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. 8 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 · 10 legs · 397.2 nm · 397.2 nm exposed

#	From	To	Via	Dist (nm)	Coverage
1	KPHN	MARGN	join	5.7 nm	exposed 5.7 nm
2	MARGN	TRMML	corridor	39.7 nm	exposed 39.7 nm
3	TRMML	OREYO	corridor	55.8 nm	exposed 55.8 nm
4	OREYO	COLEE	corridor	43.4 nm	exposed 43.4 nm
5	COLEE	LUBEQ	corridor	35.6 nm	exposed 35.6 nm
6	LUBEQ	JAVAM	corridor	55.8 nm	exposed 55.8 nm
7	JAVAM	KP87M	corridor	20.4 nm	exposed 20.4 nm
8	KP87M	OSTEJ	corridor	55.5 nm	exposed 55.5 nm
9	OSTEJ	BAITS	corridor	55.2 nm	exposed 55.2 nm
10	BAITS	KRCX	join	30.2 nm	exposed 30.2 nm

Great-circle A→B is 396.0 nm; the planned route is 397.2 nm.

Diversion table (ETOPS-style)

Leg	Nearest suitable	Bearing (°)	Dist (nm)	Best cover	Margin (nm)
KPHN→MARGN	KDRM	345°	189.6 nm	KDRM	▼ -153.2 nm
MARGN→TRMML	KDRM	351°	168.7 nm	KDRM	▼ -149.6 nm
TRMML→OREYO	KSJX	336°	136.4 nm	KDRM	▼ -128.7 nm
OREYO→COLEE	KSJX	352°	117.6 nm	KSJX	▼ -96.4 nm
COLEE→LUBEQ	KSJX	010°	109.6 nm	KSJX	▼ -77.6 nm
LUBEQ→JAVAM	KSJX	033°	109.1 nm	KSJX	▼ -77.9 nm
JAVAM→KP87M	KSJX	050°	117.9 nm	KSJX	▼ -85.5 nm
KP87M→OSTEJ	KLSE	247°	110.9 nm	KLSE	▼ -105.1 nm
OSTEJ→BAITS	KLSE	221°	95.4 nm	KLSE	▼ -70.9 nm
BAITS→KRCX	KLSE	196°	95.1 nm	KLSE	▼ -57.7 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: 134 of 839
Oldest observation: 2026-07-17T10:45:00.000Z
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.