6.2 Exporting the Flight Plan to X-Plane

Overview

In the previous chapter we computed a trajectory of the expected flight path all the way from the departure waypoint to the arrival waypoint. The trajectory was stored into a pandas dataframe that looks like this:

Code

In this section we show how to export our navigation log to X-Plane so that we can load the flight plan into the 737 FMS. The file format is .fms, and the created file should be written to this directory:

• C:\...\X-Plane 11\Output\FMS plans

The X-Plane developer documentation contains details on how this format works. The process to write the file looks like this:

The content written to file is shown below. We have highlighted the airport rows for clarity:

And the EHSI will give navigation guidance from start to finish; note the resolution is small in the image, but the next waypoint after PACD reads WETSI: