Can I start by saying that I think you have done (and are doing ) a magnificent job with both your original site Navigraph and the recently acquired Simbrief flight planning site.
I use them both all the time, and along with many many others consider that the additional immersion they bring to the Flight Sim experience is fantastic and it would be almost impossible to think of flying without either them.
I have a question (a simple one I hope) that relates to Simbrief and whether or not it fully takes into account ‘winds aloft’ when generating a flight plan. ?
As an experienced ‘simmer’, I fly with a couple or three VA’s and now only fly using ‘real weather’…generally via the ASXP weather plug-in. To bump up logged flight hours, I invariably fly ‘long haul’ routes, and use both ASXP in game, and the excellent ‘Windy’ app (which I also use in real life sailing and wouldn’t put to sea without it), to identify and accommodate ‘real wind’ patterns expected during the flight. I always err on the side of safety when calculating fuel burn.
On a couple of occasions on recent long haul flights, the fuel requirement in the Simbrief flight plan has varied considerably from my own calculation…given the real weather predictions (ASXP) and the indicated wind directions and speed at cruise altitude as indicated by ‘Windy’. I nearly ran out of fuel !!
By the way, I don’t take too much notice of the ‘real weather’ as indicated in the X Plane generic weather system…I recently swapped from it to ‘ASXP’ mid flight when the ‘XP’ weather indicated a tail wind at FL370 of +20Kts, when at the same position and flight level ‘Windy had the tail wind indicated at +90Kts. Switching over to ASXP gave me an addition 50Kts ground speed, and on an Atlantic flight meant I saved over 45 mins flight time ( and of course a major fuel saving).
I’m sorry this is a bit long winded …but you guys are so good at what you do, and the flight experience is now so realistic, that many ‘anoraks’ like me want each flight to be just as if it were ‘real life’.
For what it’s worth, I started flying MS Flight simulator when it was first released…spending hours going nowhere at very slow speeds from Meigs Field, with equally poor graphics in an incredibly basic Cessna 172…my how the world has changed for the better.
Love the ‘new’ Simbrief layout and re-organisation by the way…it’s great !!
