Fsbuild-2 Flight Planner

Hey Ernie,

Pictured below is a shot I took during cruise on a flight up to Hayward:



At the time, I was at FL380 and had been given pilot's discretion to decend to FL200. So I've entered 20,000 in the alerter window (the magenta 20000) but I haven't yet begun the descent which won't be initiated until I enter a vertical descent rate (VNAV isn't being used).

In the real world, we would typically wait until we reached what the onboard computer has determined would be our Top of Descent before starting down. This is so we don't burn more gas than is absolutely necessary, since fuel burns are much higher at lower altitudes.

My question is, should I use the orange TOD dot shown above for the same purposes? In other words, stay at FL380 until I cross the TOD dot?

As a seperate question, what is the difference between the orange TOD and the green TOD?