Exactly how would this “preserve national jobs within ATC and whoever is in charge of airspace”?
Because lots of people, all over Europe, and many more trying to fly into Europe, struggle to get flight plans to validate, so they phone up the DFS (or whatever) and that protects the jobs at the other end of the phone.
You should have witnessed the heated scenes when the UK was closing the FBUs (flight briefing units). Exactly that issue, although they didn’t do routing assistance (they mostly sat there typing in faxed VFR FPs). Probably a few dozen jobs, mostly well paid, went. Quite likely much of the rest of Europe will be going down the same road at some point… This isn’t just my view; a lot of posts saying the same from mainland pilots in years past.
A similar thing was going on inside Eurocontrol who worked hard for years to prevent the masses getting autorouting (they were protecting some unhappy B2B users; Jepp being one). At one point they even implemented the validation site in Macromedia (as it then was) Flash, to prevent it being scripted. It was still possible, via OCR, but that is pretty horrible, and they were successful in blocking the first routing tool, IIRC. The crazy situation was finally cracked by the now-dead FlightPlanPro which moved to a B2B validation gateway which (AIUI) was paid for by Rocketroute, when the developer of FPP got a job at RR. RR started with FPP code. I imagine FF must be using a similar paid B2B validation gateway. Eurocontrol monitor the traffic patterns on their public gateway; they commented thus in some social gathering, when some routing tool was detected as a heavy user of the gateway 
A little gotcha with Jepp subscriptions is that you can’t have both a Jepp-through-foreflight and Jepp account active. This can be an issue, as Foreflight doesn’t offer all jepp subscriptions (e.g. there is no way you can get Greenland) which Jepp offers.
On the other hand, if you use a foreflight account then for the similar price as foreflight, you can only use your sub on 1 device.
Does FF give you a georeferenced aircraft position on the Jepp terminal chart? It won’t do the vertical one I am sure but the lateral one might work.
Yes but only if you buy the 200 USD one + (Jepp charts through FF OR Link your jepp account with FF)
Not quite, according to this:
It suggests
The Jepp charts are not georeferenced on the basic version, at least according to what I’ve been told.
(they are available as “full page” on the airport info)
Yes that’s what my chart above says. It sounds like you can just browse them, or maybe load them more easily for some airport showing on the moving map? And, of course, there is no official way to have a folder full of Jepp PDFs elsewhere on the Ipad, because there is no way to print say all of Europe from any Jepp product
I would really like to know if the track log is accessible and if you can draw a VFR route with CAS conflict warnings, on the basic version.
Peter wrote:
It suggestsall versions do eurocontrol autorouting
the PRO is needed for georeferenced plates (presumably this means the free AIP plates, unless you buy Jepps)
the PRO is needed for the profile view (a pity, looking at the VFR competition, but presumably when you draw a VFR route it will warn if you are in CAS?)
the PRO is needed for “cloud documents” which suggests that you cannot get the track log otherwise – is that right?
the Jepp charts can be installed on any version
My understanding is Jepp charts are always georeferenced. It is the govt charts that need pro to be so referenced.
Even in basic you get airspace highligting which can be smart ie highlight airspace at your level.
Cloud documents is the ability to load a file to a folder in your drop box account and it auto sync and can be read in the document page of FF. nothing to do with track logs I dont believe.
JasonC wrote:
My understanding is Jepp charts are always georeferenced. It is the govt charts that need pro to be so referenced.
Not that I don’t believe you Jason, but it would be useful to have someone at FF (e.g. @Josh_Tahmasebi_ForeFlight ) or with connections to them ( @NCYankee ) to confirm this. Georeferencing is the only reason I got Pro, I only use Jepp charts, and my renewal is coming up soon.
I don’t use dropbox. I do use goodreader and it is able to sync with a server (e.g. sync with autorouter charts). Being able to sync a goodreader folder with the FF documents section would be cool. Having said that, I don’t use the documents function much in FF because it is so slow to present all the docs.
Peter wrote:
all versions do eurocontrol autorouting
When I downloaded the free trial this was initially the “basic” version which did not have autorouting capability
You can still export your log data with the basic version. To my understanding the cloud documents is more for having an online depository (between your various FF devices) of personal files (i.e. aircraft POH etc).
The profile view in FF is lagging far behind SD – on any low level flight its hugely cluttered and difficulty to decipher. I think this is still US focused where airspace is often a lot easier.
