Fuel Calculation

[lcrane]

JetBlueInflight wrote:
But how do you take into consideration the weight of your a/c? In other words, it will obviously be different if I'm flying the a/c empty and if I
have the belly full.

I basically only want to make the basic calculations. I think FSPax makes a difference between fuel burn at different altitudes, but I don't
think it takes into consideration wind speeds over different areas and so on and so forth so no need to figure that out.

Do you just fill your a/c to the max TO weight?

I usually fly a route with fuel maxed out. For example, I would fly the King Air from IWA to RNO with as much fuel as I can carry. Note my fuel
consumption and altitude from the flight report. I fly that route at 29000. This gives me my base data. I then do my fuel calculations based on
that. I adjust my data as I fly more routes until I feel confident about my data.

Actually, FSPax only looks at the fuel flow at the moment and calculates the time remaining based on how much fuel you have left in the tanks. Fuel
flow is affected by the altitude.

You're right. Keep it simple at first. You may want to just do a long flight and see what you burn and then add on hour on that. Try the flight
again and see if you were right. Then try a different flight and see if you educated guess was right. There's also lots of software to use in MSFS
to calculate for you. ( I'm currently working on my IFR rating and my instructor won't let me use any electronic devices to calculate. He took my
palm away during a flight to simulate my batteries going dead. I didn't like it at the time but, after some thought, realized I was being trained
for when bad things start to happen when flying and needed to get my brain ahead of the airplane like when you're in the soup, gauges stop working,
electrical goes out, and palm dies. You're left with limited gauges, pencil, paper, charts, flight computer, and your training. That gets the heart
going. :D ) I just showed you a simplified way I do it when I fly. You can make is as simple or as complicated as you want. Remember to have fun.

Finally, if you want to be really challenged and have a flight computer, the back side of the flight computer can calculate the course correction
for winds aloft. It would tell you how much the winds are pushing you off course and affecting your speed.

Keep it simple to start and add difficulty as you want. I just showed you the way I do it. And I like math...so there you go. I've been playing MSFS
sense version 2 on the Macintosh and I played a version in the 80's on the apple IIe but I don't remember if that was Microsoft or not.