Route Planner Limitation
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Re: Using Windy for Flight Planning
Blake, I came across this video last week. I think it's great, but it also illustrates the main problem I have with using Windy for flight planning.When you used the Route Planner in the video you ended up picking a completely different airport than you than the one you originally wanted because you couldn't find it.
I've come across the exact same situation. The way the system exists now, you have to have a perfect geographic sense of exactly where the next fixes or the final destination are. If you try to use the search capability to find your destination, you are dumped out of the Route Planner. Return to the Route Planner and it returns to where you started. Back to square 1 and you still can't find your destination airport.
Creating the route in SkyVector, exporting it to a GPX file, and then importing it into Windy is a workaround, but it really shouldn't have to take those steps. Once you do, if you exit the Route Planner in order to get a better full screen picture of the weather (and legend which the Planner blocks), your route disappears.
FWIW, this is probably the one thing that keeps me from becoming a premium subscriber.
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@midlifeflyer
Hello,
I'll try to give you some tips to answer your questions, as Blake isn't very active on the forum. The last time was in February :)
Once you've set your starting point, as you said if you try to search for another waypoint in the search bar, the route planner is disabled.
So, I recommend saving your waypoints as favorites by clicking the little heart next to the search bar when you type their name or in the file of the airport :
Then, instead of Airports, select Favorites and plot your route by these Favorites on the map.
At this point, you can save your route as a Favorite too.
This allows you to keep it back on screen even if you exit the Route planner. You can also edit the route, such as adding or deleting waypoints. The saved route is automatically updated and saved.
At the end, it's easy to remove these waypoints and routes from your Favorites. Swiping them to the left allows to rename or delete them.
I hope this is helpful even if I don’t use the Route planner for flights but for sailing :) -
Thank you but, I'm not sure 20 or 30 favorites is a very workable solution. Making places favorites for one flight plan and then removing them from the list is, I guess, semi-workable, but the SkyVector export/ Windy import seems more efficient than that.
At least to me, (I've been using computerized flight planers since DOS), entering a series of airports or fixes or waypoints seems a basic ground-level function.
I guess, "it's somewhere around here" might be good enough for the broad picture.
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@midlifeflyer
Sorry, I didn't realize you needed 20-30 waypoints for your flight.
As free user there are limitations indeed.
By the way how do you access the Route planner if you are free user ?
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@idefix37 LOL! No, I don't need 20-30 waypoints for my flight :D.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I do more than one flight over the course of a year and they are to different places. Unless I treat Favorites as a temporary holding area - which I think is less efficient than importing a GPX - it will fill up very quickly.
