The way flight schools and aero-clubs teach VFR flight planning is exactly the same as decades ago: Unfold your en-route chart, draw your route, measure tracks and distances, find out the flight time for each segment. Then review the departure and arrival procedures on the Visual Approach Charts.

This method worked for years and will continue to work in the future. However improvements in information and communication technology changed the whole world – including flight planning. So have a look to what digital age can offer to pilots…

Electronic routing
When using flight planning software, the whole exercise is simple: select departure and destination, then your computer will select waypoints and produce a navigation log for you.

Even if you don’t invest in planning software, your handheld GPS can help you: instead of measuring tracks and distance on a chart, create a flight plan in your GPS. It will then give you all the info you need. If you program the speed, it will even calculate the legs and trip time.

These methods will reduce the risk of measurement error, and of errors when converting distance in time as well as when adding the times.

Chart vs. Reality
Any VFR pilot knows how different a chart and the reality can be. Things that are obvious to spot on a chart are often quite hard to find once in flight. When navigating with compass and clock over unfamiliar areas, this can become a major challenge.

Satellite and aerial imagery can be a great help to get a feeling how things will look like from above, and to build some knowledge of the route to be flown. I personally used Google Earth to increase my level of comfort on a couple of occasions. When approaching critical points like alpine valleys, I then felt like it was my first time here.

Get local information
Many airports have special VFR procedures for noise abatement and airspace design reasons. Seeing the procedure on the chart is one thing, understanding its design and how to interpret it is something else.

The best way to get the point and later fly the procedure properly is to get info from local pilots. Most airport offer such information on their websites. I even saw airports with video-like demonstration of the procedures, highlighting the hot spots and potential traps.

This additional information is not presented on the approach plates and can make the difference between a complex, stressful approach (and potential mistake) and a very satisfactory execution of the local procedure.

Be a modern pilot
These techniques are not part of the standard flight preparation syllabus because it would be unfair to assume that all pilots have access to these modern means and technology.

But if you’re lucky enough to have them, it would be a shame not to use them, a bit like these pilots using GPS moving maps without programming a flight plan… but this is another topic.