@Peter I just tested it for EGTK to EDMA and it produced within about five seconds a sensible eurocontrol validated airways at FL090.
I am planning to go for the basic version when my free trial period ends, but what problems did you encounter?
Some of these apps seem to optimise the flight level selected based on the profile you loaded and MEA, but if you need higher you would request that from ATC. Piston flight levels are relatively empty in Europe.
OK the previous thread mentioned an EGDM LOWS route, I also added KOK as wpt to avoid French airspace to simulate French ATC exercising their right to strike, the route came up, validated in about seven seconds.
This really belongs into the FF thread. We did a lot of this e.g. around/after here. I don’t recall any recent changes.
Has Garmin Pilot done any enhancements for Europe, in recent years?
This post in the FF thread summarises the European IFR situation pretty well. Lots of little features have been added but no proper European-specific fixes.
So the answer to @johnh might be: both are not much good 
FWIW I do my trips with a simple non-layered (raster map) VFR moving map running on a tablet. For IFR, the nav is done with panel mount kit, and on the tablet I am running mostly out of date VFR charts because it is for emergency use – nearest airport, etc – only. For VFR I run a current VFR chart, especially in the UK where they will hit you hard with their new zero tolerance policy and there I would not dream of running something other than the real CAA map. However, due to the new policy, I have stopped VFR in the UK now except for trivial local flights. If I wanted to run a current VFR moving map with lots of features I would use EasyVFR. Skydemon is also a popular app in the UK and some other places; IMHO it is too feature packed for most users, but opinions differ Garmin Pilot and Foreflight are nowhere near these aforementioned programs for VFR, and suitability for IFR depends a lot on one’s workflow.
@Peter my experience is EasyVFR for VFR, horses for courses etc
Here is another one for Garmin vs ForeFlight – Garmin now actually works on Android!
GP always existed as an Android app but it was feature-crippled and really only for the US market, IIRC.
We did this more recently here (the result of this search) and it looked like GP/Android had all the main features of GP/IOS except no Jeppesen data. The rationale behind that is obvious; to do with ease of rooting the former and extracting the data.
This report is more recent – GP/Android cannot file IFR flight plans which renders it basically useless.
RobertL18C wrote:
@Emir thank you, my mini is on 12.4.9 so am guessing it is missing some of the latest functionality of the ForeFlight app.The app works, however, but am not sure what features are not loaded.
The last version of ForeFlight for older iPad (like mine Mini 3 – iOS version 12.5) is 12.9.2. You don’t miss much, maybe some bug fixes related to 3D view and daily weather forecast (basically useless features for any aviator). However, in the future anything they add to application will be available only on devices supporting iOS 13 and above.
I have recently installed dual IFD550/440 to replace my GNS530W/430W in my Jetprop.
With the change has come the need to switch from Garmin Pilot to ForeFlight. So far it has been an “interesting” transition, biased somewhat by my familiarity with Garmin Pilot, but I thought it would be a good exercise to share some of the more striking differences with a view to a better understanding of how to get the best out of ForeFlight moving forward.
The first handicap is that ForeFlight does not specifically cover Asia as a region, so I am having to run the European version. The base map detail of FF is quite poor compared to that of GP. The wind barbs on FF are tiny and much further spaced out almost making them unreadable. The profile view of the flight plan does not offer any wind information in FF, only tabular winds accessed via the flight altitude box. On FF Airway labels only appear at high zoom views making flight planning much more laborious as I have to constantly keep zooming in to see any airway labels. I have found switching to the Jeppesen base map is better in this regard than FF’s native aeronautical base map, but Jeppesen maps lack a lot of underlying detail.
My next impression is regarding the general handling of entering and managing flight plans.
FF seems much weaker in this area. The limited size of the FPL box (cannot be expanded) means that in the Nav view mode you can only see 3 lines of the flight plan plog at any given time, and there are no altitude constraints shown. The main FPL view of the waypoints listed by name only with no other attributes shown does not seem to be particularly useful other than when entering quick and dirty flight plans pasted in from another source.
There appears to be no way to see basic information like TOD or TOC points in the FF Navlog part of the FPL. I know that a very detailed plog is available via the pre stored Flights section, but this is not connected to the real time flight data, only as a static look up reference.
In flight using Direct To, FF unhelpfully deletes every prior waypoint prior to the Direct to point, and inserts your current long/lat in their place. This has already proved to be a practical limitation when ATC clears you direct to a point, only later on to have an upstream controller amend the direct to, to a prior waypoint that no longer exists in FF. I fail to understand the rational of this behavior and FF support tell me this is working as designed and cannot be changed. The only way around this I have found is using “Direct to a leg” rather than a WP, which does not delete any prior WP’s.
The map drawing on FF is significantly faster than GP (I am using an Ipad Air2), and I have noticed that with each major release of GP, it is getting slower and slower refreshing all the map layers. Perhaps this will be mitigated on newer IPads, but it does seem that GP is getting more bloated in this area.
The annotation of altitude constraints on the FF map is much clearer than GP even when not superimposing arrival or approach charts, so this does make up somewhat for the lack of any altitude information on the FPL plog.
There is no ADSB weather coverage out here, so I rely on the Satellite Enhanced view on both apps when on the ground. The resolution of the various temp layers is very crude and blocky on FF compared with GP. I am guessing this comes from the resolution being provided by ADSB datalink weather in the USA, but to apply the same resolution when connected to internet based weather sources seems quite crude to me.
After landing, I found FF much better at displaying geo-referenced airport data allowing for easier taxying.
FF also scores with its ability to suggest ATC approved routing in this region, which is not available via GP at all for Asia.
GP does a much better job of automatically logging each flight and prefilling all the pilot and aircraft data based on the FPL. FF requires a lot of manual input after the flight.
FF support have been very responsive so far, much more so than Garmin, and I get the impression that FF is being developed at a much faster rate than GP which also has to keep conforming to the UI look and feel of their GPS boxes.
None of the above are show stoppers as such, and either app does a very good job overall of providing a lot of pilot aids.
Cheers – E
After landing, I found FF much better at displaying geo-referenced airport data allowing for easier taxying.
Maybe that’s a setup thing. My GP automatically shows the Garmin SafeTaxi chart after landing, so that my wife can tell me where to go 😉
