Top rated Aeroplanner wins for overall features and price flexibility.

by Jane Garvey

We’ve been checking out software-based flight planning programs off and on for a decade now and the best commercial products have evolved into sophisticated and useful tools. Beyond just grabbing weather and filing your own laboriously created flight plan, the good ones offer substantial assistance in route and altitude planning, weather overlays and, frankly, more toys than the average pilot would utilize routinely.

On the down side, the program and update disks are expensive and in the brave new world of ubiquitous and ever changing TFRs, disk-only programs are simply unable to offer “all available information.” To their credit, each of the three major commercial flight planner companies…