My brief impressions after a few days
VFR: The auto-highlight feature makes things easy despite the problematic profile view. Having said that, without the ability to set a different altitude for each leg, it’s hard to know if your planned vertical avoidance of controlled airspace works. It’s mostly the lack of info on frequencies and graphical NOTAMs which is problematic for VFR use for me as things stand (same issue in Garmin Pilot actually), but I understand this is not FF’s focus.
IFR: the routing feature, with its perfect integration, beats GP+Autorouter I think. Charts are much clearer, and certainly faster, than GP. Weather info is much better displayed and the synviz works much better. Only downside vs GP is the lack of database concierge for the time being, if you have the FS510.
I will take another look tomorrow (plan to drive to Sywell) but I suspect the lack of graphical notams would not matter all that much if there was a decent reliable website which did them and to which your route could be exported.
The far away best site has been this and I have always found it perfectly sufficient, but it is yet again broken, and obviously being something which somebody is doing for free, you can’t really complain about the service level 
(actually same argument with the Autorouter). There are other sites but they plot the stuff badly in various ways. But all of them are better than the classic NATS Narrow Route Briefing!
Enroute notams, and to a lesser extent airfield notams, are a real bastard in Europe, with busting an airshow with Red Arrows (or probably any other high-profile TRA) being a guaranteed 4 digit fine, and the various French ZITs being a (reportedly) a 10k fine with (reportedly) aircraft confiscation VFR flight without notams is accordingly extremely unwise and being in radio contact offers little protection.
FF must add graphical notams to penetrate the UK VFR market, and I reckon they eventually will.
They do TFRs in the US so they can do the Red Arrows ;-)
Peter wrote:
plan to drive to Sywell
Wycombe Air Park (Booker) maybe? 
It would also be great to have a visual depiction of the notam on the maps as well
Peter wrote:
I suspect the lack of graphical notams would not matter all that much if there was a decent reliable website which did them and to which your route could be exported.
But it should be an all-in-one soution. Easy VFR do it, SkyDemon do it
Wycombe Air Park (Booker) maybe?
Ha! You are right. It moved from Sywell EGBK to Booker EGTB for this year. Website here.
Good job you posted that David, and huge thanks, because it saves me a lot of driving
But I wonder about the others who posted in the Sywell thread (I have just renamed it)? Maybe they haven’t realised it has moved. There is a load of people on FB talking about Sywell too.
But it should be an all-in-one soution. Easy VFR do it, SkyDemon do it
Do those products plot the whole shape (by parsing the coordinate lists of the corners) or do they just plot the containing circle like all the free websites do? The former is more tricky because the coordinate lists are not in a standard format. I am sure this wheel has been reinvented many times…
Do those products plot the whole shape (by parsing the coordinate lists of the corners) or do they just plot the containing circle like all the free websites do? The former is more tricky because the coordinate lists are not in a standard format. I am sure this wheel has been reinvented many times…
EasyVFR does both. Plotting the coords isn’t 100% reliable because they aren’t designed to be machine readable. So we also show the circle. That way if the coords plotting isn’t 100% correct, the circle will be.
Having said that, when the plotted coords aren’t correct, it’s usually obvious from the nonsenical shape.
SD certainly plots shapes and had the Queens birthday bash corridor accurately plotted across SE England on Saturday. So much so that I was able to co-ordinate my arrival at the boundary at +1 min of it going cold (verified by ATC I hasten to add!).
I had a detailed Foreflight demo from the CEO on the stand today – seems a real quality product and very impressed with the attitude of the company to data integrity; I’m going to download the trial version and have a play for sure.
