Inside the Flight Plan: What Pilots Look for when check… — Transcript

A330 pilot Emmanuel explains how to analyze a flight plan using SimBrief, focusing on route, weather, and operational details for safe flight execution.

Key Takeaways

Flight plans are essential tools for pilots to visualize and prepare mentally for the flight.
Significant weather charts provide critical information on hazardous weather phenomena that affect flight safety.
Checking local weather, SIGMETs, and NOTAMs is crucial for understanding airport and en route conditions.
Operational Flight Plan (OFP) details like flight times, slots, and cost index guide flight execution.
A structured approach from big picture to detailed data ensures comprehensive flight preparation.

Summary

Emmanuel, an A330 pilot, discusses what pilots check in a flight plan before a flight, focusing on SimBrief-generated plans.
The flight plan provides a mental image of the flight, including route, weather, fuel, and operational details.
The route page is the first step to understand the big picture, including alternate airports.
Significant weather charts highlight critical weather phenomena like turbulence, icing, volcanic ash, and tropical storms.
Moderate and severe turbulence are marked with specific symbols; light turbulence is not shown as it is less critical.
Jet streams are indicated with core flight levels and wind speeds, important for flight planning.
Local weather reports, SIGMETs, and NOTAMs for departure, destination, and alternates are checked for detailed operational info.
The OFP header provides scheduled flight times, known slots, and cost index information.
Understanding weather impacts like moderate icing or thunderstorms helps pilots prepare for operational decisions such as anti-ice use or extra fuel.
The process moves from big picture overview to detailed local and operational data to ensure a safe and efficient flight.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

Hello everyone and welcome to the channel. I'm Emmanuel, I'm an A330 pilot and today I want to discuss a topic where I feel that a lot of flight simmers don't really know exactly what to look for, and that is what do we check when we have a look at our flight plan before a flight?

Speaker A

Now, this is mostly a SimBrief focused question, so let's open up SimBrief. Today we're flying the LTU flight 4819 from Munich to Düsseldorf on the A330-200.

Speaker A

The flight plan is our tool to gain the mental image for the flight.

Speaker A

Basically, after we have finished reading our flight plan, we want to know exactly what we are going to do today, and we want to know the weather conditions, how much fuel we'll have everywhere, and how the flight is going to go.

Speaker A

In my opinion, the easiest way to do this is by opening the PDF, because the PDF flight plan basically is the most realistic version you can get.

Speaker A

Now, I'm using the Lufthansa format over here, but in the past I did a video on the Ryanair format as well, and there are lots of others available out there as well.

Speaker A

But regardless of which layout you are using, the data you're trying to gather is always the same.

Speaker A

So, let's start with exactly that data.

Speaker A

My first go-to page is the route page, because we want to gather the big picture before we are going into the smaller detailed items.

Speaker A

So, the route page just shows me my route and the location of alternate airports.

Speaker A

If we want to gather a little bit more data, we are going to head over to the significant weather chart, and that one gives me any significant weather along our route of flight.

Speaker A

But what kind of data are you actually going to get from this page?

Speaker A

So, from the significant weather chart, you basically want to know about any relevant weather phenomena along your flight, not other clouds and stuff like that, but the important data is the one that actually matters for the execution of your flight, so thunderstorms, turbulence, icing, ash clouds, that kind of stuff.

Speaker A

Now, let's have a look into a prominent example of the most commonly seen phenomena on a significant weather chart.

Speaker A

This one here is rather empty, we only have one marked area, that's this entire area over here, and then there's a symbol inside that tells us exactly what we have over there.

Speaker A

And this one over here is moderate icing from flight level 180 to the bottom of the chart, the bottom of the chart is marked down on the lower left here, so this is a chart between flight level 100 and flight level 450.

Speaker A

So, basically, we do have moderate icing from flight level 180 down to somewhere below flight level 100 in this entire area over here.

Speaker A

Now, let's have a look at a little bit more detailed example, and that's this significant weather chart over here.

Speaker A

So, this is an example of the current chart for Australia, Oceania, and the Indian Ocean, and over here we can see a lot of great examples of what we may possibly encounter during the review of a significant weather chart.

Speaker A

So, let's start with the most commonly seen symbols, if we take a look right down here, we can see several pieces of information.

Speaker A

First, let's go ahead and have a look at the area that is marked over here, so that's this area, and you can see this is marked with a number five.

Speaker A

If you go down here, we can check number five, and that actually has this little symbol over here, which looks a little bit like a pyramid, and this is the symbol for moderate turbulence.

