Flight Planning Math for Student Pilots: Wind Triangle, Fuel & Weight-and-Balance

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Convert the numbers of a practice cross-country trip between nautical miles and kilometres, knots and km/h, feet and metres, kilograms and pounds, and gallons of fuel into pounds.
• Estimate true airspeed at five cruising altitudes from the indicated airspeed, see the gain in knots and work backwards to the indicated speed that gives a target TAS.
• For five practice legs you calculate the wind correction angle with ASIN, the true heading wrapped to 0–360° with MOD, the groundspeed with COS, and one leg's headwind component.
• Turn distance and groundspeed into minutes per leg, a running total, an ETA for every checkpoint and the trip's average groundspeed.
• Add up taxi, climb and cruise fuel, pick a day or night VFR reserve with IF, total the fuel required and check the margin to the usable fuel on board.
• Load the fictional Skylark SK-4, calculate each station's moment, the total weight and the centre of gravity, and check them against the weight limit and the CG envelope.
• For five fictional airfields you calculate pressure altitude from the altimeter setting, the standard (ISA) temperature, the density altitude with the 120 ft per °C rule, and find the field with the worst performance.
• Finish the practice flight log: fuel left at landing, weight, moment and CG at zero fuel, takeoff and landing, and plot all three inside the SK-4 CG envelope as a scatter chart.