@pavelneuman said in Weather forecast, flight planning and airspaces at once. A great extension for pilots:
Pilots will love this flight planning tool. Although Windy recently released its own route planner (Distance & planning) that has VFR chart built in, this plugin is coded specifically for pilots. It extends Windy's forecast layers with feature-rich flight planning and airspaces (Airspaces is available as a separate plugin too - see our list of Windy plugins).
Here's a short tutorial on how to use Flight Planner plugin..
Getting started
To load Flight Planner plugin, enter it's short name (fp) to www.windy.com/plugins and click Load plugin.
After plugin is loaded, you can access Flight Planner via contextual menu (right-click or long press).
Now you can use the weather picker to add a waypoint.
Or click an airport icon to add a waypoint.
You can also use the search option to add a waypoint.
Or enter coordinates in the search bar.
You can also load a flight plan, supported formats: gpx/efp or ep1 (easycockpit or easyplan).
You can set the altitude, airspeed and estimated time of departure for each leg. To set the time, select a single leg, by long-pressing the row.
Once the flightplan is completed, you can drag the aircraft icon to view the weather at the point where you will be, and at the selected time and level. The program will use the interpolator function to obtain the weather info for the current overlay.
For wind: the ground speed is calculated and the aircraft icon will crab.
You can also use the elevation strip at the bottom, to move the aircraft icon.
The plugin can collect the weather data for overlays that you select.
First select the overlays and select alert values.
Then click Read Wx. The program will zoom in and fly along the route to collect the weather data for each overlay. This will take a few seconds, but can take about a minute for a long route. Do not drag the map while this is happening.
When you now slide the aircraft icon, all the selected data will be shown in the box.
Once the Wx data have been collected, the program will calculate the corrected ETE, average ground speed and the ETE for the entire trip.
You can also drag waypoints, first click "allow drag" (1) then drag them to the new position (2) and click OK. Then "lock drag" (1) again, to prevent accidentally dragging when sliding the aircraft icon.
The plugin contains the previous airspaces plugin, airspace data is obtained from openAIP.net.
@TZ
You are right, this is obvious when latitude-longitude grid is shown (see Settings).
The reflection of the sun moves a little more north each day and will disappear before reappearing around September 20 at the time of the equinox.
