Flight Planning and Monitoring
The full EASA ATPL(A) Flight Planning and Monitoring syllabus, taught properly: VFR and IFR route selection and navigation plans, chart reading from en-route minima to SID, STAR and approach plates, the commercial fuel plan from taxi fuel to final reserve and the special procedures beyond it, NOTAM and GNSS pre-flight preparation, the point of equal time and point of safe return, the ICAO ATS flight plan item by item, and the in-flight monitoring and replanning that keeps the plan honest — every learning objective explained and every calculation worked in full.
Where every flight plan begins: the VFR chart. Choosing a route that respects airspace and restricted areas, riding the semicircular levels, navigating by lakes and towns and masts, pulling frequencies and call signs off the chart, mining the aerodrome pages for visual procedures, and then turning all of it into a finished navigation plan with courses, wind-corrected headings, ground speeds and leg times.
Flight planning is taught here the way the exam tests it: chart in hand. The first lesson chooses a route and gathers everything the chart and the aerodrome directory publish about it; the second measures, calculates and fills in the navigation plan, line by line.
Planning in the instrument world: choosing airways among conventional, RNAV, RNP, conditional and direct routings, decoding the en-route chart's altitude alphabet from MEA to MHA, knowing who owes the terrain clearance and when the cold demands more, reading SID, STAR and approach plates, and finishing the IFR navigation plan with the same wind-triangle discipline the VFR module taught, now with a flight management computer watching over it.
Three lessons take the plan onto the airways: first the routes and the minimum altitudes that fence them, then the terminal charts that bracket every IFR flight, and finally the completed navigation plan from top of climb to top of descent.
The arithmetic that decides how much of the take-off mass is kerosene: converting litres, kilograms and densities without slipping a unit, reading fuel flows from the manual, the commercial fuel plan from taxi fuel through trip, contingency, alternate and final reserve to extra, and the special procedures that bend the standard plan — reduced contingency, isolated aerodromes, the predetermined point and the economics of tankering.
Three lessons build the fuel plan: first the raw arithmetic of units, flows, range and endurance; then the commercial plan the regulations prescribe, component by component; and finally the special procedures that trade the standard plan's shape for operational advantage.
The last hours before departure, when the plan meets the day: the NOTAM briefing that checks every facility, aerodrome and airway the flight depends on, the GNSS achievability check with its RAIM predictions and NANUs, the meteorological update that reprices altitudes, headings, times and fuel, and the two computed points (equal time and safe return) that tell an oceanic crew which way survival lies.
Two lessons: first the NOTAM briefing and the satellite homework, where the published world is checked against today's outages and works in progress; then the meteorological update and the derived points, where the navigation and fuel plans are recomputed with the latest wind and the point of equal time and point of safe return are fixed.
The plan leaves the flight deck and enters the system: the ICAO ATS flight plan with its fixed boxes, the codes that compress a whole operation into a message, and the repetitive flight plan for the airline that flies the same line every day; then the flight itself, monitored waypoint by waypoint against the plan, and replanned in the air when the day disagrees.
Two lessons: first the ATS flight plan, the form that tells the system what the flight intends, item by item; then flight monitoring, where the times and fuel figures computed on the ground are checked against reality in flight, and in-flight replanning when the comparison says the plan no longer holds.