Create your own GPS waypoints

There are a few ways to do this. Did you know that you can add waypoints by dragging the red line around in the planner edit route page? That's a great way to add fuel stops to a flight plan. However, you can not add a point that does not exist in the program by doing this. I'm going to show you one way to create your own waypoints. I will use the USS Kitty Hawk as an example. Start the sim and go to create a flight. Click on flight planner. Choose departure location. You can start from anywhere, but I told you the closest airport was KSFO so enter that into the airport ID field. Click OK. Choose destination. If you know of another nearby airport, go ahead and use it if you like. I'm going to assume that the only nearby airport you know of is the one I told you about. So, go ahead and enter KSFO again for the destination airport. Click OK. Then click find route and save the plan. Exit the program. Now, in your My Documents\Flight Simulator Files directory you will find the flight plan file. It will be whatever you named it (if you have lots of plans, remember what you saved it as) and end in .PLN. Open that file with notepad. Mine looked like this:

[flightplan]
AppVersion=9.0.30612
title=KSFO to KSFO
description=KSFO, KSFO
type=IFR
routetype=0
cruising_altitude=4000
departure_id=KSFO, N37* 36.43', W122* 22.83', +000013.00
departure_position=1R
destination_id=KSFO, N37* 36.43', W122* 22.83', +000013.00
departure_name=San Francisco Intl
destination_name=San Francisco Intl
waypoint.0=, KSFO, , KSFO, A, N37* 36.43', W122* 22.83', +000013.00,
waypoint.1=, KSFO, , KSFO, A, N37* 36.43', W122* 22.83', +000013.00,

All we are going to do is add a line between the bottom two waypoint lines. It must be formatted EXACTLY like the others. Pay attention to spaces and commas. Each field (between commas) begins with a space and there is a space at the end of each line after the final comma. Easiest way to do this is copy and paste one of the others between the two we have. Then we can just edit it to look like this:

waypoint.0=, KSFO, , KSFO, A, N37* 36.43', W122* 22.83', +000013.00,
waypoint.1=, CV63, , CV63, U, N37* 44.64', W122* 36.65', +000013.00,
waypoint.2=, KSFO, , KSFO, A, N37* 36.43', W122* 22.83', +000013.00,

Note that we must renumber our added point and any following it. I gave it the name CV63. I do not know the naming limits. Keep it short. Also note the type U. That is for user defined point. The A in the other points is for airport. There are several other types. You are not limited to 2 or 3 waypoints. You may see VORs and NDBs or intersection waypoints etc. I do not know the limit on how many waypoints you can have. The last field (+000013.00) is the altitude. Enter it if you know it, if not just leave it alone or enter an approximation. It will only affect the GPS field that tells you your vertical speed required to reach the waypoint. It's not critical for our purposes. You're done. Save the file. Start the sim and load the flight plan. I have a problem here. Sometimes after I load the edited plan, it looks like my point did not get added. Sometimes it will only show up in the flight log portion of the planner. Sometimes clearing the plan and reloading it will fix this. Just go ahead and fly. Even when it does not show in the planner it gets into the GPS and works fine.