Speaker A

And marked next to that, we can see we have moderate turbulence with the tops at flight level 400, and the bottom is below the bottom end of the chart, which again is flight level 250 over here.

Speaker A

So, this is moderate turbulence.

Speaker A

If instead of just one of those triangles, you have two of them, like over here in number four, that is severe turbulence.

Speaker A

So, for example, number four over here marks an area of expected severe turbulence from flight level 260 to below flight level 250, aka below the bottom of the chart.

Speaker A

Now, you will not find light turbulence marked on a significant weather chart, because, well, it's not really important.

Speaker A

Light turbulence happens, you don't care about that.

Speaker A

But moderate and severe turbulence definitely are important.

Speaker A

Then you've got symbols like this one over here, and this is a jet stream.

Speaker A

And you will always have the core of the jet stream, so the area where it is strongest, marked over here in plain letters, so flight level 390 is the core of this jet stream.

Speaker A

The strength is written by the symbols up here, a full triangle is 50 knots, and then a large marker marks 10 knots and a small marker marks 5 knots.

Speaker A

So, we have 95 knots of jet stream over here.

Speaker A

Now, next up, we have tropical revolving storms, such as the one over here, marked by this symbol we see over here.

Speaker A

And this one's called Talia, and that's the same name that you would hear in all your news reporting.

Speaker A

But be aware that you've got to watch English reporting for that, in other languages they're sometimes selling different names.

Speaker A

And yes, you can actually buy the name of a tropical revolving storm and name it after your ex-partner.

Speaker A

You can do that if you want to.

Speaker A

All right, another important symbol is that one over here, and that's a volcano eruption.

Speaker A

So, this one is Mount Semeru, and basically when you see something like this, you want to have a look into the ash tam to see if there is a relevant ash cloud for your flight.

Speaker A

So, that way you have a lot of different pieces of information that you can see from the significant weather chart.

Speaker A

The one thing that we want to learn from it is how is our flight actually going to be affected by any significant weather?

Speaker A

And we can see that from our flight from Munich to Düsseldorf, we will basically not have any significant weather until descending below flight level 180, where we will encounter some moderate icing conditions.

Speaker A

So, we got to make sure that anti-ice is operated for this flight.

Speaker A

But we are going to have a smooth flight, there is no turbulence forecast, and that's the important thing that we want to know from the significant weather chart.

Speaker A

Likewise, if we, for example, were flying through an area of thunderstorms, for example, if we look at the chart over here, we can see this huge area over here, which is part of the intertropical convergence zone.

Speaker A

We can see that there are occasional CBs up to flight level 470, so if we had to fly like this, then we could definitely consider taking extra fuel in order to avoid those thunderstorms.

Speaker A

Now that we have seen the big picture of what's going on, we take a look at the little bit smaller picture, and that is the local weather that you can find somewhere over here.

Speaker A

So, you check for any met reports, you check for SIGMETs, any tropical cyclone SIGMETs, volcanic ash SIGMETs, anything that you found on the large chart that might affect your flight.

Speaker A

Then we're going to check the weather at our departure, destination and alternate airports, and if we have any en route alternates, for example, ETOPS airports, then we would also check for those.

Speaker A

Those would normally be listed down here as well.

Speaker A

Next to that, we are also going to have a look at the NOTAMs to see if there is anything relevant for the flight.

Speaker A

You can see we are now already in the detail work, so first we got the big picture by looking at the route chart and the significant weather chart, and then we're working our way down.

Speaker A

So, after getting the big picture of the weather, we are looking at the local weather on the weather tab, then we also look at the NOTAMs to see if there is anything at the airport that might be important for us.

Speaker A

Think runway closures and so on.

Speaker A

Now, once we've checked this, we are going to move up into the actual OFP itself, and over here there's a couple of interesting things for us to check.

Speaker A

So, first we check the top header, and over here basically we want to know our scheduled flight times, we want to see if there's any slot that's already known, and we want to know what cost index we're going to fly.

Speaker A

Also interesting is that you actually have a correct aircraft on there, because there have been cases where OFPs were filed for incorrect registrations and stuff like that.

Speaker A

Next, you want to see your aircraft's weights, so what's your zero fuel weight, how close is that to the maximum allowable?

Speaker A

Same for the landing weight, same for the takeoff weight.

Speaker A

Next, you have a look into the routes to see your planned cruising level, this one could also be interesting for the significant weather chart, so that's one piece of information that you may want to take along.

Speaker A

Now, on some flight plan formats, within the navlog, you will find a so-called shear factor, that's something that you will find, for example, in the LIDO layout or in the Ryanair layout.

