilt, as an accurate flightplan will be a considerable help when it comes time to flight test and then write the flight manual. Having a record of actual fuel flows, TASs etc will give a pragmatic result, rather than the optimistic data that often seems to be a feature of aircraft information. Entering the aircraft data naturally requires you to know a lot about the plane(s) you fly. Every moment arm for every payload, the fuel flows at all altitudes, the climb IAS at all altitudes and similar information is entered into tables. The process takes about 20 minutes per aircraft, but only needs to be done once. Thereafter, you simply select that aircraft and the programme “knows” how the aircraft flies. If you add leg or area winds, you can ask the programme to compute the optimum flight altitude – a great trick for navigation contests. You can have up to 52 different aircraft defined, and in my case, I made up a database for three power settings: 75%, 65% and 55% cruises. Depending on the mission, I can select the aircraft performance characteristics I want and make a plan without having to re-enter the data. The Q-200 is one of those unfortunate aircraft where to stay inside the centre of gravity and weight limits with two people on board, you need to trade off baggage for fuel and fuel for all up weight. To optimise a flight, you really need to know the weight of each person, as 20 kilograms of fuel is worth almost 200 nautical miles (370km) of flight! Through planning a couple of synthetic flights, I came to the conclusion that the programme, although already an outstanding piece of work, could be improved. There are fixed components in an aircraft such as its empty weight and balance, and variable components such as fuel, baggage and passengers. Many pilots have to juggle the variable components to optimise a flight and it would be nice to do this in a linear way – leg by leg. At present, you have to keep returning to the main menu, then jumping to other modules to change the variables. The flight database would need to be extended to provide space for such data on each leg, rather than for a single entry, but this is no real issue for modern computers. The pilot planner could then fully simulate the flight by answering a series of questions leg by leg. The existing database does manage the fuel very well, but not the payload. I asked a couple of friends who are involved in small airline operations what they thought of the software. They agreed it does an excellent job of automating the planning process, but could be improved in the areas that might be called “flight management”. The trade off of course is simplicity versus completeness. Many people are reluctant to use a computer even for familiar manual tasks, and if the initial reaction is that it’s all too hard, then nobody would buy the programme at all. This is a catch 22 that all software developers have to manage. However, enough carping about minor details. One of the aspects I enjoyed was the graphical approach to the output of the plan, although you need a computer with a graphics capability to really take advantage of this feature. On each leg, the centre of gravity was plotted for the takeoff and landing – provided you had entered the necessary data in the first instance. Checking CG movements can be important, as in some cases the CG moves aft as fuel is burnt. In one reasonably recent case, this movement aft resulted in loss of control on landing and fatalities from the crash. A plot of the track is a useful “mug’s check” to see if the route really does go in the direction you intended. In addition, there are displays of the airfields in the area, including the runway directions. If you are diligent in entering the data, the reward is that your printer will complete the forms, including an enroute section that details airfields and frequencies, plus other information. You have a choice of reports, including a CAA DA3274 Domestic Flight Plan or the CAA DA3275 ATS Flight Notification format. I thought the enroute information most useful – a bit like the info pack you get when you go to your state’s motoring organisation on a road trip. Which brings up the subject of NAIPS. A cynical friend of mine says the acronym stands for: Never Actually Intended to Provide a Service! Since you can access NAIPS via modem, it would be technically possible to have you own data set stored on the CAA computer, and build a flightplan just as you would on your own PC using the Champagne software. CAA do not seem to be following this path, so external flight planners such as Champagne Flight Planner, using information down loaded from NAIPS and other sources seem to have a role to play for some time to come. Filling in flight planning forms is a boring and tedious job (although very necessary) that keeps us on the ground longer, and away from where we would much rather be, flying. Flight Planner from Champagne PC Services cuts down on the time and effort needed and can get you back in the air sooner. (Bill Lines) There are a number of other screens, such as the communication module, lowest safe altitude and the critical point/ point of no return screens. Each add functionality to the package. During my use of the programme, I kept noticing thoughtful touches such as changing the colour of a notice when the maximum all up weight had been exceeded. Overall, I thought the Champagne Flight Planner is a very useful piece of work. While some of the ergonomics could be arranged better to assist flight management planning the heart of the programme provides a very useful computer based aid. You can also keep your Champagne database current for a modest annual fee. Where will flight planning programmes go next? One path could be onto a small hand held personal organiser, indeed, there are several products that let you take your plan with you. Another path could be a “Flite” version, so that you can enter data along the route and update your plan as you go giving revised estimates and an accurate readout of fuel remaining on future legs. The increasing sophistication of GPS may see you completing the plan in your home or office, down loading the plan into a PCMCIA card plugging the card into the GPS receiver which of course controls the autopilot. One thing is for sure, technology is changing so fast it may be wise to keep your old circular prayer wheel “computer” to show your grandchildren how primitive is used to be when we indulged in real flying. The bottom line is that if you fly fairly frequently and computing flight plans annoys you, this is the type of product to buy. My thanks to Champagne PC Services for our review copy.