European IFR flight planning?

You going to join up with SD, Achim? Autorouter and SD would be a great match…

I think so too…

First the technology needs to mature a bit, then everything is possible. We’re currently working on a separate approach for Her Majesty’s airspace incorporating the standard route document and trying to distinguish good DCTs from bad DCTs. UK routes is our top priority right now.

Skydemon indeed does print strip charts in the PC version. This is an example. Scale can be set dynamic.

Full printout in PDF here: skydemon_egka_ldlo.pdf

That PDF, lenthamen, crashes my PDF reader Does it contain some tight javascript loop? It takes the CPU time to 100% (actually 50% on a dual core PC). It does contain javascript, which is very unusual for a PDF:

but even if I disable javascript, I can’t get past page 1.

Anyway, the image does look good so maybe it is just your PDF printer.

SD is a great tool and I have used it VFR and IFR. The airways functionality has been there for a couple of years now, but it is still marketed as a VFR product, which to be fair is where the market is. Documentation is a bit thin on the ground due to speed of product development. I am on the SD beta programme and have a few of my own suggestions for improving the IFR functionality, but it might be quite interesting to debate and pool ideas for the functions that the majority would find useful for IFR flight, so that they could be submitted in one hit for a future release.

SD have had a bit of bad press in a few places and EuroGA more than most for heading towards ‘feature overload’, to which I agree with to an extent, although I can vouch that the ridiculous ones do get dumped, or at least tested and dumped. Maybe a move towards IFR could be a good use for the undoubtedly talented team they have. They have the VFR market sewn up for a good reason and I doubt they have any ambition to get into certified IFR avionics, but with a few tweaks they could have a very powerful, but more functional ‘backup’ to other certified GPS tools.

SD doesn’t seem to match the Jeppesen charts for MEAs….and I have cut and pasted a route through Germany to LDLO and SD did not have several of the waypoints so could not display the route….I understand Garmin Pilot app for Europe will be out any day….hopefully that is better suited to IFR…

I have on occasions pasted a Eurocontrol route into Flitestar and found that it would not plot it correctly. A common issue, which was present for years, was an inability to plot a portion of that route I posted earlier, through Belgium. One had to drag the route onto the (several) waypoints manually. A recent one was plotting a route, I think EGKA-LDLO, where it suddenly flew off to an airport in Iceland, so evidently another bug (deleting that waypoint solved it).

But on the whole it works. I recall occasions in 2005-06 when plotting some route would crash the program, and I very much recall one time when, stuck in some hotel, I had to manually plot the route in Navbox, to get a plog. Of course a “modern pilot” would say that you don’t need a plog to fly IFR

The waypoints and the airways were always present and were shown correctly. That said, nobody would recommend Flitestar today; an old and clunky program and the database is not cheap to update.

There seems to be a general issue with some IFR intersections being unknown. There doesn’t seem to be a definitive database. I do know that there are two types of five-letter identifiers: ICAO and non-ICAO. The former ones are e.g. ORTAC which hang around for decades. The latter ones tend to be used in SIDs/STARs and frequently get deleted, but they should not come up as enroute waypoints by any route generation program.

So it doesn’t surprise me if SD misses some waypoints out – especially as it isn’t going to have a large IFR user base which will make a fuss when they find something. All aviation products are only as good as how many users give them a good thrashing and complain (in English) back to the producer.

That PDF, lenthamen, crashes my PDF reader

It’s is quite large (about 10mb) and stored on my Dropbox, which seem to be slow. Maybe it wasn’t fully downloaded?
I just tried it at my work PC (Windows 8) and it displays fine. Could be a PDF printer issue. I’ve used CutePDF, a free PDF convertor.

It seem that you are worried about getting directed by ATC to IFR waypoints which are not on your filed route.
I’ve had that several times. I remember in Germany I got a totally different routing via waypoints which where off my route. I asked ATC to spell them for me. The controller sounded a bit irritated as he was quite busy, and maybe I looked stupid that I didn’t know the points he was mentioning. But hey: I was flying single pilot in IMC, in a (for me) unknown environment. ATC is there to support you, not the other way around…

Off route waypoints are not an issue, although they are fairly common, I find.

Sure one can just ask ATC to spell them.

There is an infinite spectrum of opinions on how “prepared” a pilot should be.

At one extreme, some pilots are happy to take off, knowing just the SID, and then wait for instructions and load them as a DCT one at a time. That will “work” most of the time – until ATC asks you to do “own nav” to XYZ via A B C which you don’t know how to spell (or better still “airway YYY”) and then you will end up looking like an idiot and everybody in the whole circus will hear it on the radio. I think that is grossly unprofessional and makes private IFR GA look disreputable, which we don’t really need.

Next, you have pilots who are happy to fly with just a list of waypoints, as delivered by one of the flight plan filing services by SMS or email just before EOBT. That will work “even more most of the time”, failing badly only if you get asked to fly via “airway YYY”, but that is very rare; I’ve had that maybe 5 times in the 8-9 years I have been flying IFR.

Personally, I like to have some idea of where the route lies relative to nearby waypoints, but I have done flights without that – e.g. when one has to replan the route and doesn’t have a printer or some means of displaying the new route, or one can print it to a PDF but it is too much bother to load the PDF to the tablet in use (most likely to be the case with an Ipad given the very limited ways of getting data into it while travelling).