Speaker A

The shear factor can also give you information about possible turbulence, if it is above three, then basically you can say like, yeah, there might be some turbulence.

Speaker A

The shear factor basically tells you the difference in the wind speed between your planned cruising altitude and an altitude a couple thousand feet above and below.

Speaker A

So, if there is a large difference, aka a larger shear factor, then chances are that this comes with turbulence as well.

Speaker A

Now, another important piece of information is the level of the tropopause, and you can either gather that from the significant weather chart, or you can gather it from your navlog.

Speaker A

For example, we can see that our tropopause is in flight level 340 over here.

Speaker A

Since we are planned to fly below that in level 320, chances are that turbulence is more likely than if we were flying above the tropopause.

Speaker A

Now, once we've checked that, we are going to move further down into the other alternates, make a decision if we prefer to use any other alternate.

Speaker A

And the most important information that you can gather here is how much fuel will you need in order to get to a different alternate.

Speaker A

For example, today, we are planned to fly to Hanover, which uses 3,299 kilos of fuel.

Speaker A

But there are other alternates available, such as Frankfurt, which uses only 2,940, or Paderborn, or even Münster Osnabrück, all of which use less fuel.

Speaker A

So, keep in your mind, you have different alternates available.

Speaker A

And in today's case, they actually use a little bit less fuel than the planned one, so we have more options available there.

Speaker A

Last but not least, when we've checked all of this, we are going to go down into the fuel section.

Speaker A

So, by now we have a good mental image of what our flight is going to look like, and only now we go down into the fuel section and make a decision on how much fuel we actually want to carry.

Speaker A

Things to consider over here are, do you possibly expect to get additional last minute payload?

Speaker A

In that case, you might want to load a little bit more fuel.

Speaker A

In today's case, for 1,000 kilos more zero fuel weight, we'd use 20 kilos more fuel.

Speaker A

Is it likely that you are going to fly lower than your planned altitude, and if yes, for how long?

Speaker A

That way, you also have information like this available in your flight plan.

Speaker A

Are we possibly running late, would it therefore make sense to take extra fuel to cover a higher cost index, and how much savings can we actually achieve there?

Speaker A

Today we could save three minutes of flight time for a cost of 300 kilos of fuel, so that's not too much.

Speaker A

But if you're going long haul, you may be able to save some 15 or 20 minutes.

Speaker A

It is always worth having a look at how much fuel that would possibly use extra, and then think about whether you want to take that or not.

Speaker A

So, with this piece of information available, we would now make a decision on the fuel quantity that we actually want to carry, and then submit that to the airline.

Speaker A

And that is basically the last thing we do from checking our flight plan.

Speaker A

Now we have a good mental image of what we are going to do, how our flight is going to look like.

Speaker A

So, in case of today's flight, we expect a smooth flight from Munich to Düsseldorf, we've got good weather conditions and route, we have good weather conditions locally in Düsseldorf with only few clouds at the sky.

Speaker A

Temperature is close to zero, but that's not really going to affect our flight.

Speaker A

And we know that we are actually going to be on time if we depart like 10 minutes delayed or earlier.

Speaker A

Well, and with that, we can make a decision on the fuel amount that we want to carry, and that's the last thing in this process.

Speaker A

I do hope this video helped you getting to the grips with what we are looking for when checking and analyzing our flight plan.

Speaker A

Of course, this is not a completely extensive video, you could make an hour long video out of this topic.

Speaker A

But I think this is a very nice breakdown of the kind of information that you have a look at as a pilot.

Speaker A

If you have questions, put them into the comments below and I'll try to answer as many as possible.

Speaker A

If you like the video, be sure to leave a like in YouTube, and if you're up for more, I would appreciate if you would subscribe to the channel.

Speaker A

Finally, if you really love what I'm doing, I would appreciate a small donation through the buy me a coffee link in the video description below.

Speaker A

Thank you for watching, and I'm looking forward to see you all again on the next one.

Topics:flight planSimBriefA330 pilotsignificant weather chartturbulenceicingjet streamNOTAMSIGMETflight preparation

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the first page a pilot checks in a flight plan?

The first page pilots check is the route page to understand the overall flight route and the location of alternate airports.

What kind of weather phenomena are important to look for on a significant weather chart?

Pilots look for significant weather phenomena like moderate and severe turbulence, icing, thunderstorms, volcanic ash clouds, and tropical storms, as these affect flight safety.

Why do pilots check NOTAMs before a flight?

Pilots check NOTAMs to be aware of any operational restrictions or changes at airports, such as runway closures, that could impact the flight.

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