Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler - Building a multi leg route my aircraft can handle

Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler | Airline Operations | Building a multi leg route my aircraft can handle

DVA13608
Captain, A320

Joined on January 26 2019
Moose Club
Century Club
Eurocap Club
Toulouse Century Club
Online Century Club

Edmonton, AB Canada

143 legs, 242.3 hours
140 legs, 235.1 hours online
140 legs, 238.3 hours ACARS

Posted onPost created on February 13 2019 18:24 ET by Gerard Beekmans

After the discussion earlier about connected logbooks, I wanted to check more into it and see how I can make that work for me. The gotcha being: I am trying to traverse the "ponds" with my A320. I'm having some trouble figuring our proper routing to get to certain places (without resorting to requesting charter flights). For example, I'm trying to arrive in Sydney, Australia (YSSY) from Edmonton Canada (CYEG). There is no direct flight in the schedule so I'm trying to figure out which hops to use.

Using the multi-leg tool is not working out because I can't specify the maximum distance per leg. It's giving me a Los Angeles (KLAX) to Sydney (YSSY) of 6,500 nm in a B777. I'm not yet rated here for that one.

Manual hopping is proving to become quite the exercise of trying to piece together which airports I can fly between that are available in the schedule. I came up with the following:

Edmonton (CYEG) -> Vancouver (CYVR) -> Honolulu (PHNL) -> Guam (PGUM) -> Manila (RPLL) -> Sydney (YSSY).

That last leg is 3385 which is pushing the limits of the A320 not having enough fuel for alternates and such. So I'm trying to see how else I can get there. Maybe I need to hop through Indonesia, arrive in Northern Australia first and continue on.

I also tried Honolulu - Fiji (NFFN) and Honolulu - New Caledonia (NWWW). Without an alternate, no ETOPS fuel planning and lowering reserves, I could just make it (according to SimBrief's fuel calculations anyway).

If I wanted to keep things by-the-book, is there a better way to go about this?

The easy solution is: get rated in the B777 program and flying the PMDG 777 I already own. My issue is that I have the FSX version of it and I only use P3D nowadays. I am looking to get more mileage out of the A320 for now simply to get my money's worth before I move on.

Is there a way to get some kind of world overlay of all the airports and routes that exist in the database? Then I can simply follow the lines across the world and play connect the dots/lines.

If such a thing does not exist, I may have created a project for myself. I noticed the entire schedule can be exported into another format. I think I saw PFPX. Perhaps I can use that to build something like a Google Earth KML/KMZ file that shows every route available. It might be too messy with way too many criss-crossing lines especially in the US but at properly zoomed out levels, it may be manageable to plan a cross-continent trip.

Thoughts anyone, before I embark on a project that'll essentially be a waste of time if there already exists a better way to accomplish this.

Gerard Beekmans

Captain, A320

Posted onPost created on February 13 2019 18:42 ET by Gerard Beekmans

Replying to myself again (seems to be a habit lately), I found the Interactive Route Map. It did the job though still not as easy as would have been nice. It allowed me to at least select one airline at a time to see which airports they served, noticed Pan American has a bunch of blue dots on all the islands in the Pacific Ocean so it became a clicking exercise to see which dot has a line to which other dot and see if I could switch airlines at certain destinations to get other outbound options. The following hops seem to work out:

Honolulu (PHNL) - Canton Island (PCIS) - Nausori (NFNA) - Sydney (YSSY). Each leg is under 2,000 nm so that ought to work out fuel wise.

There's got to be an easier (ie quicker) way to do this. smile

Gerard Beekmans

Captain, A320

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