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 1 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. 26 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 · 9 legs · 424.4 nm · 51.2 nm exposed

#	From	To	Via	Dist (nm)	Coverage
1	KLWT	UFXIT	join	15.5 nm	exposed 15.5 nm
2	UFXIT	JAYKE	corridor	56.4 nm	exposed 26.7 nm
3	JAYKE	OBNAW	corridor	47.5 nm	covered
4	OBNAW	GLUES	corridor	39.1 nm	covered
5	GLUES	JENKI	corridor	56.4 nm	covered
6	JENKI	WEDAK	V231	27.2 nm	covered
7	WEDAK	LEZLE	Q152	129.0 nm	exposed 8.9 nm
8	LEZLE	ALW	corridor	47.4 nm	covered
9	ALW	S95	join	5.7 nm	covered

Great-circle A→B is 374.2 nm; the planned route is 424.4 nm.

Diversion table (ETOPS-style)

Leg	Nearest suitable	Bearing (°)	Dist (nm)	Best cover	Margin (nm)
KLWT→UFXIT	KGTF	290°	66.4 nm	KGTF	▼ -41.8 nm
UFXIT→JAYKE	KGTF	291°	10.2 nm	KGTF	▼ -26.4 nm
JAYKE→OBNAW	KGTF	022°	9.8 nm	KGTF	▼ -5.7 nm
OBNAW→GLUES	KHLN	098°	11.9 nm	KHLN	7.5 nm
GLUES→JENKI	KHRF	255°	5.3 nm	KHRF	▼ -18.8 nm
JENKI→WEDAK	KHRF	349°	1.8 nm	KHRF	17.8 nm
WEDAK→LEZLE	KGIC	257°	7.4 nm	KGIC	▼ -45.2 nm
LEZLE→ALW	KALW	267°	0.5 nm	KALW	▼ -7.0 nm
ALW→S95	KALW	062°	0.5 nm	KALW	33.8 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: 29 of 379
Oldest observation: 2026-07-17T10:52:00.000Z
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.