Recommended Route is an output of ForeFlight’s proprietary autorouting engine that gives you the best route with the highest likelihood of “cleared as filed”, while optimizing on current and forecast wind and temperature data, altitude, and your specific aircraft performance constraints. Using ForeFlight’s Graphical Route Advisor makes it quick and easy to generate a Recommended Route, File the route, and get on with your mission.
For routes that include a departure or destination in Europe, ForeFlight’s autorouting capability includes EUROCONTROL validation.
The Graphical Route Advisor is designed to give you a quick comparison of trip time, fuel, and ground distance for each available route, at the stated altitude. The Route Advisor tool is also enhanced with the graphical overlay of all route options on a map. You can visually inspect each route by tapping on it, and as you do, it is highlighted on the map to give you an immediate and visual route comparison.
To generate a Recommended Route (available with Performance level plans), ForeFlight’s routing engine analyses thousands of possible routes based on your detailed aircraft performance profile and time/fuel savings, while also accounting for your aircraft ceiling, preferred routes, and trending ATC cleared routes. The result is a route that delivers more consistent ‘cleared as filed’ flight plans optimized for your aircraft.
ForeFlight also provides a list of previous ATC cleared routes that others have flown. This list is actively curated (meaning we prune out old, non-applicable routes and routes with expired waypoints) so that, similar to the Recommended Route, you have the best chance of selecting a route that comes back “cleared as filed”. In addition, ForeFlight displays the filing recency, frequency, and aircraft type.
We are continually refining the capabilities of our routing engine to make even smarter altitude suggestions. For example, if you’re flying a shorter route, ForeFlight will suggest an altitude that accommodates executing the flight with roughly one-third of the flight time in climb, one-third of the flight time in cruise, and one-third of the flight time descent. This results in a more comfortable ride, as well as requesting an altitude that ATC is more likely to accept.
Using the Recommended Route feature makes it really fast and easy to find the route that is best optimized for your aircraft with a ‘cleared as filed’ outcome – all with minimal pilot workload.
Recommended Route and Detailed Aircraft Performance Profiles
An essential part of generating a Recommended Route is having detailed aircraft performance profile data available to feed into the calculations. You can set up a fully configured aircraft in just ten seconds with the help of ForeFlight’s predefined aircraft profiles. ForeFlight uses the aircraft manufacturer’s published flight planning performance data, or “the book values”, defined not only for multiple altitudes, but also multiple weights and temperatures, therefore fully modeling the aircraft’s climb, cruise, and descent performance for all conditions.
All of this adds up to reduced pilot workload during flight planning and more confidence in the resulting answers.
Access to ForeFlight’s Recommended Route, built-in detailed aircraft profiles, and many more powerful performance planning features are available in our top-tier Performance plans. Click here for pricing information and click here to learn more about Performance.
