Goose wrote:is there a program that makes it simple or does it require a degree in programming?
Somewhere in the middle. Creating flightplans for FSX is simple enough once you understand the concept, but quite tedious and by no means fun.
You can in fact use the FSX SDK to do this, and doing it this way will give you good reliable AI, but it does take some getting to grips with. This is probably the trickiest way for a beginner, as you'll need to do a lot of reading, typing and debugging. However if you want to give it a go,
there is a nice tutorial here.There are a few GUI-style tools for FS2004, but hardly any for FSX. You could try AI Flight Planner,
there is a nice helpful sub-forum at the FSDeveloper site. This creates flightplans for both FS2004 and FSX.
A lot of people do use the FS2004 tools, though, and then convert the resulting traffic files for use in FSX.
You can in fact use FS2004 flightplans in FSX, but they will deactivate any FSX flightplans, so you'll lose the default AI, and any FSX-specific flightplans which you may have installed. So it makes more sense to user a conversion tool.
TTools is a popular flightplan tool -- it is pretty much the standard tool for FS2004, even though it is not an actual MS tool.
You can download TTools here.
The conversion tool I use is AIFPC, but I don't have a download link at the moment -- a quick google should find it.