The purpose of planning is to get general idea of how you going to fly from your origin to your destination. We will divide flight planning into three major parts:

• Route planning
• Flight level planning
• Filling the Flight Plan

Let us start to plan your flight route. First thing to do is to decide which will be your origin and destination airport. In this example we will fly from Kiev Boryspil’ airport to Dnipropetrovsk. Therefore, now we can get the ICAO codes of these airports, they are UKBB and UKDD accordingly.

The main source of meteorological information in VATSIM is meteorological coded information also known as METAR. This kind of information published every 30 minutes for most of the world’s airports and can be easily found in the internet. It consist of a few major types of information for the every specific airport – they are wind, visibility, weather phenomena, air pressure, runway surface condition and predictable changes. Therefore, you would understand how to decode this kind of information we provide you with the diagram as shown below.

METAR UKBB 030800Z VRB02MPS 9999 BKN050 M19/M20 Q1028 86411040 36821040 NOSIG

We can get that code on request for Kyiv Boryspil (UKBB).

METAR - is an identifier of a meteorological code, it means that this is weather observation, not forecast.

UKBB - station of observation.

030800Z - date (03) and time (0800Z) of observation.

VRB02MPS - first three symbols - wind direction in degrees (VRB – means it has no specific direction) and the next 2 indicates the speed (02MPS).

9999 - visibility near the ground in meters, if 9999 – visibility more than 10 kilometers. If stated CAVOK – it would mean that the visibility is more than 10 kilometers and there are no significant weather phenomena. If there is no way to determine visibility, the runway visual range will be stated with the code RVR as shown as R36L/5000, which means that on runway 36L the visibility is 5000 meters.

BKN050 - cloud base in hundreds of feet, so this are broken clouds with ceiling of 5000 feet. Type of clouds you can encounter: FEW – fewer, SCT – scattered, BKN – broken and OVC – overcast. After the ceiling altitude the abbreviation CB could be stated which indicates cumulonimbus clouds are present.

M19 / M20 - temperature and dew point in degrees of Celsius (-19° and -20°), symbol M indicates that the temperature is below zero.

Q1028 - air pressure in hectopascals 1028hPa.

86411040, 36821040 - runway surface condition:

• 88, 36 - number of runway if there are few runways present – 50 added to the right runway number, so 86 refers to runway 36R and 36 to runway 36L, if 88 – conditions are for all the runways;
• 4, 8 - the type of condition that runway is covered with (rain, snow, slash etc.);
• 1, 2 - percent of coverage;
• 10, 10 - the thickness of coverage in tens of millimeter, 0.1 mm;
• 40 - breaking coefficient in hundreds of present 0.4 – the larger the number – the better the grip.

To get more information about how to decode METAR you can use our special manual...

Now let us think about some questions...

CAN WE ACTUALLY FLY IN SUCH A WEATHER?

First, we have to decide whether the current weather conditions allow us to perform a flight at all. There are many visibility restrictions, especially for visual flights, and if the current visibility and cloud ceiling are below the minimum, we should not fly and wait for weather to get better. Despite we fly virtually, we strongly suggest you to consider this factors and evaluate your personal skills in marginal weather conditions. Here are some numbers to start with:

If current weather conditions are below them, it is better to postpone the flight.

WHAT RUNWAY SHOULD WE USE?

If there were a controller providing service for the airport of your desire, you would not be asking yourself the question about the runway in use – the controller will tell you, but if there is not a single controller, you have to decide which runway to pick for your operations. To determine this we need the direction of the wind.

You may already know that airplanes should take off and land in a headwind. We already got the direction from which wind is blowing from METAR and runway heading we can get either from map or simply by multiplying the number of the runway by number 10. Therefore, the formula is - the closer wind direction to the runway heading – the better. For example for wind 330 degrees will suit the runway 36, but if the wind is 200 – it definitely should be runway 18.

WHAT FOR DO WE NEED PRESSURE?

You measure your altitude with the barometric gauge so what you see on the scale is not actually an altitude - it is a difference between air pressure on different altitudes. For high altitude flights, we always set altimeter for the pressure of QNE 1013.2 hPa this gives, us that all the aircraft’s altimeters show the pilot’s correct altitude. However, close to the ground we have also take into a count ground obstacle and know their height. Unfortunately, because the air pressure always changes, the height of these objects will always be changed as well. And in order to this numbers be constant we should measure their altitude from the medium sea level MSL, to do this, every time we fly, we have to set our altimeters for QNH pressure – the current pressure on the aerodrome related to the medium sea level.

During the climb we will cross the transition altitude – this is the altitude where you have to switch from QNH to QNE and set on your altimeter the pressure of 1013 hPa, this altitude can be found on most kind of aerodrome chart, but in Ukraine transition altitude is constant through all the country 10 000 feet.

When descending there is a transition level – the flight level where we switch from QNE to QNH for the specific aerodrome we going to land at. QNH we can get from the METAR or it will be given to us by an air traffic controller. Transition level is always higher than transition altitude, in Ukraine it could be flight levels 110, 120 or 130 depending on the pressure.