Why Do We Still Need Five Tools to Plan One Flight?
I spent nine years planning flights in executive aviation. Not flying them—planning them. Sitting at a desk with three monitors, four browser tabs, two phone lines, and a stack of permit documents while a Global Express or Gulfstream IV waited on the ramp for a briefing package. My job was simple in theory: get all the information a crew needs before they push back for a twelve-hour international leg. In practice, it was an exercise in organized chaos.
Here’s what a typical trip looked like from my chair. A client calls on Tuesday afternoon: “We need to be in Lagos on Thursday.” That’s two days to build a complete operational package for a large-cabin jet crossing multiple FIRs, sovereign airspaces, and time zones. Overflight permits for every country on the route, landing permits, customs and immigration requirements, ground handling, fuel availability and pricing, parking, crew rest, and a hundred other details that nobody thinks about until something goes wrong at two in the morning in Abuja.
First stop: NOTAMs. I’d pull up the FAA NOTAM system and start reading. Runway closures, navaid outages, airspace restrictions—the usual. But here’s the part that crews flying domestically in a King Air never deal with: half of those NOTAMs aren’t in English. A NOTAM for a runway closure at Le Bourget comes in French. A restriction at Frankfurt might be in German. A critical notice about Guarulhos? Portuguese. And if you’re routing a Global 6000 through West Africa, good luck. You might get NOTAMs in French from Senegal and English from Ghana, with no consistency in format or severity classification.
I’d spend twenty minutes just translating NOTAMs. Not because I speak six languages, but because I’d copy and paste them into Google Translate and then try to figure out whether “piste fermée” meant the runway was closed now or would be closed next week. Context matters in NOTAMs, and machine translation without aviation knowledge can be risky. I once saw a colleague misread a French NOTAM about a temporary frequency change at LFPB and brief the crew with the wrong approach frequency for a Falcon 7X arrival. Nothing happened. Paris Approach caught it. But on a long duty day after crossing six time zones, that’s exactly the kind of error that compounds.
Second stop: weather. Different website. Different login. Pull up the METAR and TAF for the departure, destination, and alternates. When you’re filing for a Gulfstream at FL470, alternate planning gets complicated fast. Cross-reference the NOTAMs because a navaid outage combined with low visibility at your alternate can mean selecting a different alternate, which means recalculating fuel, which means calling the handler to confirm Jet-A1 availability at an airport you weren’t originally planning to use. That’s another thirty minutes gone.
Third stop: permits. This is where the real fun begins. Every country has different requirements for overflight and landing permits. Some need 72 hours’ notice. Some need a full week. Chad requires a permit even for overflight with no intent to land. The UAE processes permits in hours if you know the right channel. Nigeria can take days. Some countries waive permits for commercial operators but not private flights. Some require a specific handling agent to submit the application on your behalf. And where do you find all that information? Scattered across government websites (some of which haven’t been updated since 2008), PDF documents buried three clicks deep in a civil aviation authority’s website, and tribal knowledge that lives in the heads of experienced dispatchers who’ve been doing this for twenty years.
I once spent an entire afternoon trying to confirm whether a particular Central African country required a landing permit for a positioning leg with no passengers on a Challenger 604. The civil aviation authority’s website was down. The phone number listed went to a fax machine. I ended up calling a ground handler in Douala who happened to know someone at the authority. The answer was yes, they did require a permit, and we had 48 hours to get it. We got it with six hours to spare. The crew never knew how close they came to a diversion.
Fourth stop: ground handling and services. Who’s the handler at the destination? What fuel is available? Is Jet-A1 the only option, or is there TS-1 that the Rolls-Royce engines aren’t approved for? What are the landing fees for a 45-ton aircraft? Is there a noise curfew that affects a late-night departure? Does the FBO have a crew lounge, or do the pilots need a hotel for the turnaround? Do they accept fuel cards, or do you need a carnet? More phone calls. More emails. More waiting for responses from people who are eight time zones ahead and already done for the day.
Fifth stop: put it all together. All of this goes into a briefing package for the crew: flight plan, weather, NOTAMs, permit status, handler contacts, fuel information, customs procedures, crew documentation, APIS submissions, and passenger manifest requirements. I’d compile it, review it, and send it. By then, half a day was gone for a single leg. And this was a routine trip, not a complex multi-stop itinerary through countries with unstable airspace.
Now multiply that by three or four trips a day across different aircraft and different operators. That was my life for nine years.
The thing that always frustrated me wasn’t the complexity. I actually enjoyed the puzzle. It was the fragmentation. Every piece of information I needed existed somewhere. It just didn’t exist in the same place. Runway data and PCN numbers were on one site. NOTAMs were on another. Permit requirements lived in someone’s head. Handler contacts were buried in a spreadsheet someone started years ago and never maintained.
I’d sometimes think about how Waze solved a similar problem for drivers. Before Waze, you had your map in one place, traffic reports on the radio, speed trap warnings from friends, and gas prices on a separate app. Waze put it all together and let the community keep it accurate. The more people use it, the better it gets.
Why doesn’t business aviation have that? We have the most safety-conscious professional community in transportation. Pilots and dispatchers are meticulous about sharing information—from PIREPs to handling-agent reviews, slot-booking tips, and fuel-price updates. But when it comes to consolidated operational data, we’re still working with tools and workflows that were designed in the era of paper Jeppesens and telex messages.
I think part of the problem is that aviation data has traditionally been controlled by a handful of established providers. They charge substantial subscription fees for what is, in many cases, publicly available information that they’ve organized and packaged better than anyone else. And because the barrier to entry is high—you need to know what data to collect, where to find it across 200 countries, and how to keep it current—there hasn’t been much disruption.
But that’s changing. The same open-data and community-driven models that transformed how we navigate roads, find restaurants, and book hotels are starting to appear in aviation. Platforms where pilots and dispatchers can contribute corrections, verify information, and fill in the gaps that no single organization can cover for more than 30,000 airports worldwide.
The concept is straightforward: if you land a Challenger in Luanda and discover that the customs hours listed online are wrong, you should be able to fix it right there. If you find out that the handling agent at a particular airport went out of business six months ago, you should be able to flag it. And when you do, every crew that flies in after you benefits from that five-second correction.
I left my flight planning desk a few years ago, but the problem stayed with me. The five-tool, three-subscription, one-phone-call workflow that defined my career shouldn’t still be the standard in 2026. We have synthetic vision in business jets and stream real-time weather to cockpit displays, but we still can’t get a French NOTAM translated to English without copying it into a separate browser tab.
I believe the next generation of pre-flight tools will look a lot more like Waze and a lot less like the government websites I grew up using: community-driven, continuously updated, and available on one screen instead of five. The data is already out there. We just need to bring it together and let the people who use it every day keep it honest.
Pilots and dispatchers are already the most reliable reporting network in transportation. We just haven’t given them the right platform yet.
Editor’s note: We’re sharing this article because it provides an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the complexity of international flight planning and the challenges faced by the professionals who support these operations.
Disclosure: The author is the founder of Data Sky Center, a community-driven airport data platform.
- Why Do We Still Need Five Tools to Plan One Flight? - July 31, 2026
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