4.1 Aircraft Performance Context

Introduction

In section 2.1 we introduced a simple diagram that indicated four core ingredients needed for flight planning:

• navigation data

• aircraft data

• weather data

• terrain data 

So far we have taken care of navigation data. We will now turn our attention to aircraft data. For flight planning, we can break down aircraft data into two aspects:

• aircraft equipment

• aircraft performance 

Our problem requirements are highly simplified, to the extent that aircraft equipment is excluded from consideration. Therefore, we will focus on the second aspect: aircraft performance data. When we say aircraft performance data, we mean things like fuel consumption, climb rates and airspeeds. We need this data to correctly predict groundspeed, altitude and fuel consumption from the departure waypoint to the arrival waypoint. 

To keep things simple, we are not going to spend time figuring out how the X-Plane 11 aircraft performance model works, and we are not going to try and adapt performance figures from Boeing manuals to the simulator. Instead we are just going to run a few test flights at a few different aircraft weights, in weather conditions that are close to standard atmospheric conditions. 

In the next section we will outline some details about the flight tests we will perform. 

Note: for more detailed notes about aircraft performance and why we chose to generate our own data, please see the aircraft performance sections in Chapter 8.