MU2 in Europe - Dispatch services - Local copilots - Trip itinerary

For clarity, the “autorouter” described as Autorouter AG, autorouter, and EuroGA router, is the same product, developed by Achimha and Tomjnx of EuroGA.

I did a load of beta testing of it in the early days and David and I produced a “EuroGA login” for it, as http://router.euroga.org. Then, anybody with a EuroGA login did not need to do another login.

It brought a lot of people to EuroGA, and brought a lot of people to the router, so it was good for everybody. It is a free product; we would not have done it for a paid product because the competition would raise hell.

The only other Eurocontrol router is RocketRoute, whose autorouter function can be found as a standalone free executable for Windows and Mac in FlightPlanPro which was developed by a guy who later got involved job-wise with RR. Many people expressed the blindingly obvious concern that RR would eventually terminate FPP, but amazingly it is still there, and still works. It is my backup route generator, and I use EuroFPL for backup flight plan filing (and for any VFR FP filing).

Eurocontrol promised to open up their internal autorouter to the Great Unwashed in 2005 (I have this in writing from them) but politics and loud objections by (according to Eurocontrol insiders) Jeppesen and other bizjet ($$$) flight support services, prevented it, until their hand was forced by FPP and another product called Autoplan which no longer exists. But even now they don’t offer any such service.

Sorry but we disclose the Eurocontrol routing engine to our users next to having our own routing engine and offering the Autorouter engine. In most cases the Autorouter engine provides the best results, but in some cases our own or the Eurocontrol engines come up with good or better alternatives.

OK. I am in the car and did the rough planning for the European Tour in 35 minutes for all flights. I took some screenshots and will post the planning back home. I excluded the transatlantic flights and started of in Wick and ended there as well.

we disclose the Eurocontrol routing engine to our users

Yes I should have mentioned that but, to be precise what Eurocontrol offer is a “route suggest” feature.

They construct a route which is all at one level, so if e.g. going UK to Croatia the route is forced to FL140+ which can produce sub-optimal routings.

Also IME the route suggest feature often fails to produce anything. I have used it many times over the years. FPP offers it as one of its options. But maybe they have improved it recently?

I guess it works fine for a TP or a jet, which will fly at FL250+ for fuel burn reasons alone.

While a video conference is a great idea, it can take a bit of arranging to get everyone at the same time, then is internet quality dependent, and if you get all that to work, it’s of absolutely no use to someone with the same question a week later.

Why doesn’t @mciholas just post a hypothetical flight that they might like to do. Those experienced in IFR flight in Europe can describe the process that they do to prepare for such a flight, giving the appropriate links, and screenshots etc.

Mciholas then then follow through the process themselves, asking any questions they might have, and it will be useful for someone reading in a week/month/year later too! it also allows them to see the different processes that different pilots go through (I’m sure everyone has a slightly different varient that they think is best!)

If one flight isn’t enough, then when that’s done, they could always suggest another hypothetical flight until they finally get comfortable and confident with what needs to be done. It’s what happens among friends anyway, so why not just do the process on here

OK. Back home. I planned for 35 minutes in the car waiting for my wife somewhere on a parking lot the whole European trip. See the time stamp above the screenshots in the picture album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/terwelle/albums/72157665376952640/with/25688638162/

All the flightplans validate and are ready to fly. The estimated enroute time, alternate, valid IFR route etc. is all there. There are some open ends that I could not figure out in the car that fast. First of all the legs are quite long for the Cirrus and in some cases too long. I did the planning for the SR22T as that is what I had configured in the app at that time in the car. Of course I could add another aircraft and configure it including its performance and equipment settings and do the same thing at e.g. flight level 260. Also, I would not know where to land in Dublin or near Barcelona, so would have to spend some time researching that or calling around or asking on a forum like this one which airport you guys would select in such as case. And I would question the order in which the total trip is arranged, but that would depend on the person wishing to fly through Europe.

All the flightplans can with one push of a button be opened straight in SkyDemon on my iPad and/or iPhone. The filing, delaying and all the flightplan related messages would appear on my Apple Watch, iPhone and iPad while I would be on-the-go. SkyDemon would give me all the VFR and IFR mapping for Europe, plus all the state plates ready to go. If I would add the Jeppesen app plus subscription to my iPad, I would have the Jepp plates as well ready to go. There is the customs form to still fill in through a website like onlinegar.com for entry into the UK. And again, I skipped the trans-atlantic part for now. That was a little bit too much for the 35 minutes I had in the car.

Only thing still to do is book the hotels through Booking.com, Airbnb.com or other solutions, check for things to do and see and call the airports or handlers to arrange with them. But some of that could also be done while on the go as well.

Oh. Peter. It is true that the Eurocontrol routing-“engine” does not know how to move from one flight level to another and thus is not of use in a lot of cases. However, we also have our own routing engine, which can handle that quite well, but true, the Autorouter routing engine is best, so that is why we also support that one. Most of the time the best results come from Autorouter.

I added some comments to the images I uploaded to my Flickr photo-album. Those comments and the uploading were not done in the 35 minutes I mentioned above. :-) But the comments give you some more information on what I am doing. Could still organise a webinar/screencast for those interested, but of course, let’s see if our American friend would reconsider if he sees how easy it is to plan the whole trip.

So, I am ready to go on the trip. :-)