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Route Planning for Weather & Fuel

dan

dan

Well Known Member
I'm planning a trip back to OSH later this week for the RV Assembly workshop. At this point I'm relatively certain that there will be weather to contend with. I won't get away with VFR-only this time, I don't think. Anyway, I sat down with Airnav's great deals report and planned out a whole bunch of routes and relatively cheap fuel stops. When I travel these kinds of distances, I like to have several options planned in advance!

My normal route is CNO-18V-OSH, and that's what I'll start out with...but if (and when) weather sends me out of the way, at least I'll have some decent options ready.

20070821_osh_route_plan.jpg


Gotta love Airnav and the Garmin 496!
 
OK Dan, when do you roll the alternate route mapping capability in to Weathermeister?

My current technique for big trips is to start with Airnav to get some potential fuel stops, then go to Skyvector to plug them in for visualization, and then to Weathermeister for detailed altitude/speed/fuel planning. Nothing beats WM as the final detailed planning stop!

Paul
 
LO US Chart, IFR Charts, Victor Airways

Everyone does there own thing in flight planning and I am no exception. I agree with the shortest distance kind of, and weather for sure but fuel cost are so far down on my flight planning concerns that they do not affect my flight planning. I look at the Jep US LO chart and find the shortest Victor airway route without dashed lines and that in my primary route. I consider the big picture weather relief options but there is no hard plan made for them. More often than not I still draw the primary course line on the affected sectionals and add 10 nautical mile tick marks and check the terrain and special use airspace along the way. I flight plan for 4 hour legs which leaves over a 1 hour reserve at 75% power with my 55 gallon fuel system and land at the airport for fuel that satisfies my plan. If the weather is going to make a IFR flight difficult near launch time, I replan the flight. In flight if the weather is threatening on course (not just mild clouds) I deviate around it and cancel IFR if necessary to stay out of it. I use the GPS to tell me where my intended destination is especially during major deviations (100s of miles of deviation would not be a cause for cancelling the trip or waiting it out at some mid-way point) so I can turn for the destination when terrain and weather permit. I call Unicom before descending to make sure fuel is available when possible.

Bob Axsom
 
Bob Axsom said:
... fuel cost are so far down on my flight planning concerns that they do not affect my flight planning.
Click to expand...
On a trip where you are going to burn 150+ gallons, saving a dollar per gallon is significant. I'm not made of money, and I want to fly as much as I possibly can. And that means putting fuel price very high on the list of stopping point priorities.

I can remember a time not too long ago where I traveled with NO regard for fuel price. As recently as 5 years ago, the difference in fuel price from point A to point B, at its worst, had very little impact on the trip cost.

But flying today is a totally different ball game...at least for me...because of the vast range of fuel prices. You'll find fuel in some spots for say $3.50/gal, and as much as $6.00/gal in other spots. For short trips, ok, not a huge deal, but for LONG x-country travel, I absolutely must consider fuel price.
 
Bob Axom said:
... fuel cost are so far down on my flight planning concerns that they do not affect my flight planning.
Click to expand...
dan said:
On a trip where you are going to burn 150+ gallons, saving a dollar per gallon is significant. I'm not made of money, and I want to fly as much as I possibly can. And that means putting fuel price very high on the list of stopping point priorities.

I can remember a time not too long ago where I traveled with NO regard for fuel price. As recently as 5 years ago, the difference in fuel price from point A to point B, at its worst, had very little impact on the trip cost.

But flying today is a totally different ball game...at least for me...because of the vast range of fuel prices. You'll find fuel in some spots for say $3.50/gal, and as much as $6.00/gal in other spots. For short trips, ok, not a huge deal, but for LONG x-country travel, I absolutely must consider fuel price.
Click to expand...

I hear what Bob's saying but I whole-heartedly agree with Dan. In my case of flying 300-400 hours/year, that's 2000-3000 thousand gallons of fuel purchased per year (at 8 gal/hr fuel burn). Some simple math at 50 cents/gallon savings is a whole lot of $$$. No matter what, though, you gotta fly safe ;) Rosie
 
After 18V, you might consider stopping in LeSeur, MN...I think we paid 3.75 there on the way back from OSH...
 
Dan,

In ten words or less can you explain how you put all of those options on the map? Is there a site that you are using to do this or is there any chance it'll be on your planning site? Better yet, if I send you my 496 can you take a few minutes and plan all the options and program them into the routes for any destinations that I might want to go to one day? Seriously, this is pretty cool stuff. Please share...

Regards,
 
Bryan Wood said:
In ten words or less can you explain how you put all of those options on the map? Is there a site that you are using to do this or is there any chance it'll be on your planning site? Better yet, if I send you my 496 can you take a few minutes and plan all the options and program them into the routes for any destinations that I might want to go to one day? Seriously, this is pretty cool stuff. Please share...
Click to expand...
No, not in 10 words or less. Golden Eagle 2007. It's one long route that goes back and forth in order to "look like" it's several possible routes. I wanted a quick & easy reference in the cockpit.
 
I saw C27 on your map... Manchester, IA... I'm from there. Should be very decent fuel price - self serve.

Have a good trip!
 
