VFR-descent planner

Advisory route planning

Suggest a route that keeps a VFR-reporting airport within range at every point — ETOPS planning with a live-weather suitability predicate.

This tool suggests a route and shows margins. It never asserts that the weather will hold or that the route is authoritative. Stale or missing weather makes an airport unusable (fail-safe). Advisory / planning use only — not for navigation.

Plan a VFR-descent route

Range defaults to a 40 nm distance disk. Time-at-speed (range_min + speed_kt) and glide (glide_ratio + altitude_ft) modes are available as query parameters — see /v1/plan. Plans are capped at 600 nm great-circle — farther than that, use the trip planner.

No fully-covered route exists under the HARD constraint. Reason: disconnected. The origin reaches 88 node(s) over covered edges; the destination is reachable if coverage is ignored (a weather wall, not a missing connection).

Showing the SOFT minimal-exposure route below — the out-of-coverage segments are highlighted in red and quantified in the diversion table.

Local equirectangular projection, north up. Green fills are range rings (radius R) around suitable, VFR-reporting airports — their union is the covered region. 12 suitable airports in the region. Red segments are out of coverage. Coverage is tested by sampling the great circle every sampleSpacingNm; a covered verdict is exact only to ±sampleSpacingNm/2. An uncovered sliver narrower than the spacing can be missed. Advisory, not a defended claim.

Route · 14 legs · 445.5 nm · 89.7 nm exposed

#	From	To	Via	Dist (nm)	Coverage
1	6H8	OHROR	join	23.5 nm	covered
2	OHROR	YARGR	corridor	53.0 nm	covered
3	YARGR	BUFFF	corridor	57.2 nm	covered
4	BUFFF	KIXCO	corridor	47.5 nm	covered
5	KIXCO	MLS	V2	57.8 nm	covered
6	MLS	ASHLI	V2	14.0 nm	covered
7	ASHLI	CONUK	V2	33.9 nm	exposed 11.8 nm
8	CONUK	NIBBE	V2	43.6 nm	exposed 26.1 nm
9	NIBBE	KOXMY	V2	10.0 nm	covered
10	KOXMY	BIL	T268	15.0 nm	covered
11	BIL	POCOV	V611	16.0 nm	covered
12	POCOV	SHELA	V611	3.4 nm	covered
13	SHELA	ESTRO	V611	51.1 nm	exposed 32.1 nm
14	ESTRO	KLWT	join	19.6 nm	exposed 19.6 nm

Great-circle A→B is 379.8 nm; the planned route is 445.5 nm.

Diversion table (ETOPS-style)

Leg	Nearest suitable	Bearing (°)	Dist (nm)	Best cover	Margin (nm)
6H8→OHROR	KBIS	334°	16.4 nm	KBIS	13.6 nm
OHROR→YARGR	KBIS	074°	16.5 nm	KBIS	▼ -14.1 nm
YARGR→BUFFF	KDIK	332°	4.0 nm	KDIK	9.3 nm
BUFFF→KIXCO	KBHK	208°	16.9 nm	KBHK	0.2 nm
KIXCO→MLS	KMLS	261°	2.0 nm	KMLS	▼ -14.6 nm
MLS→ASHLI	KMLS	064°	3.8 nm	KMLS	22.6 nm
ASHLI→CONUK	KMLS	070°	17.4 nm	KMLS	▼ -11.3 nm
CONUK→NIBBE	KBIL	251°	21.8 nm	KBIL	▼ -25.3 nm
NIBBE→KOXMY	KBIL	248°	11.8 nm	KBIL	18.2 nm
KOXMY→BIL	KBIL	238°	1.1 nm	KBIL	28.2 nm
BIL→POCOV	KBIL	146°	3.4 nm	KBIL	22.9 nm
POCOV→SHELA	KBIL	157°	17.1 nm	KBIL	19.5 nm
SHELA→ESTRO	KBIL	163°	20.5 nm	KBIL	▼ -31.4 nm
ESTRO→KLWT	KBIL	158°	71.4 nm	KBIL	▼ -43.8 nm

Per leg: the nearest suitable airport (bearing from the leg midpoint) and the single airport that best blankets the leg, with margin = R − its worst-point distance. A negative margin (▼) means no single airport covers the whole leg — the union still may; this is a per-airport lower bound, not an over-claim.

Snapshot & configuration

Nav cycle: 2607
Artifact: 66355e9d67a7
METAR reports used: 13 of 183
Oldest observation: 2026-07-16T08:48:00.000Z
Range R: 40 nm → 40.0 nm
Weather minimum: VFR only · 75 min max age
Routing: mixed · corridor 30 nm
Constraint: hard
Min runway: 3000 ft
Coverage test: ±0.75 nm

This plan is reproducible from the values above: the same nav cycle, artifact, METAR observation times, and config yield the same route. Coverage is tested by sampling; a “covered” verdict is exact only to the tolerance shown. Weather is an ephemeral overlay — never merged into the navigation data.

Advisory / planning only · AIRAC cycle 2607 · not a certified navigation source.