The Flight Dispatcher: Flight Planning across the North Atlantic

Flight planning an international flight requires a lot more diligence than flight planning a domestic flight. Everything becomes more critical, including fuel requirements, weather analysis, choosing an alternate, enroute requirements, dealing with customs and immigration, individual country requirements, and individual airspace requirements.
In this lesson, we will focus on the North Atlantic High Level Airspace or NAT HLA. The North Atlantic is the busiest oceanic airspace in the world with over 450,000 flights per year. It is also one of the most complicated. Once you learn how to flight plan through the NAT, it then becomes a simple matter of learning the differences for the remainder of the world.