Flying Rhino
RHINO AVIATION

Preflight Planning

Before Planning the Flight

  1. Confirm that the Aircraft Type exists and has correct W&B envelope, buckets, and anchor positions.
  2. Confirm that the specific Aircraft exists and is linked to the correct type.
  3. Confirm that the desired form Template exists and is not disabled.

Step 1. Build the Current Loading

  1. Go to the W&B page.
  2. Select the aircraft registration.
  3. Enter passengers, baggage, and fuel as needed. For non-fuel buckets, use the lookup button beside the name field to choose a saved person, passenger, or reusable load item.
  4. Review the Loading Summary.
  5. Make sure the envelope and bucket limits are acceptable.

Step 2. Enter the Flight Route and Timing

  1. Go to the Flight page.
  2. Select the same aircraft used in W&B.
  3. Enter Departure and Destination airports.
  4. Enter ETD as yyyy-mm-dd plus a 24-hour time, an unambiguous current-year numeric slash date plus a 24-hour time, a time by itself, or a relative time. Examples include 2026-09-01 07:30, 7/14 0730, 13/12 1330, 0730, +25, and +1:30. Both 0000 and 2400 mean midnight. AM/PM notation is not accepted.
  5. A slash date whose two numbers could both be the month is rejected as ambiguous. For example, 6/7 requires clarification between June 7 and July 6; 7/14 and 13/12 are unambiguous.
  6. After ETD is accepted and weather is refreshed, ETD is displayed canonically as yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM.
  7. Enter ETE.
  8. If needed, enter Departure Alternate and/or Alternate.
  9. If an alternate is entered, enter Alt ETE.
  10. For a single-leg flight, optionally enter Cruise Alt and Cruise % Power when the selected aircraft type has climb and cruise fuel-performance data. Cruise Alt may be entered as feet, comma-separated feet, three-digit hundreds of feet, or FL plus a flight level. For VFR flights, the +500 and route-direction hemispheric checks apply only when Cruise Alt is more than 3,000 feet above the higher of the departure and destination field elevations; a missing field elevation is treated as sea level. IFR whole-thousand and route-direction checks apply regardless of that approximate AGL altitude.
  11. For a Single-Leg IFR flight, Expected Route accepts up to 250 characters. The field is hidden for VFR and Multi-Leg planning, but its contents are retained if you switch back to Single-Leg IFR. Form generation makes the text available as [ROUTE], converted to uppercase while preserving the entered spacing. Reverse discards Expected Route because the clearance is direction-specific.
  12. Only use runway override fields when you intentionally want to override runway selection.
  13. Use Route Mode to switch between Single-Leg and Multi-Leg. Switching from Single-Leg to Multi-Leg preserves Departure, Destination, Alternate, timing, aircraft, and safety factors, but drops Departure Alternate.
  14. Switching back from Multi-Leg to Single-Leg retains Departure, Destination, and Alternate for the Single-Leg view; intermediate stops are preserved when switching back to Multi-Leg.
  15. Use Reverse to create a new, unsaved return flight. The new ETD is 30 minutes after the original destination ETA. Reversal retains the aircraft, flight type, safety factors, route mode, and weather mode, but weather must be refreshed or the What-If recalculated before use.
  16. For Single-Leg routes, Reverse swaps Departure with Destination and swaps Departure Alternate with Alternate 1, discards Alternate 2 and alternate ETE values, retains runway overrides with their airports, and lowers a valid Cruise Alt by 1,000 feet.
  17. For Multi-Leg routes, Reverse reverses the stop order and segment ETEs, keeps each ground time with its airport, reverses each stop runway from arrival/departure to departure/arrival, and discards both alternates.
  18. Hypothetical weather follows each airport by database identity when a route is reversed. If the same airport appears more than once with conflicting hypothetical values, make the values agree before reversing.
  19. ETE and ground-time fields accept h:mm, h:m, :m, :mm, 0h5, 0h05, decimal hours such as 3.5, or whole minutes such as 12. After submit, values are shown canonically, such as 1h32 or 0h10.
  20. On the Multi-Leg page, use RWYS syntax arrival/departure for stops. Examples: 12/30, 36R-14, 9 27, and 13++++31.
  21. Multi-Leg RWYS separators may be slash, hyphen, en dash, em dash, non-breaking hyphen, whitespace, semicolon, colon, or plus. A single runway without a separator applies to both arrival and departure.
  22. Multi-Leg Weather and Runway Performance shows all route airports. Intermediate stops show LAND first and T/O second; only flight time, not ground time, is used for fuel-burn weight interpolation.

