Lydd – Annecy. Took about 20 seconds. No additional $300 subscription.
Thanks Dave, I assume you have the Performance Plus version. The lower featured products don’t seem to connect to the Aviationcloud routing engine. I had the Professional Plus variant originally and that certainly wouldn’t route. Upgrading to Performance Plus unlocked this facility for additional cost of $100. Total cost after upgrade was $299 bought directly off the Foreflight website. It was £299 if the upgrade was an Apple in-application purchase so that one to avoid.
But as you say routing is very quick and has given me very sensible options on the mock trips I have tried so far.
Phil
Could someone run a few routes with Foreflight versus Autorouter?
Try e.g.
EGKA-LDLO within FL100-FL170
LDLO-EGKA within FL100-FL170 and via SRN (a VOR in Italy) which should force a short route S-N across the Alps at FL140
EGKA-LKPR as above, and back
Autorouter does good routes but you almost never fly them. For example no matter which route you file through Belgium you just get KOK-LNO or some such.
Also very interesting would be a summary of the facilities in this function. It would be better to post it here however so it is easy to find, but OTOH it is specific to Foreflight so it’s OK in either place. It would be a great resource – for the reasons given in the other thread. Autorouter is free which means it will always draw the biggest audience in Europe but there are excellent arguments for having an instantly viable alternative.
For example one desirable feature is how easy is it to edit the validated route and re-validate it. The Autorouter used to be very rigid but this was added later. It is useful for common European stuff like ATC strikes. I got a bad one in Sept 2017 (a French ATC strike, LFMD-EGKA) which was solved with Achim’s help by filing another completely silly VFR sector through the strike region but clearly this is not something one can rely on (he’s vanished from EuroGA – for the 6th time, and Tom his partner in the project vanished more than a year ago, after EuroGA was used to launch the product so successfully) and it was too hard for me to do it with just the phone, and one lesson there was to always have the tablet handy AND know how to do these hacks. You will need them, right at the worst possible time.
Yes, I can do that.
In addition I have wondered about doing a comparison of Rocketroute vs Autorouter vs GP/Autorouter vs Foreflight. Maintain the same planning constraints but record time to route, route overhead and a bitmap capture to show the general directness/sense of the route. Any other parameters?
GP should be same routing as AR since they both use AR – Garmin license the AR API 
And as we are now looking at a $300 FF product anyway, a RR-FF comparison is becoming meaningful since RR is very expensive now…
Perhaps start a new thread for this. Then one can post links in the product-specific threads pointing to it. That would be really useful.
Yes I will create a new thread but as a quick experiment here is one example that in my experience is typical.
You would think that GP and Autorouter would give identical routes and routing speed? My observations so far under non-scientific conditions is that they simply do not. Here is a comparison a minute ago with both GP and Autorouter similarly programmed with a Meridian profile at FL240 from EGMD to LOWS IFR.
Autorouter
Time to route = 8 seconds
Overhead 7% (very sensible route)
GP
Time to route = 67 seconds
Overhead 36% (yes really crazy route)
RR
Time to route = 75 seconds
Overhead 14%
Foreflight
No routes found – error message after 60 seconds
The times were averages over three routings.
Ok, this is small sample of one route but my impression overall is this difference between Autorouter and GP is real. I will recreate with more routes in a new thread to see if there is a real pattern here.
Foreflight can often time out between city pairs it hasn’t been asked before. It can be annoying but worth retrying.
For a Meridian it gives me.
LYD M189 WAFFU XAMAB/N0145F250 UL612 RESMI UN491 DEGES UN871 BADVI UL725 UNKEN UNKEN1R
Not a great route but it gets you flying.
There is a difference between the lower airways and the upper airways. The Autorouter could not do the upper ones in its early days. RR concentrates on the upper airway crowd and clearly the price is OK there. It would be interesting to see of FF does the lower airways, below FL200.
ForeFlight EGKA-LDLO at FL170 comes-up with this:
SITET A34 KOVAK H20 DOMOD A3 MOTAL R11 RLP G4 HOC L613 RIPUS N850 GERSA Z50 RESIA P131 ADOSA L612 CHI L614 PUL PUL2C
It struggles to find anything sensible for the return:
For EGKA-LKPR:
SFD Y803 DVR L9 KONAN L607 RUDUS L984 SULUS Z650 TONSU Z35 LOMKI LOMKI7R
and LKPR-EGKA (note the 10000ft alt it has forced):
N0187F100 BALTU3B BALTU L984 ABERU DCT SINBA DCT KODUK DCT GORKO L604 MASEK Z52 OHMAR Z658 IDOVI Z104 TIPUT DCT BULUX DCT GILOM M624 BUB DCT BARTU DCT DENUT DCT KEGIT L179 SASKI L608 SUMUM DCT ADMAG
I think it tries too hard to optimise winds and it doesn’t give you an option to force en-route waypoints.
Dave_Phillips wrote:
ForeFlight EGKA-LDLO at FL170 comes-up with this:SITET A34 KOVAK H20 DOMOD A3 MOTAL R11 RLP G4 HOC L613 RIPUS N850 GERSA Z50 RESIA P131 ADOSA L612 CHI L614 PUL PUL2C
It struggles to find anything sensible for the return:
At FL170 using a Meridian gives me:
SITET A34 KOVAK H20 DOMOD A3 MOTAL R11 RLP G4 HOC L613 RIPUS N850 GERSA Z50 RESIA P131 ADOSA L612 CHI L614 PUL PUL2C
Which is a lot better but still not perfect.
