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:

The article addresses a debate between a CFI who considers traditional flight plan filing and flight following obsolete due to modern tech, and a DPE (and author) who stresses their foundational importance for pilot certification and safety.
Flight following is a valuable, workload-permitting service for VFR pilots that aids in risk management and traffic awareness, and is critical for IFR operations, but it is not the same as a flight plan.
Private pilots must demonstrate comprehensive knowledge of VFR flight planning, including creating navlogs (even manually to show understanding) and the procedures for filing, activating, and crucially, closing flight plans, as forgetting to close one triggers a search.

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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.