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 169 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. 30 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 · 458.6 nm · 29.6 nm exposed

#	From	To	Via	Dist (nm)	Coverage
1	KRCX	COWAY	join	35.4 nm	covered
2	COWAY	KP03I	corridor	6.7 nm	covered
3	KP03I	UDILE	corridor	58.7 nm	covered
4	UDILE	GEP	V218	16.7 nm	covered
5	GEP	ABR	J70	211.6 nm	covered
6	ABR	IRIWY	T462	58.7 nm	exposed 16.1 nm
7	IRIWY	KP06A	corridor	23.9 nm	exposed 13.5 nm
8	KP06A	LINTN	corridor	31.8 nm	covered
9	LINTN	6H8	join	15.1 nm	covered

Great-circle A→B is 390.7 nm; the planned route is 458.6 nm.

Diversion table (ETOPS-style)

Leg	Nearest suitable	Bearing (°)	Dist (nm)	Best cover	Margin (nm)
KRCX→COWAY	KRCX	089°	0.0 nm	KRPD	7.1 nm
COWAY→KP03I	KUBE	285°	0.7 nm	KUBE	34.1 nm
KP03I→UDILE	KUBE	085°	0.9 nm	KOEO	8.7 nm
UDILE→GEP	KMIC	175°	5.1 nm	KANE	21.6 nm
GEP→ABR	KABR	275°	2.9 nm	KMVE	▼ -75.6 nm
ABR→IRIWY	KABR	131°	0.2 nm	KABR	▼ -15.8 nm
IRIWY→KP06A	KMBG	225°	32.1 nm	KMBG	▼ -10.9 nm
KP06A→LINTN	KBIS	332°	26.3 nm	KMBG	▼ -8.8 nm
LINTN→6H8	KBIS	328°	25.3 nm	KBIS	13.6 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: 87 of 512
Oldest observation: 2026-08-30T10:50:00.000Z
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.