Yesterday I did a flight between CYUL and CKK7. My fuel estimate was far too low. I investigated and I found that the wind component on the OFP was P000, as was ISA deviation, even though there was a headwind the entire flight, up to 116kt at one point. Temperature varied throughout the cruise as far down as -15 ISA.
Today I’m trying to create a flight plan from CKK7 to CYXH and I notice the same issue, W/C shows P000, as does ISA. It makes no difference whether I file direct, or with multiple waypoints. Cruise FL also doesn’t make any difference in wind prediction. I’m using the default Sim Brief B350 - King Air 350 profile with no altered options and default selections for climb, cruise, or descent.
It appears that this is working if there are waypoints. Either the behavior has changed or I was mistaken in my original post (leaning towards the latter). Any direct flightplans will not compute a wind component.
The flight yesterday from CYUL to CKK7 had waypoints, but the wind component was 0. When I look back at that plan in my history, it appears simbrief didn’t render the waypoints on the map, likely causing a lack of wind data. Not sure why, I may have made a bad flight plan. A reference image of the generated flight plan:
So the plan generation issue appears to be some other issue, apologies for the confusion.
I suppose my question now is: Should there be wind data in flight plans that are filed simply as direct to destination?
Hi Tim, thank you for the information, that makes sense.
I have also realized something, the “problem” with no waypoints showing up in the generated flight plan was because I, at some point, unchecked “Detailed Navlog”. That’s completely my fault.
When I add a singular waypoint, the wind component seems to be calculated from that single waypoint, plus TOC and TOD. So I’m assuming that more waypoints will give a more accurate wind prediction. If that assumption is true, it would be nice if simbrief could calculate the wind component based on constant intervals along the route regardless of the number of waypoints, but I understand this would require more computation and bigger weather data requests.
SimBrief already does this. You can notice that the wind values in the navlog are often not the same as the wind values in the “Wind Information” section. This is because the navlog winds are averages over the previous leg, while the “Wind Information” winds are spot winds over each waypoint.
