Hello! VFR Cross Country flight planning is a topic that can (and does) encompass many hours of ground school. For this video, I narrowed the scope: given a flight plan along certain points, with book burn rates from the POH, how do I build the flight plan to show time enroute as well as burn? We start with an empty VFR flight plan sheet and fill in most of the blanks along the way.

There are a few things that I forgot to mention - they may be obvious, but I'll mention them here so we're square. The actual trip burn can be found in two ways: 1) The sum of all leg burns plus pattern fuel allowance or 2) T/O fuel minus final landing fuel. Whichever is easiest for you. This value goes in the "Burn" part of the fuel ladder to give your planned landing fuel.

On my flight plan, I failed to talk about the MINTO box. This stands for Minimum Takeoff Fuel. It should be your minimum landing fuel plus your burn. Lets say the burn for this flight came to 11 gallons. Your MINTO would be 11g (burn) plus 10g (minimum landing fuel) = 21g. So you now have some numbers to work with when considering how much cargo/pax/payload you can carry.

I also advise that for every flight plan that you actually go out and fly, you dip the tanks after landing to give you feedback as to how well your plan stacked up to reality. Where you ahead or behind on gas? How can you account for the under or over burn? If the airplane is new to you with no personal history regarding its fuel consumption vs book, then you might want to pad your Min Landing Fuel for that reason. As you gather more data, you can adjust your overall burn vs book (such as perhaps adding 5% to book burn rates).

Thanks for watching!