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And now mogas works

I'm wondering if I could fit 100 gallon extended range tanks...:)

Frank 7a
 
Suggestions

Instead of 18V ($3.80)which is close to DIA (DEN) consider Greeley (GXY) at $3.94. Closer to the mountains is Longmont (LMO) at $3.89.

South of DEN Pueblo (PUB) is $4.00 and La Junta in the prairie is $3.81.

K81 is nice since they have a barbeque place in field near the fuel pump.

If you have time call me on the way back and I will fly with you a bit if I have enough time on my engine.
 
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Thanks Ron. I just got off the phone with about 15 airport managers, checking fuel prices. :)

I may end up heading up north through the Salt Lake City area, but if I go through the Denver area I'll keep all of your suggestions in mind.

K81 reports $3.72...not bad! Might not have time to BBQ, though. :( Gotta cover a lot of ground tomorrow.
 
dan said:
K81 reports $3.72...not bad! Might not have time to BBQ, though. :( Gotta cover a lot of ground tomorrow.
Click to expand...
Hi Dan,

We stopped at K81 on the way back from Oshkosh for the cheap fuel and the BBQ. However, they didnt open the restaurant until noon or 1pm so we kept going. There also isnt any restroom facilities around that we could see except in the restaurant.
 
Version 2.0, with fuel prices:
20070822_osh_route_plan.jpg


If weather steers me left or right, I'll pretty much always have a good option. Fun stuff!
 
Now there's an opportunity

In interesting Operations problem here.

Factoring out weather, take distance, fuel consumption rate, average speed, and fuel cost to optimize the route for lowest cost.
 
JimP said:
In interesting Operations problem here.

Factoring out weather, take distance, fuel consumption rate, average speed, and fuel cost to optimize the route for lowest cost.
Click to expand...


Supposedly, that is what Airnav.com does for you when you go to it's "fuel" function and let it pick a route for you. But it is always so dang slow that I rairly have the patience to do that....

Have a good trip Dan. I'm headed to Virginia for Labor Day weekend, then hope to see you at Big Bear in Spetember, followed by LOE....yeah, lots of travel coming up!

Paul
 
JimP said:
In interesting Operations problem here.

Factoring out weather, take distance, fuel consumption rate, average speed, and fuel cost to optimize the route for lowest cost.
Click to expand...
That's pretty easy from my perspective. CNO-18V-OSH.

Any other route, and I have to stop one more time. One more stop means more fuel burned -- and more time wasted. Even if I save a little on fuel, it washes away if I have to stop once more.
 
Route Optimization

JimP said:
In interesting Operations problem here.

Factoring out weather, take distance, fuel consumption rate, average speed, and fuel cost to optimize the route for lowest cost.
Click to expand...


This would be a variation on the "traveling salesman problem", a problem in route optimization. This is a hard problem to solve. As in NP-hard (Nondeterministic Polynomial-time hard). :eek:

There are sophisticated algorithms that can solve for this problem, I'd be a bit surprised if AirNav is using them. On the other hand, maybe this is why AirNav is super slow sometimes, the servers are buried running optimizations. :rolleyes:

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

Just FYI: There is a related problem in theoretical computer science (the P=NP problem) that qualifies for the Millennium Prize. You could really outfit your RV10 with that extra million! ;)
 
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More Route Computation

I just did the math. Using the optimum algorithm (that I know of), the time to solve the route problem exactly is (n^2) x (2^n) operations, where n is the number of airports to solve for.

Using 10 airports, the solution time is 3ms. No sweat. Done before your finger leaves the enter key.

Using 100 airports, the solution time is approx 10^19 years. As in, more than a trillion trillion years. :eek:

Assumptions: 3Gig pentium. (It really doesn't matter!)

Doug, I hope this wasn't too far afield from RV stuff...
 
flight planning software for graphic?

I thought from Dan's original post that I could go to the Airnav sight and generate a graphic similar to the one he posted - a route map with waypoints posted, but I couldnt seem to find such a feature. DId I miss something on their site, or is the graphic produced from some other software? Would like to check it out - it has a nice look to it.

erich
 
erich weaver said:
I thought from Dan's original post that I could go to the Airnav sight and generate a graphic similar to the one he posted - a route map with waypoints posted, but I couldnt seem to find such a feature. DId I miss something on their site, or is the graphic produced from some other software? Would like to check it out - it has a nice look to it.

erich
Click to expand...
It's something I did by hand. If Paulo Santos would return my emails, we'd have something exactly like this on AirNav/Weathermeister. But he's apparently too busy to return emails.

It was worth my effort to produce this "kneeboard fuel price chart," because today my original plan today was to head to EGE. Almost as soon as I took off, the forecast for the Denver area didn't look so hot. I turned left and changed my plan to U42. Then when I had a ton of fuel remaining I pressed on to BPI. There was no guesswork since I had done all the planning up front. Well worth the hour or two I spent on this.

Such a simple concept. Why haven't I seen this done before? I've done it textually many times, just not a map of it. The map is the way to go.
 
Good luck getting any type of response back from AirNav. If you do, you are "the man".

:rolleyes:

(I've tried many times for different reasons.)
 
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