Garmin Flight Plan (.fpl)
Garmin Flight Plan (.fpl) is Garmin's XML format for aviation route plans — a sequence of named waypoints an aircraft's avionics or a flight-planning app can load directly.
At a glance
| Extension | .fpl |
| Encoding | xml |
| By | Garmin Ltd. |
| Current version | FlightPlan v1 (XML namespace http://www8.garmin.com/xmlschemas/FlightPlan/v1) |
History
Garmin defined FPL as an XML schema (namespace http://www8.garmin.com/xmlschemas/FlightPlan/v1) for its aviation product line. No public introduction date is documented; the format has been the flight-plan exchange format for Garmin's panel-mount and portable aviation GPS units for as long as those products have supported XML import/export.
Where it is used
FPL is read and written by Garmin's aviation avionics — the G1000 glass cockpit, GNS 430/530 and GTN navigators, and portable units like the aera series — as well as by flight-planning software and apps that interoperate with them, such as Garmin Pilot and third-party flight planners that offer Garmin-compatible export.
Structure
An FPL file is XML with two parts: a waypoint-table listing every point's identifier, type, country code, latitude, longitude and optional comment and elevation, and a route section that references those identifiers in flying order along with a route name and description. Identifiers follow aviation convention — four letters for an airport, GPS-derived codes for everything else.
How widespread
FPL is the native flight-plan format of Garmin's aviation ecosystem, one of the most widely installed avionics families in general aviation, and is accepted as an import format by most third-party electronic flight bag and flight-planning tools that target that market.
RouteConverter support
| Reads | Garmin Flight Plan |
| Writes | Garmin Flight Plan |
RouteConverter reads and writes FPL as a single, non-multi-route file. It always writes a country code for each waypoint — a compatibility requirement for Garmin G1000 avionics, which import the file incorrectly without one. Writing Garmin Flight Plan is free for the first ten saves; beyond that it needs the fpl-g1000 sponsor feature. Reading is always free and unlimited.