Drawn rather than photographed, so it cannot quietly fall out of date. This is the widest layout: in a narrower window the map hides and the reference columns drop from three to two, but nothing changes its name.

Toolbar

New, Load, Save, Print, Export.

Simulation-only banner

Always there. This is not a flight-planning tool for real aviation.

Guide

What to do next: one step of twenty-five, with the button that does it.

Title row

The plan's title, aircraft type and registration.

Route string

The whole route as text. Paste one in to build the sheet in one go.

Nav log

The sheet itself: a row per checkpoint, a row per leg between them, and the totals underneath.

Side pane

Beside the sheet, one tool at a time, picked on its rail: the route map, where you drag a checkpoint or drop a new one onto a leg; the fuel plan; and a pocket calculator for the sums beside the plan.

Detail panel

Everything about the one checkpoint or leg you have selected — and the whole flight's summary when you have selected nothing.

Planning tools

Three reference columns beside the sheet.

Guide steps

All twenty-five steps, not just the one the Guide is on. Tick them off by hand.

Weather

The METAR at each airport and the winds aloft along the route. Drag a report onto a leg to use its wind.

Performance

The aircraft's speeds and burn rate, which the sheet and the fuel plan beside it both work from.

Flight timeline

The flight along one rail, with the terrain and airspace it crosses drawn above it. Made to be printed.

The most distinctive thing about this sheet, and the one worth reading twice. A figure the calculator worked out is an offer, written in pencil; a figure you have settled is yours, in ink. The calculator never writes over your ink — it tells you when it disagrees and leaves the decision with you.

How close is close enough? A measured figure — a course off the map, an angle from an inexact wind, a variation, a deviation — is judged by the leg: one degree puts you a mile off after sixty. Red arrives once the difference would take you half a mile wide of your next checkpoint, or past the two degrees a compass can be flown to. So a degree is worth chasing on a long leg, and two on a ten-mile hop is not.

TH, MH and CH are different. They are sums of two numbers already on the row, so there is nothing to be tolerant of and any difference is flagged. They can still be wrong about the world through the course or angle above them, but that is the cell above saying so, not this one.

✓ Confirm

Accept the pencilled offer as it stands. Gray becomes ink.

↻ Update

Replace your ink with what the calculator now says. Offered wherever the two differ, not only where the difference was large enough to turn the cell red — so a sheet can be brought exactly into line one click at a time. Red goes away because you agreed with it, not because it was hidden.

Clear

Take your entry back out. Whatever the calculator offers shows through again, in pencil.

Refresh

A different thing from Update: it goes back out to the weather and terrain services and re-derives. Update settles a disagreement you can already see; Refresh goes and looks again.

A column header does any of these to a whole column at once. Hover any cell to be told what it holds and where the figure came from.

Left to right across the sheet, as they print.

Alt.

cruise altitude

Wind · Dir Spd Temp.

wind direction, wind speed, temperature

TAS

true airspeed

Course · TC WCA

true course, wind-correction angle

Course · TH VAR

true heading, variation

Course · MH DEV

magnetic heading, deviation

Course · CH

compass heading

Dist. · Leg Rem.

leg distance, distance remaining

GS · Est. Act.

ground speed, actual ground speed

ETE

leg time

Fuel Burn

fuel burn

Time · ETA ATA

arrival, actual time of arrival

Fuel · Rem Act

fuel remaining, actual fuel remaining

A colon in a length of time always means minutes and seconds; an h means hours. A time of day is the only thing written the other way.

4:40

four minutes and forty seconds. Under an hour a time is held to ten seconds.

1h20

an hour and twenty minutes, held to the minute

8

typed on its own, minutes: the sheet writes it 8:00

14:35 · 14:35Z

a time of day: the departure time, an arrival, the actual time. Z is UTC.

Every field the calculator has an opinion about, and what that opinion is based on.

arrival

from the departure time and the ETEs behind it

compass heading

from the heading chain

cruise altitude

from terrain and the VFR rules

deviation

from the deviation card, assumed zero

distance remaining

from the total distance and the legs behind it

fuel burn

from the cruise fuel flow

fuel remaining

from the starting fuel and the burns behind it

ground speed

from the E6-B calculation

leg distance

from the route geometry

leg time

from the time calculation

magnetic heading

from the heading chain

temperature

from the weather data

true airspeed

from the aircraft profile

true course

from the route geometry

true heading

from the heading chain

variation

from the magnetic model (WMM)

wind direction

from the weather data

wind speed

from the weather data

wind-correction angle

from the E6-B calculation

Beside each checkpoint's name, and on the map. A checkpoint with no symbol is one whose identifier has not been recognised — it says nothing about the place, only that we have not found it.

Airports are drawn the way a sectional draws them. The bars are the runways, turned to the way they lie on the ground. Blue is a field that publishes a tower frequency; magenta is every other, as on the chart — it means no tower frequency is listed, not that nobody is there. The four ticks mean fuel and services. No free source records fuel, so they are an assumption: a medium or large field in the simulator has it. On the map a larger field draws a larger symbol.

Under a route summary, on a tour's row, and on a tour's next flight: the three points of a flight on one rail — where it starts, somewhere in the middle, and where it ends — in the proportions their times actually put them in. The shaded stretch is flown after sunset. It says what it is like along the way; it does not say whether to go.

●

A report from the field itself.

◍

A report borrowed from a station nearby — the badge says which.

○

No report: either still being asked for, or none within 40 NM.

shaded

Flown after sunset. The same shading as the Flight Timeline's night.

Worth saying once more, at the end of the page that explains the arithmetic: SimNavLog is built by people who do not fly for real, on free data of unknown currency, and it is for flight simulation. Nothing here has been checked by anyone qualified to check it. Do not carry it into an aeroplane.