This is a review of Dispatch Planner X by Jessica Bannister-Pearce.
One of the great things about flight sim, is that it gives us a chance to fly aircraft, that in real life, we only get to travel on. But with great power comes great responsibility, or in this case the Flight Operations Manual. Through the hallowed pages of the FOM, we learn all about our chosen aircraft from hydraulics to engines, and of course the all important ‘Checklist’. This is great when you’re sat at the gate, ready for the pushback, but where are we going? And how will we get there? Do I have enough fuel? Or too much fuel? These are the questions I hate answering. Mostly because I know little about routings or required fuel. Thankfully Blushing Sheep Simulations (I’m Welsh, so enjoy the irony here) bring us Dispatch Planner X.
The Welcome Screen
Where Do You Want to Go Today?
Blushing Sheep have decided to offer us the front office as it were to prepare us for the flight ahead, and starting the program up for the first time gives a few simple questions to answer. The most important of which are the choice of Pounds(lbs) or Kilograms (Kg) for weight preferences along with FS version. Also really useful is you’re name as a pilot. This will be helpful for connecting to VATSIM to pre-file you’re dispatch plan, (a nice touch for those who fly online) as well as placing you’re name on the load sheet. You’re home based airport (again for VATSIM flyers) and an option to update the FS aircraft list, to take into account any new aircraft added, more or less round out the start up preferences.
With these choices out of the way, we can get on to the program front. The Welcome screen in front of you offers several options. To your left are your menu choices. First is ‘Create New Dispatch’, which is the main option and point of the program. Next is the Options section, where you can make changes to the preferences you’ve just set. And the final choice is to ‘Launch FS’. Below these is a time and date display and the last thing is a green bar. This is a status bar. Green is good, whist Yellow moving stripes mean that the program is downloading information. Red means Error. An error message will follow so you’ll know what went wrong. The rest of the screen is taken up with your ‘saved flight’, where you can choose a previous route and load with ease. But the real power comes from the create new dispatch option. So away we go.
This is just the Basic flight info Page
Know you’re ICAO’s
Clicking the icon, we’re moved to a fresh page and a fresh set of icons in place of the Saved flights panel. Number 1 is our basic flight details, and that’s where we’ll start. But before that, you’ll notice a set of folder style icons below. From left to right they are: Clear current flight, Load a flight, Save a flight, Print All and finally the Home button which returns you to the Welcome page.
Selecting Basic flight details, we change screens again. Now it gets serious. From here we’ll need to enter the details of our flight today. First of all we need to enter the departure and arrival airports. This is where you’ll need to know the Airfield ICAO’s, as there’s no searchable database included in the program. There is, however, a helpful link below that will take us onto the web where we can search for our airfield’s ICAO’s. You also need to enter your flight number. Next, we need to think about alternates and hold time. There is also an option for a second, third and fourth alternate to be entered, but both the Alternate selection and hold time sections are optional, so are not really required to produce a dispatch plan. Following these sections comes the next hurdle, Departure times, Arrival times and approximate flying time. Entering all this data is required, so I suggest studying you’re route to see what the actual flying time is. (I usually fly scheduled airlines, so I check their websites for flight times and flight numbers). Both departure and arrival times must be in UTC time, so always check before making the mistake of entering local time (I’m guilty on that one).
The really difficult one comes next, the flight plan. If you know it, feel free to enter it here. But to save time and typing fingers, Blushing Sheep have once again provided us with a link to the web, where we can get a route with little hassle. A quick copy and paste and we’re on to the next item. By now, you’ll have noticed that as you fill in the many boxes, they turn green. That means the information is correct. Not a problem for most of them, but a god send for the flight plan section. Especially if you’ve taken the time to enter the route manually. You’ll know straight away if an error has occurred.
Next comes the more mundane bits such as Cruise Altitude, Speed, Cost Index (curse the Cost Index I say) and airframe type and reg. The final push comes when its time to enter you’re PAX amount along with crew. But most importantly, you’ll need to select the FS version and the specific aircraft from the last menu for the program to work out all the variables (don’t select the bog standard 737NG if you’re flying the PMDG 737-700)
Finally, you can tick the box to display the weather at both airfields on the dispatch plan, providing you have an internet connection that is.
