Mac Flight Planner - Description

What is Mac Flight Planner?

Mac Flight Planner is (as the name implies) a flight planning application. In fact, Mac Flight Planner (MFP) is the only flight planning application for Mac OS X for use in real world aviation. All other flight planners on Mac OS X require the X-Plane database are are designed for use with that simulator. While X-Plane is, in my opinion, the greatest flight simulator going, I think you'll agree that it's database can't be relied upon for real world aviation around the world.

In MFP, you create your own waypoint database. Yes, this can be tedious at first, but considering that most GA pilots will regularly use 20-30 waypoints in their immediate vicinity and then add a handful everytime they fly somewhere new, this task of creating and maintaing your own database is a lot less work than it may appear. Considering the alternative of paying huge sums of money for tens of thousands of waypoints you'll never use, it's not a bad trade-off.

So what can MFP do for me?

MFP lets you create flight plans you can print for in-cockpit use through simple drag and drop. Enter true airspeed and wind heading and speed for each leg and MFP will computer wind corrected magnetic heading, ground speed, distance, time interval and total time. You can also record altitude and lowest safe altitude for each leg. You can see totals for the time of the flight, distance and total nautical air miles (amount of air you've travelled through).

You can enter a departure time and date and MFP will compute your departure time in UTC, arrival time in local and UTC, and whether you will be arriving or departing before or after sunset. You can also see the exact sunrise and sunset times for your departure and arrival airports.

What are the print outs like?

MFP uses a plugin based system for printing. There are two included plugins, one for a fullsize (A4 or US Letter) flight plan and one for a radio frequency list of all waypoints in the plan. You can see what these printouts look like by downloading the pdf's listed in the screenshots section.

You can develop your own plugins by using the SDK included on the MFP disk image. All you need is a knowledge of Cocoa. The source code for both of the included plugins are included in the SDK so you can see how it all works. This allows you to modify an existing plugin to include your flying clubs logo, or you can build a completely new plugin to meet regulatory requirements for your country. If you need help developing your plugin, you can email me anytime.

Flight planning apps are usually expensive, how much is this one?

Yes, you're right. Flight planners are usually very expensive pieces of software, mostly due to their large waypoint database and the costs incurred in creating and maintaing that database. As I've noted earlier, MFP doesn't have a huge database with thousands of waypoints you'll never use. This allows me to sell it for considerably less.

You can buy Mac Flight Planner for $20 on it's own or for $30 as part of a bundle with FlightMath from TriVectus. FlightMath is an E6-B replacement type application and is very useful to have during planning. The bundle represents a 25% saving so try FlightMath as well and if you like then save yourself some money and buy the bundle.