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News & Media Membership: Five Great Features

Membership: Five Great Features

AOPA Flight Planner makes preflight easier, faster

July 1, 2017

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Know Your ratings

Q. What’s the difference between a certification and an endorsement?

A. The pilot certificate you hold is one of six grades issued by the FAA: student, sport, recreational, private, commercial, or airline transport pilot (ATP). Additionally, unless you hold a student pilot certificate, your certificate probably also has one or more ratings on it, such as rotorcraft–helicopter, or airplane–single-engine land. These give you certain privileges as outlined in sections of FAR Part 61.

But what if you would like to fly a complex airplane, or a tailwheel airplane? These are covered in the additional training and authorization requirements of FAR 61.31. Flying an aircraft as pilot in command requires either an appropriate category, class, and type rating on your pilot certificate or a pilot in command/solo endorsement.

Single-engine airplanes come in many sizes, shapes, and speeds. But if the airplane has a tailwheel, has an engine of more than 200 horsepower (high performance), has retractable landing gear (complex), or is pressurized and capable of operating above 25,000 feet (high altitude), you are required to obtain a logbook endorsement from a flight instructor to fly it as PIC. These are one-time endorsements and do not limit you to a single make, model, or type.

What about aerobatics? No certificate, no rating, no endorsement. Airshow pilots carry credentials that allow them to perform at low altitudes, but the rest of us can fly aerobatics above 1,500 feet, as long as we hold the correct certificate, rating, and endorsement for the aircraft we are flying.

Questions? Call AOPA's Pilot Information Center at 800-872-2672

The iPad is a wonderful tool for use in flight, but sometimes it’s best to sit down at a computer to plan a flight. The AOPA Flight Planner can make the preflight process easier and faster. In addition to rubberbanding a route and checking information on airports, airspace, and navaids, AOPA’s planner has several unique and new features. Here are five features you may not be aware of:

1. Airports/fuel along route. Do you like to grab lunch at a stop, or maybe you need a runway 3,000 feet or longer? Is a precision approach necessary? Click on Tools and then on Airports/Fuel Along Route. From here you choose how far off course you’re willing to accept suggestions, and then pick from 12 different filters, including runway length, restaurant on field, and so on. With fuel prices color-coded based on relative price, you can make quick work of selecting a stop.

2. Weather along route. To figure out what the weather is going to be along only your route, click on Tools and Weather Along Route. Here you’ll get a graphical picture of the weather, specific to your planned flight time. Simply select a corridor width and your expected departure time, and you’ll see color-coded forecasts only along your route based on your crossing time. Click on any station and you can see detailed information, either in a quick-glance graphic or in text format. Slide your departure time and the information updates to determine the optimum time to leave.

3. Send to. A modern flight planner wouldn’t be worth much if you couldn’t take the information into the cockpit with you. AOPA has worked with partners to provide functionality to do just that. Send your nav log to your inbox; ForeFlight, FlyQ, Garmin Pilot, and WingX users can click on a link embedded in the email, and the application will import the flight plan automatically. Android users may import to Naviator or WingX.

4. Range. It’s a beautiful day and you want to get in the air—but you don’t know where to go. A range tool in the AOPA Flight Planner lets you select your range rings, which can be defined by time or fuel, and are specific to your aircraft performance. Then select your location on the map. The software will draw a range ring around your location and show, at a glance, all the airports within your desired fuel burn or flight time. It sure beats using a protractor.

5. Graphical briefings on the horizon. Soon, the AOPA Flight Planner will be integrated with Leidos Flight Service. The Leidos NextGen-style briefing allows route briefings to be more graphical. For example, when viewing the list of notams in the briefing, users will see all the notams displayed on an interactive chart along with their route line and waypoints. The icons on the chart can be used to browse the notams, rather than clicking through text details. Seeing a notam’s exact location on a chart helps the pilot visualize the impact it could have for a flight. Look for this feature in the next release of the AOPA Flight Planner.

The AOPA Flight Planner is powered by Jeppesen and is free to AOPA members. Find it at www.aopa.org/flightplanner and try it before your next flight.

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