Whether you are a dispatcher, Part 135 charter operator, or pilot, creating and filing flight plans is probably one of your least favorite tasks. It takes a lot of time to collect all the information, analyze it, and compile it into a plan; then you have to file that plan with ATC with the hope that you’ll hear those magic words: “cleared as filed.”
And, while today’s apps have made the process a bit easier, there are still times, especially when planning an international trip, that you have to switch between multiple sources to gather all the routing and weather information you need. And you have to do it for all the altitudes you may want to request. All that just cranks the pre-trip anxiety meter up a few notches.
Hassles aside, the fact is that everyone has struggled with the varying complexities of flight planning since the days of the E6B simply because there was no better way. You did it the hard way because that was the only way.
GoDirect Flight Planning from Honeywell Aerospace
Honeywell’s new GoDirect Flight Planning app is the industry’s first totally clean-sheet solution to simplifying the complexities of flight planning.
“What Honeywell did was recognize that flight planning was in need of a significant refresh that was new, faster, and more accurate,” explained John Peterson, general manager, services and connectivity, for Honeywell Aerospace. “While it would have been easy to just update the GUIs [graphical user interfaces] or add new drop-downs, the engine driving it all would have still been the same old thing.”
So instead of simply putting a new patch on the old application, Honeywell made the bold move to start from scratch and develop the first purpose-built flight planning engine to drive its new suite of flight-planning services.
Peterson explained that it took two years of work by a team of experts using the latest coding techniques, coding practices, and software tools to create the GoDirect flight planning engine, which is part of Honeywell’s sentience network. The system provides the latest data security to every user, from airlines to Part 91 private operators. Each user’s information is exclusive and security is assured.
So just what does Honeywell’s new purpose-built engine do to ease the workload of schedulers, dispatchers, and flight crews? Simply, it eliminates a lot of the repetitive work and possible mistakes from flight planning.
Let’s say you are planning a trip using one of the popular flight-planning apps or websites. After you load in all of your flight information, it takes perhaps six to 10 seconds to pull it all together and show you the routing for one given flight level. Not bad.
The problem is that if you want to check multiple altitudes against forecasted weather and winds, you have to repeat the process for each flight level or approach. That’s when the time and workload start to really add up.
GoDirect: up to 12 routes in 30 milliseconds
“We can provide eight to 12 routes at multiple flight levels and with multiple approaches and departures within 30 milliseconds,” Peterson stated. “So you think about sitting down to plan a route and you put from/to in, select the aircraft you want to base the performance calculations on, and in less than half a second our new GoDirect Flight Planning Engine will be ready to serve you up to a dozen routing options to choose from based on time, fuel used, forecasted winds and weather—whatever you want.”
Peterson said that while GoDirect’s benefits are great for domestic U.S. trips, the ease and functionality is even more evident when you’re planning international flights.
“European flight planning is complex, and we had to tackle that problem head-on to fix it,” he said. “We have some compelling tools to do international routes—especially for when you are planning a trip from the U.S. to Europe. Using the same GoDirect Flight Planning Offering, you can look at over 90 percent of the routes commonly filed to Europe.”
One early adopter of the GoDirect Flight Planning package is Detroit Metro Airport (DTW)–based Masco Corporation. Masco’s flight department has been a Honeywell GoDirect user for 20-plus years, according to Ben Tubbs, a four-striper on the company’s Dassalt Falcon 2000LXS and its pair of Embraer Phenom 300s.
Typically, the fleet’s trips are within North America, Tubbs said, but growing business interests in Europe are requiring more transatlantic flights. No matter whether it’s a short flight or a multi-stage transatlantic mission, he added, GoDirect has greatly streamlined the flight-planning process.
“I can use my iPad to easily jump on the app and start building the next trip, one leg at a time,” he said, adding, “Most of our domestic trips are two to four legs a day. That allows me to easily review each leg and make good decisions about that flight based on fuel burn, routing, or weather. It’s also easy to get a recommendation from the GoDirect Flight Planning representatives regarding preferred routing.”
“Once I have a large overview, I can start narrowing it down to build a Trip Kit for the day,” Tubbs said. “Then, right before departure, I can use the Trip Kit to recheck all the data in real time. It’s a great way to plan and to keep our entire team together so we are all working from the same information.”
Tubbs said that while the newest version of GoDirect Flight Planning has proven to be an excellent tool for all of Masco Corporation’s typical mission-planning needs, the speed with which GoDirect enables creation of a flight plan really pays off when unforeseen “pop-up” flights happen. That’s true, he says, even when he’s not near an Internet connection.
“I’ve been away from the airport and they call and say the passengers want to go now,” Tubbs explained. “Before I leave, I can call GoDirect [Honeywell GoDirect Flight Planning Services] and give them all the information. And by the time I arrive at the airplane, they’ve got everything ready for me. They’ve even emailed me all the performance calculations for that trip—everything we need is there for us.”
GoDirect: prioritize your options
Every flight crew wants to fly the most direct route possible to their destination—saving time and money is what flying privately is all about. Peterson said that GoDirect will show you more “cleared as filed” route options than any other app.
Peterson explained that the system can auto-source the routing based on what is important to a particular flight profile. For example, if having routes that are commonly “cleared as filed” is a top priority, then those routes come up first. If, on the other hand, the goal is to choose routing based upon the shortest times, then those routes top the list. And all of that information is available on every route option.
“Because of the complex analytics, we use, we can keep track of all the routes that are typically cleared as filed,” Peterson continued. “Then we aggregate those routes with our sophisticated analytics algorithm. So, say you want to go from New York to Los Angeles. GoDirect can tell you, based on everyone who has filed that flight plan in the business jet market, that 98 percent of the time, this route is cleared as filed.
“If for whatever reason you don’t want to select that particular routing, GoDirect will show you a listing of other routes in descending order from the 98th percentile down.
“We want to turn all the old, time-consuming steps of creating a flight plan into just pushing a few buttons and picking the route that best fits your needs for that trip,” Peterson concluded.
GoDirect: dispatchers need love too
While the benefits to flight crews are obvious from the first time you see what GoDirect Flight Planning can do, Peterson stressed that the app’s portfolio of capabilities also helps flight-department schedulers, dispatchers, and Part 135 charter-fleet operators provide the highest levels of efficiency and accuracy to support their operations.
“GoDirect lets dispatchers look at where their fleet is right now, where the weather is, and what the demand is—where their customers are and where they want to go,” he said. “They can use the tool to do all of the flight planning and then it will automatically synchronize with the various flight crews out in the field. The automatic synchronization means less pilot/dispatcher interaction, so they can both spend more time doing what they need to do to plan safer, more efficient flights.”
Said Tubbs: “Honeywell GoDirect Flight Planning has always been a capable tool for us. But as a flight department, we strive for continuous improvement in every part of our operation. That’s one of our company’s core values.
“Honeywell and the GoDirect Flight Planning Services have embodied that for us. Whether it is on an iPad, a laptop, or over the phone, we can quickly take care of even complex flight planning. On top of that, the team at GoDirect is responsive to our needs and is always available to our flight crews. I’ve never received that level of support from any other offering.”