Hopefully, all your boxes are green and the two ticks at the bottom are lit. This is good news. It means we’re now ready to fly. At least if you want to. The right hand ‘tick’ takes you to the status page where your dispatch plan is waiting. The left ‘tick’, however, takes you on to the Advanced Information section.
Advanced planning anyone?
Information Overload?
Contained in the Advanced planning section are some really powerful features. After the introduction the first page of interest is the Airports/Alternates page. Here you’ll find much more detailed descriptions of your departure and arrival airports, including the elevation, location and descriptions of the various runway lengths available. Your alternates contain more or less the same information, including their distance from your destination.
Next up is the gem of the program, The ‘Route and Time’ section. Simply click on the calculator button below and the program works out your route for you complete with leg times, performance figures and what stage the flight is at (Climb, Cruise or Descent). Using this information, Dispatch planner then works out the exact amount of fuel required for your chosen flight. That makes this a pretty powerful piece of software, and a must have really. It also gives you your route in an easy to follow listing, and checking the small box at the bottom of the page will include this information in the final dispatch print out. If there are any errors on the plan, the box below will let you know.
The next page will present you with all the details of your flight pertaining to weight and fuel. The left side gives the planned weights as well as the maximums, whilst the right side gives you the fuel required for the trip along with contingency fuel, alternate fuel, hold fuel and what ever the captain adds. This gives us a planned takeoff fuel. Adding in the taxi fuel gives us the total fuel to be added to the aircraft, or Block fuel. If you wish to add extra fuel (Captain’s discretion), then checking the ‘tanker fuel?’ box allows us to add extra whist telling us the amount of extra flight time available to us. If you add too much and send the aircraft over it’s limits, then the PLNTOW will turn red, letting you know it’s time to lose weight.
The final choice left is to Validate the route. You can use this to see if your chosen route would pass the Eurocontrol validation. It’s a nice touch, but not much use outside of Europe.
One Final tick to click on and we’re ready to go.
Success! Meet the Dispatch Page
Lost In Translation
Now that we’ve entered all the relevant data, we can now see the reports. Clicking the Dispatch report icon brings up a new window to display the report. This is not for the faint hearted. The data displayed will be familiar to many real world pilots, but to a new pilot, it will take a bit of translation. Included are the aircraft details, fuel and weight information along with the route and weather at both destination and arrival airports. The weather is probably the biggest mountain to climb, but is easy to understand once you get used to it. You also have several options at the top of the page. You can ‘Maximise the window, Print (a great option, I’d advise using it), Show/Hide editable areas. This displays selections of changeable features including ‘extra fuel’ ETD and ETA’ along with ‘Cost index’ ‘Company route’ and even ‘Flight no and Airframe/Reg’
The final option besides close is ‘File VATSIM flight plan’. Clicking this opens VATSIM’s pre-flight website with all the details filled in making it a lot quicker to file that plan.
Going back to the main menu you can also select the Weather report. This opens up the weather report for both departure and arrival airports as well as the weather at your alternate/s. This is a much more detailed report than found on the dispatch report. It covers not just the weather currently, but its projected weather as well. Helpfully, Blushing Sheep have included an option to help decode the jumbled mess on the page and selecting TAF’s Explained from the menu takes you to another website to help you along.
And now the Weather, brought to you by the number 1,2,3,4…………
Your final choice is the load sheet. This gives you all the data concerned with weight during your flight. Again, I’d advocate printing this out as it makes programming your FMC much easier.
Extras
As if the program itself was not enough, Blushing Sheep have included a useful editor for us to use to update any aircraft specs we like, or simply to add a new aircraft with all it’s relative details. Truthfully, I can’t see it being of much use to myself. However, everyone is different.
And finally the load Sheet. Sadly Captain’s with long names are not catered for.
Conclusion
This is an invaluable tool, especially to those of us who fly the heavy iron. The ability to update the AIRAC database via Navigraph.com is also useful. And at only 19 Euros this won’t break the bank. If I had to pick a fault, I’d say that some of the data contained in the final printouts can be intimidating for the novice, and although Blushing Sheep cover this with web links, perhaps a little more information in the PDF manual would have been helpful. Other than that, what you’re left with is a program that you really can’t do without and at a price you can’t afford to miss.
Related posts
