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. 23 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 · 11 legs · 408.5 nm · 62.9 nm exposed

#	From	To	Via	Dist (nm)	Coverage
1	KRCX	COWAY	join	35.4 nm	exposed 35.4 nm
2	COWAY	KP03I	corridor	6.7 nm	exposed 6.7 nm
3	KP03I	LENCK	corridor	36.0 nm	exposed 13.5 nm
4	LENCK	OLMST	corridor	59.0 nm	covered
5	OLMST	TESEE	corridor	31.3 nm	covered
6	TESEE	KP06E	corridor	46.5 nm	covered
7	KP06E	LOCKR	corridor	41.6 nm	covered
8	LOCKR	KP09C	corridor	46.7 nm	covered
9	KP09C	FAHTU	corridor	28.2 nm	covered
10	FAHTU	TAPNN	corridor	45.3 nm	exposed 2.9 nm
11	TAPNN	6H8	join	31.9 nm	exposed 4.4 nm

Great-circle A→B is 390.7 nm; the planned route is 408.5 nm.

Diversion table (ETOPS-style)

Leg	Nearest suitable	Bearing (°)	Dist (nm)	Best cover	Margin (nm)
KRCX→COWAY	KCBG	273°	60.0 nm	KCBG	▼ -55.3 nm
COWAY→KP03I	KCBG	274°	53.3 nm	KCBG	▼ -20.0 nm
KP03I→LENCK	KCBG	276°	17.6 nm	KCBG	▼ -13.3 nm
LENCK→OLMST	KPNM	285°	0.7 nm	KPNM	8.1 nm
OLMST→TESEE	KPNM	096°	27.1 nm	KBDH	▼ -6.9 nm
TESEE→KP06E	KMOX	230°	23.4 nm	KMOX	▼ -1.8 nm
KP06E→LOCKR	KETH	189°	20.3 nm	KETH	7.9 nm
LOCKR→KP09C	KGWR	219°	11.1 nm	KGWR	10.7 nm
KP09C→FAHTU	KJMS	323°	14.7 nm	KJMS	2.0 nm
FAHTU→TAPNN	KJMS	064°	13.8 nm	KJMS	▼ -2.3 nm
TAPNN→6H8	KBIS	282°	26.4 nm	KBIS	▼ -3.1 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: 86 of 510
Oldest observation: 2026-07-16T07:55:00.000Z
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.