Flight Plans FS? -> Plan-G? (FSX and/or FS 2020)

[Tarsier]

Hi.  Looking for a sanity check...   :)

I've used Plan-G for flight following (and lots more) for 2-3 years.  While most of what is discussed here is about creating a flight plan in Plan-G and exporting it to the flight simulator, I have always created my flight plans in FSX and then I "Open" the flight plan in Plan-G (just point Plan-G to the User folder where plans are saved from the sim.  That has worked great for me; and it has been very simple to do.  Am I the only one doing it this way?  Does it make a lot more sense to create from Plan-G then "Load" the plan into the Simulator?  It seems a little more complicated, and I don't see yet what the advantage(s) are.

It seems like I got started this way based upon info in Plan-G documentation, but maybe I got from somewhere else.

Anyway, I appreciate any thoughts you may share.

[tim arnot]

Not speaking for anyone else, but I find the built-in flight planners to be particularly rubbish - that's a large part of why I wrote Plan-G in the first place...

[earnorbust]

So...how do you save the Plan-G flight plan in the file format of *.PLN for loading into FS2020?

Robert

[tim arnot]

File -> Export...

[earnorbust]

Fast reply...thank you.

I have three more questions:

1) where can I download the program documentation (manual)?
2) Does Plan-G offer typical approaches for my arrival airports to load into my flight plan?
3) Why didn't Plan-G copy my airplane profiles from FS2020 to it's own airplane profile file - saving me the work of entering the data anew?

[tim arnot]

1. The v4 manual is not yet written. The v4 Quick Start guide is in program\Docs folder. The v3 manual is in the program folder.
2. Yes
3. It's an alpha. Lots of stuff is not yet implemented.

[earnorbust]

Hi Tim

Bug info...The flight plans that Plan-G saves, lose their approach procedures when loaded into MSFS.

Seems to be a MSFS problem, since their own saved flight plans don't show the approach after re-loading into MSFS. Looks like the *.PLN file format needs updating!

That's an ugly bug for all flight planning software products, because the approaches are so important for ILS flights. You guys should heavily complain to Asobo to give this flaw fixing priority!


Hope that helped out.
Robert

[tim arnot]

It's an alpha. Lots of stuff is not yet implemented.

When Plan-G supports the MSFS-specific IFR .PLN extensions, there will be a separate exporter for them.