Flight Planning Software

[Barney]

Has anyone installed a flight planning software program in Dapper?

I have CrossOverOffice installed and tried to install "AirPlan," a fairly good shareware flight planning program, but no luck - didn't work.

Any help here?

Thanks,
Barney

[p_quarles]

I just did a quick search of the repositories, and one showed up, called "kflog." If that's unsatisfactory, though, I'd suggest searching at Sourceforge. There are thousands of unpackaged open source projects there, and it's a good bet there are a few flight planners.

[PilotJLR]

For me - can't beat www.duats.com
:-)

[Barney]

My question was prompted from recently helping a friend plan a trip from KMIA (Miami, FL) to SBBE (Belem, Brazil) and finding so few flight planning programs that had an international capability. AirPlan (Windows) does and costs a mere $10, whereas many of the more expensive programs are limited to USA domestic only. DUATS did not recognize the ICAO identifier for Belem, Brazil, or other international airport identifiers.

As I mentioned before, I tried installing AirPlan with CrossOverOffice and was not successful - I tried twice. CXOffice helped with Quicken 2005, which works as good as it did under WinXP Pro, a plus for CXOffice and Dapper.

I have also been unable to get LogBookPro to work in Dapper, another great aviation program that many would feel better about being able to use with Linux OS.

Perhaps my examples are another testimony to: "You can't have your cake and eat it, too!"

[odiseo77]

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but you could take a look at FlightGear (http://sourceforge.net/projects/flightgear/):


The FlightGear Flight Simulator project is a free, open-source, multi-platform, flight simulator. FlightGear has been used for desktop simulation, engineering simulations, faa certified simulators, university research, and the aerospace industry.

You can find more flight simulators here (http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=flight+simulator) .

[PilotJLR]

This international problem is an interesting one... frankly, this may be a windows-in-a-VM solution.
For duats - I live in Chicago, so Canada is as international as it gets for me now. I used to fly for a major airline, though, which is why I like the duats flight plans. They are simple and to the point... planning in excess of that is often futile due to the unforseen variables that always creep in. Climb, cruise, descent profiles fit 99.9% of all segments!

I will post back if I find anything decent that installs in wine... but my initial reaction is that this problem is unique enough to require the native OS, unfortunately.

But as for logbooks... USE PAPER. You have to be militant with your backup strategy to go electronic. I *almost* got bitten with PDA-based logbooks about 8 years ago. Thank goodness I forced myself to write on paper once per month. Of course, now that I'm an engineer, I use RAID 1 with nightly rsync mirrors to another disk and monthly offsite DVD backup. But that's a whole nother story.

[mips]

This might seem a bit off topic but have a look at X-Plane flight simulator. Now start searching for flight planners for it, there are many, I just don't know if they are available for Linux. If they are plugins to x-plane then they should work on any platform.

Here is one example, http://www.xpgoodway.com/

As to how suitable this would be for REAL flight I have no idea so err on the side of caution rather.

[PilotJLR]

Check out this list:
http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/Aviation-HOWTO/x102.html

And then here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/fplan/

International support... NO. So it doesn't really help your initial problem. But worth looking at, at least.

[Barney]

I was able to call my friend last night (Wed. 12/19/07) on his cell phone and he had arrived safely in the SE corner of the Dominican Republic and should have been on his way and arrived in Belem, Brazil by now.

Thanks to all for your help and advice, but as y'all have mentioned, we had to resort to the "other" OS and use AirPlan (WinXP) for international flight planning.

As I doubt that I'll be taking my RV-3 anywhere internationally, I've found that the EAA flight planner (online) at aeroplanner.com works just as well as some of the more sophisticated flight plans that I used to use at my Part 121 carrier.

Thanks, again,
Barney

[Icarosaurus]

I found this:
http://www.aopa.org/flight_planner/index.html?PF
It's the AOPA flight planner... runs well under WinE but requires AOPA membership.
There's also:
http://www.xpgoodway.com/
But it's intended for gaming purposes.

[LucidLoon]

I've been using www.airnav.com for runway and navaid information such as VOR,TACAN and ILS frequencies and www.skyvector.com for charts. Skyvector.com lets you right click on the aeronautical charts showing options to plot courses.