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 1138 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. 122 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 · 407.9 nm · 10.5 nm exposed

#	From	To	Via	Dist (nm)	Coverage
1	KCDW	MUGZY	join	32.6 nm	covered
2	MUGZY	MEATS	corridor	57.3 nm	covered
3	MEATS	TRUER	corridor	43.3 nm	covered
4	TRUER	CAPDO	corridor	54.3 nm	covered
5	CAPDO	MRRIO	corridor	33.9 nm	covered
6	MRRIO	ERI	corridor	57.8 nm	covered
7	ERI	TRACE	corridor	33.9 nm	covered
8	TRACE	DOLFN	corridor	27.8 nm	covered
9	DOLFN	TRAKR	corridor	38.9 nm	exposed 10.5 nm
10	TRAKR	KPHN	join	28.0 nm	covered

Great-circle A→B is 388.1 nm; the planned route is 407.9 nm.

Diversion table (ETOPS-style)

Leg	Nearest suitable	Bearing (°)	Dist (nm)	Best cover	Margin (nm)
KCDW→MUGZY	KCDW	107°	0.0 nm	KFWN	15.1 nm
MUGZY→MEATS	KMPO	088°	2.3 nm	KMPO	2.2 nm
MEATS→TRUER	KIPT	249°	6.7 nm	KIPT	7.8 nm
TRUER→CAPDO	KIPT	114°	13.6 nm	KUNV	▼ -11.0 nm
CAPDO→MRRIO	KBFD	014°	6.4 nm	KBFD	21.8 nm
MRRIO→ERI	KERI	296°	5.1 nm	KFKL	▼ -3.8 nm
ERI→TRACE	KERI	088°	6.6 nm	KHZY	14.3 nm
TRACE→DOLFN	KHZY	129°	25.7 nm	KLNN	6.1 nm
DOLFN→TRAKR	KMTC	297°	19.0 nm	KMTC	▼ -17.7 nm
TRAKR→KPHN	KMTC	255°	15.2 nm	KMTC	17.5 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: 2608
Artifact: 470e70bc1152
METAR reports used: 133 of 1032
Oldest observation: 2026-08-30T10:45:00.000Z
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 2608 · not a certified navigation source.