21. Planning a trip with several legs

Licence note: The trip planner is an optional module. If your club does not have it, the button "Plan a trip with several legs" does not appear - departure and destination are unchanged. The availability overview with daylight and night is not part of it; every club has that.

A reservation normally has one departure and one destination. But if you fly away and come back later or on another day, or if you stop somewhere on the way, you can break your trip into legs. The result is a small timetable: where you are when, how long you stay, and when you are back.

First things first

The application does not calculate flight times. You enter every flight time yourself - as a pilot you know anyway how long A to B takes and how much fuel it needs. The application adds up your figures and shifts the times along, nothing more.

Creating a timetable

Open a reservation and click Plan a trip with several legs below the departure and destination fields. The first leg takes over the departure and, if you entered one, the destination.

You can add a stopover in the middle of the trip: every stop offers Add a stop here. The new leg starts where the previous one landed; as soon as you enter its destination, the following leg follows automatically. If you delete a leg in the middle, the chain closes again by itself.

For every leg you enter:

• From and To - the airport codes as usual
• Flight time - fastest via the buttons 30 min, 1 h, 1 h 30 and 2 h. Short flights get rounded up in practice anyway; if you want it exact, type it into the fields next to them.

The return leg appears by itself

If you enter a destination other than your starting point, the application adds the return leg automatically - after all, you almost always bring the aircraft back to where you started. The leg is marked as Return and takes over the flight time of the outbound leg; if you change it, your figure stays.

So an ordinary trip needs one typed destination and one click on the flight time - everything else is already there.

This keeps going: if you turn the return leg into a stopover by changing its destination, the application adds another return leg. The chain always ends at home.

If the aircraft stays away for once, simply delete the return leg with the bin symbol. It will not come back by itself, and instead of "Back at" the summary names the destination and points out that the aircraft stays there.

Between two legs there is the stop. It is preset to 45 minutes and can be changed at any time; the buttons next to it (45 min, 1 h, 1 h 30, 2 h) set it with one click. For an overnight stay, click +1 day as many times as you stay. The button matching the current value is highlighted in green, so you see at a glance what is set.

To the right of each leg you see the resulting times, and at the bottom you see how long the whole trip takes and when you are back.

Everything hangs on the start time

There is exactly one fixed point in time: the start of the reservation. Everything else is a duration. If you change the start time, the whole trip moves with it - every leg, every stop, the end. No row is exempt from this. So if you have a fixed return date, adjust the stop duration instead.

The aircraft stays reserved the whole time

Even a trip over several days is a single reservation. The aircraft is blocked from the first to the last minute - it is parked away from home, and nobody else can use it from the home base during that time. Splitting the trip into several reservations would be wrong: the aircraft would look free in between.

That is why the timetable has to fit into the reservation. If the trip takes longer than the reserved period, a red hint appears and saving is refused.

The summary below the legs tells you in both directions when the end and the reservation do not match, and offers the fix in one click: Extend to when the trip runs past the end of the reservation, Shorten to when you would keep the aircraft reserved for hours after the trip without flying it. Shortening is only suggested when the trip ends where it started - if it ends away from home, the surplus is intentional, because the aircraft is parked at a foreign field and stays blocked until the reservation ends.

Trip plan as PDF

Once the reservation is saved and has a timetable, the button Trip plan as PDF appears below the legs. It puts on one sheet what you need on the way: club logo and key facts at the top, then the legs with departure and arrival times, flight time and the stops in between, and at the bottom the totals and when you are back.

The plan is built from the saved state. If you just changed legs and have not saved yet, you get the last saved state - so save first.

The sheet states explicitly that all times are your own planning figures and that the application does not calculate flight times. The plan does not replace flight preparation.

When the aircraft has to come back

For each aircraft the club can require that it is back at its homebase at the end of a planned trip (switch in the aircraft administration).

The rule applies only to the timetable, not to ordinary reservations. If you simply enter a destination as before, to show the others where you are heading, nothing changes for you - only planning a trip in legs states explicitly where the aircraft ends up.

This does not forbid flying away. It requires the reservation to run until you are back: if you fly away for a week, you reserve the aircraft for that week and structure the trip inside it with the timetable. From the club's point of view the aircraft is gone during that time anyway - nobody can use it from the homebase, and that is exactly what the reservation should show.

If your trip ends away nonetheless, a red hint appears and saving is refused. The return leg is offered automatically anyway - usually you only need to extend the reservation.

Two things are exempt: maintenance reservations (an aircraft in the workshop is simply not at home) and the ferry flight home - if the aircraft is parked away and you bring it back, the reservation ends at the homebase even though it started somewhere else.

Refuelling

For every stop you can tick Refuelling planned. This is purely your own note. The application does not know whether fuel is available at the destination or which grade - there is no reliable data source we are allowed to use for this. Check it yourself as before.

Removing the timetable

Remove timetable takes you back to the simple view with departure and destination. Both are kept, only the structure in between is dropped.

Without a timetable everything works as before

The timetable is optional. A local flight or a simple out-and-back does not need it - just enter departure and destination as usual. And if you do not feel like planning, simply reserve from Monday 10:00 to Wednesday 15:00 and leave the timetable out.