OnCourse Software

Flight from Atlanta to Little Rock in CRJ 900..everything going fine, ATIS tells me 4L is in use which will involve a down wind leg. ATC descends me fine, vector for heading and then that's it. After a while i think looks like they are sending me to Houston, Texas, so i start to turn my aircraft without contra instructions except a notification that i am 29 miles off the airway which doesn't make any sense. I try to contact the tower but just get static noise and end up landing 4L under my own navigation.
Logs attached and thanks for your attention.

Some of your waypoints are very close together and PF3 did warn you that you 'might' experience issues. Your last waypoint was only 7 miles from the airport which is really way too close and you should look at having something at the very least 10-15 miles.... best is to have your last waypoint 20-25 miles out.

The reason why you got the 'off the airway' nudge was due to you flying away from the last waypoint. If you check the attached picture of your flight plan you will see you reached LIT and then HOBER required you to almost do a 135 degree turn back in the opposite direction!

Never take any "generated" flight plan for granted. Payware or not. In fact payware flight plan generators make the most mistakes. And that's why I don' use them. Always, always always check the generated fpl against actual airways data and published procedures for both the departure and arrival airport. The first thing I always do is to view the basic fpl in Skyvector. That'll stop me going the wrong way down an airway. I have seen many examples of that!! And, I can re-programme the fpl to go direct instead of slavishly following airways which is another common bug which can add an hour or more to your flight thus wasting fuel and time. Then make sure that the departure and approach routes are correct both in speed and altitude. Then you'll end up with a much better fpl model.

Thanks for the prompt and descriptive replies Gentlemen. I'm using Online Flight Planner, which is very good but does seem prone to nonsensical vectoring, especially with SIDS and STARS. The other main problem is, that for some reason, you can't delete your first or last WAY POINT, hence the HOBER thing.
Thanks again.

Some flight planners limit your ability to edit waypoints, or refuse to allow you to delete waypoints from a SID or STAR procedure. This can complicate things when you are trying to avoid having waypoints too close to the airport (which can cause problems in PF3). In these cases it is sometimes easiest to manually edit the pln file generated by the flight planner and remove the waypoints you do not wish to include in your PF3 flight plan, then re-save the file before loading it in PF3.

On line flightplanner is usually pretty good. Before you download its fpl, it always displays an image of the route and what Dave shows above should have been immediately obvious as an error. It really isn't difficult at all to correct that by deleting that wypt and inserting another or not. You can do that either by loading the fpl into the sim and making adjustments or using a text editor. Flightpan generators for simming, payware or not, are not reliable and the resulting data must always be checked against real routes and real published data.

Thanks Vololiberista, and Dan 77 for those comments. I don't remember Hober being clearly out of place on the image, but maybe i wasn't paying attention. What i do now is let FP create the route, save it and then feed it into PFE3 and see what it says. If it says Wypts x and x are too close together (had that feature switched off previously) i delete one of them in the saved plan. Same for Wypts too close to destination airport..then i re save the flight plan after renumbering the Wypts. Last night i flew the same route Atlanta to Little Rock, had the same down wind leg, and landing runway was 4L. Worked like a charm. Once again, thanks everyone for your input.

jimble wrote: *

Tue Jan 30, 2018 5:49 pm

Thanks Vololiberista, and Dan 77 for those comments. I don't remember Hober being clearly out of place on the image, but maybe i wasn't paying attention. What i do now is let FP create the route, save it and then feed it into PFE3 and see what it says. If it says Wypts x and x are too close together (had that feature switched off previously) i delete one of them in the saved plan. Same for Wypts too close to destination airport..then i re save the flight plan after renumbering the Wypts. Last night i flew the same route Atlanta to Little Rock, had the same down wind leg, and landing runway was 4L. Worked like a charm. Once again, thanks everyone for your input.

Sometimes the warning about wypts being too close together is not important. I always have it turned off actually! What you do need to check is that the fpl makes directional sense in terms of flight time and fuel. Strange dog legs like this one don't make sense and are quite obvious. It is perfectly ok to amend a fpl in this way to go direct or off airway to avoid such a problem.