Step 3. Refresh Weather

  1. Click Refresh Weather.
  2. For hypothetical weather, select What-If, choose an Actual or ISA baseline for each airport, and enter only the values to override. Blank values use the selected baseline. ISA means calm wind, 29.92 inHg, ISA temperature at airport elevation, and dewpoint calculated for 60% relative humidity.
  3. An airport using Actual with every override field blank keeps its actual weather source labels and does not show the WHAT-IF badge. Selecting ISA or entering any weather field shows WHAT-IF for that airport. Form templates can use [Dp.Weather#T] and corresponding airport or stop tokens to distinguish actual weather (A), ISA without overrides (I), and user-specified weather (U). User-entered fields take precedence over either baseline.
  4. While the hypothetical-weather editor is open, adding or removing an optional route airport updates its row immediately without refreshing the page. Changing an airport identifier clears that route role’s overrides so values entered for one airport are not reused for another.
  5. Click Apply What-If Weather to update the weather and runway-performance card. Select Actual Wx to return to fetched planning weather.
  6. When returning to Actual Wx, the most recent actual-weather result is reused if it still matches the route and aircraft and has not become stale. Otherwise, the application refreshes the weather.
  7. Review the weather status pill and any panel message.
  8. Review each airport’s weather facts and performance facts.
  9. If you configured Personal Mins in Admin Preferences, the selected VFR or IFR flight type chooses the applicable set. Weather values beyond that set are shown in red, and switching flight type updates the coloring immediately. Red personal-minimum styling is advisory and does not replace review of the complete weather report.
  10. If the page presents override-choice selectors, choose the desired resolution and then refresh again if needed.

Step 4. Review Runway and Performance Data

  • Check the selected runway, runway length, slope, headwind, and elevation.
  • Check right-traffic and calm-wind markings in the runway lists.
  • Check the ground-roll and obstacle-clearance values.
  • If a fuel estimate is shown, treat it as approximate. The estimate uses the configured aircraft-type fuel-performance profile, rounds fuel up to the next whole unit, and is not shown when climb or cruise data is incomplete or the requested altitude or power is outside the profile. Descent data is used when available, but climb plus cruise is sufficient.
  • Alternate 1 ETE and Alternate 2 ETE are each measured from Destination. Alternate 2 is not a continuation from Alternate 1.
  • If W&B has existing Fuel Used, Alt 1 Fuel, or Alt 2 Fuel values that differ from the Flight estimate by more than the configured tolerance, W&B will ask whether to keep those values or use the Flight estimate. Both alternate fuel values are independent burns from Destination.
  • When Generate Form is requested with stale or missing weather, Cancel returns to the Flight page and Proceed opens Generate Form with planning weather disabled and runway performance unchecked. Choose the template and target, then select the W&B, runway-performance, consumables-table, V-speed, and planning-weather options appropriate to the template. V-Speeds is disabled when the selected aircraft type has no V-speed data. Runway performance remains enabled with stale weather and requires confirmation if selected. Hover over a disabled option or open the Options Info help for details.
  • Pay attention to overrun or warning styling on performance values.

Step 5. Generate the Form

  1. Click Generate Form.
  2. When hypothetical weather is active, the button reads What-If Form and uses contrasting text and outline colors. Form generation remains available and uses the current W&B loading for the selected aircraft; there is no separate hypothetical loading.
  3. Before selecting form options for a hypothetical form, review the caution and choose Continue. CANCEL is the default and returns without opening form options.
  4. Select the template.
  5. Select the output target. RTF targets download directly; DOCX and PDF targets require server-side LibreOffice conversion support.
  6. If warned that weather is stale or missing, choose Cancel to return to the Flight page or Proceed to open Generate Form without planning weather and with runway performance unchecked.
  7. The generated form uses the ETE currently entered on the Flight page. If ETE changed after Refresh Weather and you proceed after the stale-weather warning, template tokens use the changed ETE rather than the ETE from the last weather refresh.
  8. Choose the available W&B, runway-performance, consumables-table, V-speed, and planning-weather options. W&B requires aircraft empty weight and CG plus a complete envelope; runway performance requires takeoff and landing profiles or the configured legacy model; V-Speeds requires V-speed data for the selected aircraft type. Stale-weather runway performance may still be selected after confirmation.
  9. Review the output name.
  10. If you select runway performance while weather is stale or missing, confirm that selection when prompted.

Step 6. Save the Flight

  • Use Save if you are updating the current saved flight.
  • Use Save As to create a separate saved copy.
  • Use Open to reopen a saved flight and restore its route and related state.

Common Errors to Avoid

  • Refreshing weather for one aircraft, then changing to another aircraft before generating the form.
  • Entering an alternate airport without entering Alt ETE.
  • Using a runway override that does not exist at the chosen airport.
  • Entering a departure-arrival runway pair on a Multi-Leg row where one operation does not apply. The page shows a gray info note when an arrival runway on Departure or a departure runway on Destination/Alternate is ignored.
  • Editing the route after refresh and then forgetting to refresh weather again.
  • Building W&B for one aircraft while the Flight page is set to another aircraft.