Announcing the VFR New Zealand Grand Tour Flight Plan Pack
Quick summary· AI-generated
A comprehensive guided tour of New Zealand's two islands designed for light aircraft at 100-knot cruise. The pack includes nine flight plans in multiple formats (generic, MSFS 2020/2024, Little Navmap), detailed route maps, locality guides for each waypoint, and travel-writing-style PDF guides covering history, culture, geology, and Māori significance of the route. Legs average 200 statute miles each over roughly 27 hours of flying, departing and returning to Ardmore Airport near Auckland. This is reference content for VFR pilots planning realistic scenic tours in New Zealand airspace.
Excerpt from Jonathan Beckett
Photo by Boon Panthalany on Unsplash I have been wanting to do this one for a long time. New Zealand sits at the southern end of the world looking like a country that was specifically designed as a flight simulator destination — two long, narrow islands packed with mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, fiords, coastal cliffs, geothermal plains, and art deco cities, all compressed into a geography you can actually traverse at 100 knots in a reasonable amount of time. I have been planning this tour for months, and I am genuinely delighted with how it came together. The VFR New Zealand Grand Tour is a complete circuit of both the North Island and the South Island: nine legs, departing and returning to Ardmore Airport southeast of Auckland, covering approximately 1,687 nautical miles and something over 27 hours of flying. It is designed for a light single-engine piston aircraft — think Cessna 172 or Piper Cherokee — at 100 knots cruise. The legs average around 200 statute miles each, though the geography of the deep south means some are shorter, and the final leg (Wellington to Ardmore, up the entire western length of the North Island) is considerably longer and absolutely worth it. What’s in the pack? Each of the nine legs comes with: A generic / Little Navmap flight plan (.pln)
A Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 flight plan (-msfs2020.pln)
A Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 flight plan (-msfs2024.pln)
A Little Navmap native flight plan (.lnmpln)
A full route map showing the complete leg track with waypoints
Locality maps for every waypoint and airport stop
A detailed PDF guide with travel writing about every airport and en-route waypoint
The PDF guides are not just navigation notes. Each waypoint section — every departure, every en-route stop, every destination — is written as a proper travel guide, covering the history, culture, geology, ecology, and Maori significance of the place you are flying over. I have put a lot of work into making these guides read as something you would actually want to keep and re-read, not just a list of headings and frequencies. The pack also includes a tour index document and PDF and a tour overview map covering all nine legs in a single image. The route
The tour departs Ardmore (NZAR), the heartland of New Zealand GA and one of the busiest general aviation airports in the Southern Hemisphere. From there: Leg NZ-01 — Ardmore to Napier (188 nm). South-east through the Waikato, over the film set at Matamata (yes, Hobbiton is…
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