GA Fuel Planning Calculator

FAA floors: day VFR 30 minutes beyond destination at cruise consumption, night 45 (91.151); IFR requires destination, then alternate when one's required, then 45 minutes (91.167). They're starvation insurance, not planning targets — the exhaustion accident record is full of crews who launched legal and met one headwind, one deviation, or one closed pump. The professional habit this calculator encodes: a fixed personal floor (an hour aboard at landing is common) that no schedule pressure negotiates with.

Unusable fuel — the quantity that can't reliably feed the engine in normal attitudes — is certified per type and already excluded from the POH's usable figure: a '56-gallon' aircraft may offer 53 usable. Plan, dip and compare against usable only. Related discipline: know your actual fuel state by dipstick or totalizer, not gauges alone — gauge accuracy requirements are famously thin, and 'it showed half' appears in too many reports.

Through time, and asymmetrically: a 20-knot headwind on a 110-knot aircraft adds ~22% to leg time — and the return tailwind doesn't give it back equally (you spend longer in the headwind half). Plan with forecast winds aloft at honest cruise, re-run the numbers if groundspeed underperforms en route, and treat 'fuel remaining in HOURS at current burn' as the in-flight metric. The diversion decision made at altitude with an hour aboard is routine; the same decision at 25 minutes is an emergency.

No account and no connection are needed once the page has loaded — records live in local storage on your device and every calculation runs in your browser. Data doesn't sync between devices, so export the CSV when you want to move or archive your records.

Always — the CSV export is a complete, lossless dump of your fuel plan, generated locally in one click. Import it into commercial software, archive it with your files, or post-process it in a spreadsheet. No lock-in is deliberate: data you can't take with you isn't really yours.