I would guess that @miguel22 means the chargeable Skyguide VFR VAC charts.
I believe the new FF Europe subscription includes the “free” national AIP data, similar to SkyDemon and EasyVFR. This would mean that the Swiss IFR data would be available, including airport charts and IAP charts, but not the chargeable VFR VAC charts. I thought that I saw something on the FF web site regarding an additional option to buy the chargeable DFS VFR VAC charts for Germany so perhaps the Skyguide VFR VAC charts are also coming if not already available. I suggest to drop a note to team(at)foreflight.com with the specific question about that.
Hello chflyer,
That’s exactly my point. I saw that skydemon has already the possibility of buying the VFR VAC Skyguide charts for around 45€ however I would like to know if this is already possible on FF. I am hesitanting between skydemon and FF. Just out of curiosity, which one you have at the moment?
Btw I see that you also fly in CH, do you know what is the difference between the free AIP data of the aiports from EuroControl and from Skyguide? Does it really worth to pay the 160CHF yearly to buy the folder and receive the updates? Or the free AIP from Eurocontrol does the job? I am more asking since there are a lot of aerodromes where the VFR approach needs to be performed in specific arrival zones to avoid villages or citys…
Thanks!
miguel22 wrote:
Btw I see that you also fly in CH, do you know what is the difference between the free AIP data of the aiports from EuroControl and from Skyguide? Does it really worth to pay the 160CHF yearly to buy the folder and receive the updates? Or the free AIP from Eurocontrol does the job? I am more asking since there are a lot of aerodromes where the VFR approach needs to be performed in specific arrival zones to avoid villages or citys…
The AIP in EAD is the Skyguide AIP. No difference.
If you are looking for a VFR only programme I would not recommend ForeFlight as it now stands.
miguel22 wrote:
Hello all,I am hesitating about purchasing this app. Currently I fly in Switzerland (LSGY) and I would like to have the Airport Charts included in the app. Do you know if there is already any Skyguide compatibility?
Thanks!
Hi Miguel22,
We currently support Germany from an AIP and chart perspective, however we are working on support for the Swiss AIP or VFR Guide from SkyGuide and hope to have these available shortly. We do have support for Switzerland on the Aeronautical layer which features VFR Procedures for Switzerland with more updates coming very soon. If you have any questions I can help with, feel free to reach out.
Josh
Josh
Josh_Tahmasebi_ForeFlight wrote:
Hi Miguel22,We currently support Germany from an AIP and chart perspective, however we are working on support for the Swiss AIP or VFR Guide from SkyGuide and hope to have these available shortly. We do have support for Switzerland on the Aeronautical layer which features VFR Procedures for Switzerland with more updates coming very soon. If you have any questions I can help with, feel free to reach out.
Josh
Josh
Hello Josh,
Thanks a lot for the update. Do you know if it will be still this year or only next year?
Peter_Mundy wrote:
If you are looking for a VFR only programme I would not recommend ForeFlight as it now stands.
Which other program you suggest? Skydemon? (sorry for the off-topic)
Thanks.
SkyDemon, EasyVFR, Garmin Pilot, Jeppesen Mobile FliteDeck VFR all offer significantly more than the current version of ForeFlight and were all developed from a European perspective. All offer a 30 day free trial – as does ForeFlight so you can test before you commit.
The main thing Foreflight needs for European VFR is map declutter i.e. suppress airspace above a specified altitude.
In the US, with its regular airspace shapes, etc, this is not essential but in the mostly crazy European airspace it is.
This may be coming in new releases but I don’t have access to beta versions so I don’t know anything about it.
The other thing which a lot of people want is graphical notams (notams depicted as shapes on the map, not as just text) but this is a lot of work for the vendor to provide in all of Europe (because the shapes are not published in a universal machine readable form) and I don’t think any European product does it except for the popular “watering holes”. There are also many pitfalls in getting the user interface right because e.g. how do you display a graphical notam which applies to a whole country, unless you zoom out to show the whole country? It is easy to do for people who fly only locally.
On my last couple of flights I concluded that:
Foreflight is great for IFR stuff. A feature I love is the abiltity to overlay all the possible arrivals / approaches on your route, which can help pick more optimal routings. I don’t think I’ve seen that in any of the other tools (I use SD and used GP for a year)
For anything other than planning arrival / approach though, I often revert to skydemon, for:
- better visiualization of airspace
- great when looking which frequencies are available / I’m likely to talk next
- better to look at features (“what town is that”)
I have several gripes with it:
- Some AIPs are completely missing. I don’t feel that for the price we pay we should get an incomplete too. SD is cheaper and has a ton of AIPs (Iceland / Greenland / Spain). It includes a lot of georefernced plates, for less than half the cost of the correponding version in FF.
- The small menu that pops up when you click on an airfield on the map doesn’t make a lot of sense. For procedures (approaches / stars), you have to scroll down through a menu, while FBOs (useless in Europe at least) has it’s own menu. I don’t understand either on a US context how having quicker access to FBOs is more important than quick access to procedures.
- The airports menu should have some option for quick access to departure and arrival airports.
- The search menu in the airports menu shouldn’t return things that arent’ airports
- When you save a route and then edit, it saves a ton of copies (in tthat * menu that keep the original name. For instance, somehow one of the “last used” routes called EGHH to EGPO actually just pictures an arrival into LCY (I was playing around on the commercial flight I took after EGHH → LPSO). It’s infuriating to search for these previous routes.
- The Charts tabs feels a bit useless to me. I would like it to be somehow like JeppFD, where you can scroll from one plate to the other (e.g. STAR → Approach → Taxi). One irritating feat is that you can’t remove all the plates in one go.
A little thing that I love but is not so important:
- I love the scrolling, it’s super smooth and you “rotate the globe”
FF needs to roll out new features, to create a usable product for Europe. Even for IFR, the autorouting doesn’t have fly-by waypoints, which makes it almost useless, and especially useless as a backup for the Autorouter which many are looking for. I am about to do a load of routes for a trip EGKA LIRJ LDSB LGST LGKP LGKJ LGIO LDSB EGKA and some of them will need fly-by waypoints to make the route go around bad wx. I was hoping to have a go with FF on this but even on the first leg, which I am about to file, I need to route EGKA-LIRJ but via probably LFMT or similar, to keep west of the bad wx over the Alps. Currently I am still using the web version since there is little point in getting an Ipad until I can actually use it.
