Flight Planning and Following Is Not Just for Cross-Country

It’s vital for pilots to know these risk management skills.

Meg Godlewski

Tuesday, May 27, 2025 at 11:26 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

IFR flight plans provide important layers of planning and situational awareness to the benefit of everyone in the sky. [Shutterstock]

Key Takeaways:

Despite arguments that modern aviation technology makes them obsolete, private pilot Airman Certification Standards (ACS) still require knowledge of VFR flight plan procedures and flight following.
Flight following is a valuable, though workload-dependent, safety tool for VFR pilots, offering situational awareness and risk management benefits.
Pilots must thoroughly understand how to create, file, activate, and critically, *close* flight plans, whether using digital tools or analog methods, to avoid potential search and rescue activation.

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I don’t think the check ride went very well because the CFI was raising a stink that lingered about the DPE’s insistence that the applicant know how to file and activate a flight plan and know the procedure for obtaining flight following.

The CFI argued that these skills are obsolete because of the technology available now, suggesting that navigational apps, such as ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot, combined with ADS-B make the filing of flight plans and using flight following obsolete. He noted you can track someone via an app like FlightAware.com if you know their tail number and know where they are at all times.