Plan-G a new star in (simulation) flight planning software

A few days ago a fellow on IVAO posted a link about a “VFR flight planning software with charts of all over the world”. I was sceptical but decided to download it and install it (zip file) on both my flightsim PC and my laptop (I always fly with a two-PC setup).

Having read the post I originally thought of VFR approach plates but I thought it was difficult to have such an amount of information without subscription on a single freeware program.

Plan-G doesn’t actually have VFR (or IFR) approach plates, it does however have a moving map (Google) with an overlay with important and relevant aviation data such as airports, ILS feathers, airspaces (and their information), etc. What else could you ask for?

Flight Plans
With it you can also create a flight plan for both FS9 and FSX. You can open existing ones, or you can create/edit them graphically via an intuitive interface. You can set your cruise altitude as well.

The program creates its own database from FS data and stores it in an Access database. It also has a fantastic feature that lets you create user waypoints of various types such as regular waypoint, airport, visual reference, etc. Something I could not do with my Flight Sim Commander very well. In my region of interest for example (Panama) most airports don’t have IFR charts, not even VFR charts so it is imperative that you careat your own navigation and create your own waypoints to plan a proper approach.

In this figure I have a partial map of the Republic of Panama showing a few airports, the Panama TMA and the flight plan I charted from Contadora Island (OTD, add-on scenery) to Chitré (PX06 in FSX).

Other Features
If you have loaded a flight plan you can also display a vertical elevation profile to monitor during your flight. For this however you have to download a freeware DEM available for all regions of the world. You only need one tile to enable the feature, the tile you are going to use. I did notice that if you do a free flight without flight plan, the vertical elevation profile does not display any information.

It has a weather panel with information about the weather in your selected stations and nearby station(s). It also has a GPS panel that shows some extremely beautiful gauges with your ground speed, bank status, vertical speed, heading and altitude. Particularly good if your a/c has a (virtual) cockpit that is difficult to read unless you zoom in.

It also has a traffic panel with either AI or Online traffic, I fly mostly online so this would display my IVAO traffic in the vicinity. The Trail analysis panel I haven’t quite deciphered, don’t know how to create a trail. The Plan panel shows you the flight plan that is currently active.

User Interface
It is extremely pleasant, while some people might be annoyed with Microsoft Word ribbon interface, this application uses them beautifully. They don’t confuse the user or have cryptic names. There are basically three ribbons: Home, Map settings, and Data.

The largest part of the client area is a moving map using the Google Maps service. You can either have the airplane always centered (continuous download as it moves) or let it go free until it goes off-bounds and the map reloads and centers again.

Remote Connection
We all know you can always run them on the same PC and it will connect to MSFS. So far I had Flight Sim Commander on the FSX PC as a logbook. It was not much of a moving map because it did not show terrain (boring interface) and being on the same PC you either fly the plane or watch the map.

Well, with Plan-G the ball game changes and at least for FSX it liberates the user from the “tyranny” of WideFS. WideFS is a handy utility for remote connections of such clients but it has a relatively high price. To this date I have not bought it.

In a multiple-PC setup Plan-G (on the remote computer) connects to FS9 using a combination of FSUIPC and WideFS (from Pete Dowson). But with FSX it can use FSUIPC or SimConnect (the latter being preferred). SimConnect is from the Microsoft FSX SDK. The difference here is that while most FSX client applications that use SimConnect, this is in my opinion the only one that truly liberates the user from having to buy yet another software utility to accomplish something that could be done without it, Microsoft already gave us the tools.

Conclusion
To this date with over 20 years of experience in software development and some electronics I have seen plenty of payware and freeware applications out there (Flight Simultion utilities included) that are unstable, have poor exception management (cryptic error for simple procedures and crash to desktop), require administrative rights to execute (following a programming model of last century) or suffer from a combination of illnesses that are easy to solve. Well, Plan-G is not like that, I tested it with a 1 hour flight over Panamanian territory and worked wonderfully, only FSX crashed while taxiing.

My hat off goes to Mr. Tim Arnot developer of Plan-G as well as to Jeff Schallenberg & Peter Dodds for the excellent user manual. This is certainly an application that is well crafted like I had not seen in years as a flight simulation enthusiast!