Yes; very true. But it’s hard to make a business out of something that infringes somebody’s patent. It can be done e.g. software hidden inside an embedded product whose particular algorithm is not obvious from the outside, and you have protected the FLASH in the CPU from being read out – always a good move because you can never be sure that something is not patented. I have read hundreds of patents and it’s obvious that a large % of technology patents are on prior art… the examiners don’t know everything!
I am not a believer in software patents, it’s a really stupid thing just helping oligopolies and wasting huge amounts of money. I have spent 7 digits in my companies to patent things which I consider to be rather trivial and just a matter of time until somebody came up with it. Usually much more time and money went into getting the patent than coming up with the solution.
If you take dog poo and paint it green, you can get a US patent. It’s a ridiculous system. Prior art trumps a patent so by being the first and publishing it, you are protected against somebody else trying to get a patent.
A company I co-founded spent a double digit million dollar amount to defend itself against a frivolous patent claim. It took years of totally wasted resources and time (mid-priced US lawyers take $800/h) but eventually the company prevailed and it had a great outcome but still it’s a nonsense system benefiting the US oligarchs. Luckily the government has realized it’s a system gone awry.
First also from me: a great feature and nice that you continue improving autorouter.
And second, being also in software development, I completely agree with achimha that patents are a waste of money and it would be much better to use these piles of cash to finance new developments like autorouter instead of feeding the “homeless” lawyers all over the world.
This looks like a great feature but I am wondering if I am using it correctly. The route I got from Cork (EICK) to Jersey (EGJJ) was as follows:
EICK N0116F090 ERTER1S ERTER N160 LEDGO DCT STM DCT AMPOP DCT DEKOR DCT OSA DCT LDV DCT SOPEX DCT ERKIS DCT DINOG/N0116F030 DCT JSY JSY1A EGJJ
This brings me south over the sea from Cork to the north west tip of the French coast and then routes east along the coast (i.e. over land) before turning north to Jersey. I would have thought that it would have given me a route east from Cork to Wales and then south to Berry Head and then to Jersey to minimise the time over the sea.
When I route with the built in aircraft model, I get essentially Waterford – Strumble – Berry Head, which seems to me the logical way to do it.
That route seems to require ~FL140 (not totally sure why, I guess it’s the good DCT – bad DCT logic – you might try to disable UK standard routes), and your aircraft seems to be limited to FL100 (the router refuses to use levels where the climb rate of the aircraft is less than 100fpm).
Sorry I can’t take a deeper look right now, but maybe you can try to disable UK standard routes or take another look at your aircraft parameters.
A quick on update on what has happened recently on autorouter.
Exclude countries from routing
Sometimes it can be useful to tell the router to exclude certain countries from routing. Examples are notoriously poor ATC (Cyprus comes to mind), certain airspace rules you can’t comply with (e.g. DME in Germany) or industrial actions (Eurocontrol speak for strike). Here’s a quick overview of how it works. Suppose we route from Dresden, Germany to Linz, Austria. Quite expectedly, we get a route going south through the Czech republic.
Now let’s say for whatever reason we don’t want to enter Czech airspace. In the advanced setting of the route request, we select “Czech Republic” as a country to avoid:
When we route again, the result will look like this:
Garmin GFP Routes for GTN650/750 and G3000
As one of the first products in the market, we support generation of GFP route files which can be loaded onto an SD card and inserted into the Garmin GTN650/750 and G3000 navigators. The format has changed from the previous FPL format for G1000 and GNS430/530 and should be much more reliable now and contain airway information in addition to waypoints. We would appreciate some feedback. As a sidenote, the briefing pack content can be selected and there is an option to remember the selection. It is stored in the browser so if you use multiple devices, you have to set your defaults on each device.
SkyDemon route files
In cooperation we SkyDemon, we offer route files for use in SkyDemon including all information about the route (waypoints, airways, altitudes) and the aircraft. You can either download it manually from a route or get it as part of your briefing pack when you file a flight plan. You can click the file (extension .flightplan) and it will open automatically in SkyDemon. I think it is very convenient and this is what I personally use as en-route map.
User interface improvements
Several improvements were made, mostly benefitting mobile users. The tables should be a lot better to operate on phones and most pages can make use of the full screen width on large PC displays. The flight plan, route lists offer additional information which you can select by clicking on the column symbol above the tables:
The search feature is easier to use as well; just type a term, no matter which column and a fulltext search will be performed as you type and results displayed.
Enroute VFR segments
Sometimes it can be very powerful to insert an enroute VFR segment into your IFR flight plan. Either to get a shorter routing or to avoid having to climb to a very high airway (aircraft not capable or flight without supplemental oxygen desired). You can achieve this by manually tweaking the flight plan. For a few popular cases crossing the Alps, we have integrated standard VFR routes after noticing that a lot of users try to route over the Alps with aircraft that cannot reach the required airway levels.
Going from Hof, Germany to Milan, Italy in a P28 with FL110 as the max desired altitude, we get this nice Alps crossing:
The solution is marked with [enroute VFR] and contains a flight rule change to VFR at KOGOL after which you continue below the MSA (but well above terrain, we check that) the standard Brenner/Brixen route until you get an IFR pickup as soon as possible and arrive in Milan under IFR. This means you only have to make yourself familiar with the airspaces where you can’t fly IFR but get the benefits of IFR as soon as you get closer to Milan. ATC has no problems with these routings, in fact the Austrians are very familiar with the technique, they leave you on the radar frequency and treat you just like under IFR.
I’m amazed by the autorouter, I’ve been playing with it these last few days and I’m seriously considering ditching Rocketroute.
A couple of things I’ve noticed which may be of interest:
- no input for taxi fuel consumption. This feeds through fuel required but also the W&B limitations, I don’t think the fuel used for taxi is removed from the calculation of the Take Off Weight as it should? Maybe my mistake
- no input for holding speed fuel consumption. I suppose it’s assumed to be the same as cruise, but it can be very different
- no performance input for descent
- no way to customize the pilot log
- no way to download/email all the plates of the airports of the route, you have to click on them one by one and click “download”
Apologies if some of the above is there somewhere and I’ve failed to find it…
I don’t think the fuel used for taxi is removed from the calculation of the Take Off Weight as it should?
It should be…
no input for holding speed fuel consumption
We plan to add that, real soon now™
no performance input for descent
So far we just assume cruise. Now this is certainly pessimistic (you’re either faster or consume less), but then again you can seldom fly the descent as you would like, ATC often wants you to drop like a stone and if you’re unable, they issue delay vectors. So in practice I don’t think our assumption is really that bad.
no way to customize the pilot log
In what way would you like it to be customized?
Some users wanted the plog to be A5 (I just print the existing log 2-up on A4 paper, so end up with A5 sheets), some wanted A4 landscape, some wanted less/different columns..
I think it is a great tool too. As stated before I like the way all aspects of flight planning are integrated, and the very complete briefing package with GRAMETs (a great add-on – better than ogimet) – better than what you get from EuroFPL which I currently use for filing.
One great feature is the ability to configure what you want the briefing pack to contain.
There are still a couple of things I have not figured out:
I am increasingly using the autorouter and may be tempted to abandon EuroFPL some day.
One feature of EuroFPL that I like is the possibility to send notification messages to friends or family at different stages of the flight.
