Finding Realistic Flights in Infinite Flight
Realism: How to be realistic in the eyes of a fellow Infinite Flight pilot
What’s in this Tutorial?
Finding a realistic flight with FlightAware
Conversion with SkyVector (if applicable)
Inserting the flight plan into Infinite Flight
Finding a Flight
Previously, in November of 2020, I flew the United 777-300ER from Newark Liberty International Airport to Tokyo Narita International. Many pilots would simply use the same gate information and then get another flight plan from FPLtoIF or Simbrief. But today, I felt like taking realism to the next level. This includes realistic flight plan, cruising altitudes, and gate information. Follow me as I guide you through how to be as realistic as it gets, and feeling as though you are back in the air.
Flighty
Flighty app is an amazing application that I use to get specific gate information, departure and arrival times, and aircraft registrations. You can download it on the app store. For more details, go check out this link.
For this flight, it was flown on November 2, 2019. In order to find this flight, all we would have to do is type in the departure information as such.
After searching this information and selecting our flight, we can collect all of the information that we need.
Looking at this flight, we can see that our aircraft was scheduled to depart Newark at 12:00PM EDT, which translates into 1600Z. After collecting all of this information, we can move on to the next step, which is getting the flight plan.
FlightAware
FlightAware is one of the most used tools by Sim Pilots, passengers, and aviation enthusiasts. It allows us to see flight details, such as departure and arrival information, aircraft type, and flight plan. Usually to find a flight plan from a historical date, you would need a subscription. But in this situation, you do not.
In order to find the historical flight, you would have to fill in this template that I have written (without the parenthesis, keeping the slashes). After typing all of it in, it should look something like this:
This should bring us right to the date of our flight, with all of the information we need, as shown below.
I have squared off the important part of this screen, so we can move on to the next step; converting with SkyVector.
Converting with SkyVector
KEWR GAYEL Q812 SYR 5000N/07800W 5500N/08100W GUBAK 6500N/09600W 7000N/11100W 7100N/12000W TAYTA LISKI L160 PEMID P140 BUMAT L771 AGUBI L771 ABOMA L771 DITOR B223 LUMIN Y10 LARCH Y302 JUGEM Y30 GURIP Y30 SWAMP RJAA
This, is our masterpiece of a flight plan. You, as well as many others may see a problem here. This flight plan has many airways, which Infinite Flight currently does not support. I’ve highlighted the airways to make them more visible.
This is the most painstaking part of getting the realistic flight plan. In order to decode the airways, you would have to physically go to the location on SkyVector, and then zoom in to find the airways, and the consisting waypoints to get the most accurate flight plan. For instance, here’s the Q812 airway.
(Highlighted in red, credits to SkyVector)
Other Sources for Realism
Awesome tutorial by @DeerCrusher, you can use this in combination with the said links to climb realistically throughout your flight.
Great list of checklists for Infinite Flight Airliners, made by @Toon
Great source for calculating loads, takeoff and landing profiles. Made by @Kuba_Jaroszczyk
Great application by @epaga, gives in-flight callouts and allows for step climbing when away from device.
Beautiful tutorial by @CrisYe going into detail on how to realistically fly in China following regulations. China has different IFR cruising altitudes than the rest of the world, so be sure to give it a read. 🙂
Thank you everyone, I hope you can utilize this tutorial to your advantage. Credits to @SB110, taught me everything I have to know about realism.
