Fuel Planning with Ideal Flight

[Steve Waite]

With fuel planners supplied with the plane such as Quality Wings, Maddog and so on, these contain lookup tables based on the aircraft flown in the sim - THEIR sim!

With Ideal Flight FIRST we fly the plane as a test and IF measures the fuel used, the measurements and the de-brief come with a fuel Range calculation based on the conditions within YOUR sim the way YOU fly!

Following that you create a flight based on that range calculation - we enter the range climb descent cruise values and so-on in IF. I make flights with a full load and a half load - and stick to the same climb, descent, cruise and weather conditions and see the difference in fuel used.

You use this to properly understand the fuel the aircraft uses, the way YOU use it. That is if you are interested in fuel calculations. The full suite of BOEING recommended calculations can be found near the end of the briefing.

This way is the most accurate way to predict fuel bar none. Only in Ideal Flight.

[Steve Waite]

So in effect IF *measures* the fuel we used but a lookup fuel planner like PFPX and Quality Wings type fuel apps *suggests* the fuel to be used in a manner according to the professional use of the aircraft. So there's no need to bin the fuel planners, it makes it more fun to have the cross check from IF.

The reason IF does it this way is because it must assimilate any aircraft not yet made for the sim. When we installed a new aircraft and start IF it sees the new object and creates a base set of figures based on the size, weight, and engine count. Of course these can be wildly wrong, on the first instance - so we fly the plane and read the de-brief, then enter the Range, runway length and so on.

Each profile has an aircraft.ini, a simple text file, we can save for later purposes or just to copy as a backup before we make changes. On the front page of IF there's a popup menu option to create a save state for IF, it makes a folder where we please and we can drag and drop that folder onto IF or the desktop icon to restore it.