Looking for some advice

[pontiusthepilot]

Hi All.

What do most people do regarding naming waypoints? I'm asking this because I think I'm getting myself into a bit of a mess at the moment.

Some time ago, I set about adding a lot of user waypoints to plan-g which might be useful for  flight planning. The idea was that, in future, I would create flight plans simply be joining the fixed waypoints and I wouldn't have to rename ant 'wpt' waypoints. I've now got about 5500 waypoints in Western North America and I still have to resort to using temporary waypoints.

Firstly, I worked from lists of mountains, lakes and other landmarks downloaded from the internet and then later, I worked by comparing different maps to see if I could identify useful landmarks that way. Finally, I started working through all my flight plans and adding waypoints to the database that way. Whilst I was doing this, I also set about re naming all the generic 'wpt' waypoints in my flight plans to use specific identifiers and place names.

I've finished all of my flight plans in British Columbia and I'm beginning to wonder whether this is a good idea. This has become so slow and laborious that I'm getting to the point where I sometimes can't face looking at plan-g any more. Even in some parts of Europe (i.e remote parts of the Alps), there might be no places named on the base map and in some cases this will also be missing from Google maps and Bing maps too. In many parts of British Collumbia this is even more common. Even Toporama (a map made by the Canadian Government) there can be large areas where the map only displays contours, unnamed streams, unnamed roads and nothing else.

So would anyone else consider adding large numbers of waypoints to the database just in case they might be usefull in a future flightplan? And do any of you explicitly re name temporary waypoints or do you consider it best just to leave them as they are?

I've posted this for guidance because I wonder whether I'm turning flight planning into unnecessary hard work.

Regards.
Pontius.

[tim arnot]

I can only speak for myself. I only create waypoints as and when I need them, and even then I often live with the temp names. Life's just too short to spend it faffing about unnecessarily.

IMHO :)

[pontiusthepilot]

In the past couple of weeks, I've become more cautious about adding permanent waypoints, because I've come to doubt that I'll use many of them. And because they are fixed they tend to be rigid, especially in mountainous terrain. They can be fine for one flight plan but in a slightly awkward place for another.

I've also noticed that if I create a flight plan using SkyVector, all waypoints that have no identifier in the map are simply entered as 'GPS' and no description. As these are suitable to be submitted to the FAA, I'm beginning to think that doing any more probably is faffing about unnecessarily. The only qualification I would add to that adding a place name in the description that matches a place named on the base map, makes editing easier in the future. But I'm still not certain whether this will be woth the effort in the long run.

But I've noticed that the temporary waypoint names can get out of order and I a lot of the time, I've been editing identifiers and descriptions into my flight plans to rectify this.

I've often thought to ask if there is any way to get plan-p to re number them, but never got round to it. Even better, is there a way to get plan-g to re number them in reverse order? I use a tablet based moving map and if the waypoints appeared to count down to the end, I would have a rough idea how far I am from the end of the flight.

But I don't know if this is possible.

Regards.
Pontius.