We have now reached the end of the building notes for this project. We have used Python to build a simple flight planning system from scratch. If you have read these notes from start to finish, or just browsed through them, I hope that they have been interesting or useful to you, and that they may have sparked some of your own ideas of how to approach this problem.
In the future I may add a validation chapter in which I run some demonstration flights in order to compare the flight plans to the flown data. For now you will just have to take my word for it, that for zero-wind flights the flight plans are accurate to about +/- 1 minute, and with the real world weather option enabled, the flight plans are accurate to about +/- 5 minutes.
If I were to work on this project again in the future, I would probably work on cleaning up the waypoint search area functions used in the airport area search and enroute corridor search; they use geopandas in a clumsy way. I am least happy with the winds approximation; the Python library (open-meteo) is excellent but the way I integrated the data with X-Plane's weather was mostly guess work. However, since creating this planner a new version of X-Plane has been released: X-Plane 12. In X-Plane 12 the weather model has been completely overhauled and may provide more options for a smoother integration with a third-party provider like open-meteo.
To conclude, I have added some extra sections to this chapter which discuss these topics in a bit more detail:
home flight simulators
flight planning in the real world
aircraft performance in the real world