Hi I just signed up for a year of the Ultimate Subscription and have successfully created an IFR flight plan in Navigraph and loaded it and flew it in MSFS 2020.
My question is about creating a site seeing tour. Say I want to depart from LaGuardia airport in New York City and circle around the Statue of Liberty and then return to LaGuardia. I have a SimBrief account as well. Do I create a flight plan in SimBrief departing from and landing in LaGuardia? Can I add the Statue of Liberty as a waypoint in SimBrief?
Also when I am done with SimBrief and load the flight plan into Navigraph, do I massage the data by say adding an ILS approach to LaGuardia or do I leave the flight plan unchanged? I am really new to flight plans and flight sims in general so I would very much appreciate your guidance. Thanks!
We are happy to hear that you are a new user and would love to help you. In this case, however, I have both good and bad news.
For the bad news, neither Navigraph nor SimBrief is able to create such customized (VFR) flightplans. This is because both services are meant to be used for IFR flights that tend to follow airways and pre-defined waypoints, in contrast to VFR flights which tend to navigate using visual references.
For now, your only options are to either use a map service from Bing or Google in combination with MSFS built-in planner (Find coordinates to your waypoints and input these into the planner search field), or to use free tools like LittleNavMap that can display our data along with a normal map to plan your flights.
For the good news, Navigraph has a VFR project in the works that will have its main focus on exactly these kinds of flights. We’ll share more information as it becomes available, but until then your options are the above-mentioned.
Thank you for understanding! Please let me know if you have any more questions!