Welcome to the fplan Home Page!

"A freely distributable program for flight planning"

About fplan

Welcome to the home page of fplan; a freely distributable application (with source code) designed to assist general aviation pilots in creating flight plans for cross country flights in powered aircraft. It was developed primarily for use on systems running the UNIX operating system and the X11 Window System, with particular emphasis on Linux. A mailing list is available for those that want to monitor or participate in fplan development.

The input to fplan is a planfile that can be created with the user's favorite plain text editor. A self explanatory language is used to describe the flight; departure and destination airports, intermediate waypoints, navigation aids, winds aloft, and fuel consumption rates. The flight plan produced by fplan includes; wind corrected magnetic headings, distance, estimated time and fuel consumption for each leg, latitude and longitude for each checkpoint, and optional VOR fixes. A graphical preview of the flight is available on systems with X11 Windows and the XView Toolkit.

For convenience, airports or navaids can be referenced by their ICAO identifier in planfiles. The information that fplan requires is stored in database files, indexed by identifier. For users in the United States, freely distributable database files are available that were derived from the National Airspace Data distributed by the Aeronautical Information Services Division of the FAA. Database files are now available for Austria and Germany, and data for other countries is planned for a future release. (See the FAQ for more information).

Site Map

Gracious thanks go to ibiblio.org for hosting these pages!

Last Modified: Sun Nov 26 23:02:53 PST 2000