There’s no soup-to-nuts free solution, but Fltplan.com and FreeFlight offer the most bang. Almost anything they lack can be found just a couple of clicks away.

By Jeff Van West

In our experience there’s a spectrum of flight-planning tactics among pilots. One side just wants a quick picture before they file and figure the rest in the air. The other explores every permutation, and then prints a small tome of data so no situation catches them unprepared.

We polled pilots all along that spectrum, and dug into the free flight planning tools for the web and desktop. A few rose to the top. Fltplan.com a Favorite …