It's suprising how slowly the options on this are improving.
AFAIK there is still only one "proper" autorouter - Mike Flynn's FPP, also contained in Rocketroute.
Christof Edel's Autoplan was very good but then he dropped it, after Eurocontrol's constant attempts to frustrate it, by changing the validation site to HTTPS and then to Flash...
Avbrief briefly offered a gateway to the Route Suggest (RS) site but that is now dead. While FPP offers RS too, the problem is that if FPP is not working, that feature won't work either. And using the RS as the primary method (which is what you get in EuroFPL) doesn't work the majority of the time, partly because the whole route is done at one level, so one often gets silly stuff like a 50% overhead over GC.
Yesterday I could not get FPP to work, EGKA-LFBH for the EuroGA fly-in (now cancelled due to wx), apparently due to no validation gateway response.
So, the situation is still very poor for serious IFR flyers.
I would guess that IFR route development still suffers from bizzare issues perhaps 5-10% of the time. I haven't tried Rocketroute; maybe they are more reliable?
That's why I precompute all possible route for any long trip, while still at home. Most of the time they work for a week or two.
Is there some other site, perhaps not free but reliable?
RocketRoute is very reliable in my experience. A few weeks ago they switched to a new communication protocol with Eurocontrol (they were pilot customer) which has the advantage of getting immediate ACKs of the flight plan. Previously it would submit a validated route and then it would take about a minute until you get a verdict on your flight plan. That is now immediate.
Christof Edel's Autoplan was very good but then he dropped it, after Eurocontrol's constant attempts to frustrate it, by changing the validation site to HTTPS and then to Flash...
If you go that route (i.e. use the Eurocontrol NOP public webpage for route validation), you'll need to run a full blown web browser in the background. At least that's what I do (webkit-gtk).
So far, it worked reliably over the last year or so. It broke two times, when they added the "broswer" warning and a few days ago the cookie warning dialogs, so I had to add some cookies to the pre-filled cookie jar.
I don't think you need to run a "browser" but you need quite a lot of functionality of a browser incorporated into the program.
To work an HTTP website is quite easy. I am "aware" (not coding myself) of projects where a little prog was written to interact with a complex website. The HTTPS version is just a case of using some other C++ libraries.
I guess running Flash is quite messy, but it has been done, and in the worst case you could perhaps do OCR on the output.
I have no idea what Eurocontrol gains by making this stuff difficult. They MUST be protecting something. But what? It cannot be in the interest of the airspace owners (who are Eurocontrol's paymasters) to keep IFR route development difficult, because they just end up with a lot of ATCOs (who are very expensive to employ) tearing their hair out over traffic which filed one thing but really wants to fly something else. Rumour is that they are protecting some of their bigger B2B customers, starting with Jepp. Yet, I believe, they offer a B2B validation facility over a VPN, so maybe they are trying to "channel" business towards that profit centre, away from the free validation gateway.
But if you want to run flash, you'll pretty much need a web browser, just for the infrastructure the flash plugin needs.
You could become B2B customer of Eurocontrol for relatively little money, I think even for free if you're happy with the 2 certificates you get. I don't know whether that is sufficient to get access to the verification facility.
I haven't done so because the pain level isn't big enough (i.e. the verification via the website works reasonably enough), and I didn't want to get through the hassle to sign the contract and then manage the VPN...
Peter,
You should give Rocketroute a go (filing is now free and there is a 14 day trial of the whole service), we have a fair old team available to help on that side, whereas on FPP it is just me supporting it. I find the whole Rocketroute package when actually flying very good, particularly the iPad app with route packs, you get a SigWx, winds, departure/destination/alternate EAD plates, arrival/departure/alternate NOTAMS, plog, flightplan form all synced up to a nice (IMHO) organised structure loaded into the PDF browser. It is also a sensible place to keep a bunch of diversion plates. The mobile web version lets you do delays, cancels (and your own arrival message if the local ARO is closed) with very little bandwidth on either an Ios or android device.
On the Eurocontrol complexity. I honestly believe they are not trying to be difficult. They are just programmed to do everything in as complex a way as possible. I suspect it may be an industry funded training scheme to develop Java programmers (based on their interfacing process to EAD data) and Flash developers (based on the way the have done some of the public tools) ;-). It took weeks and weeks of work (after wading through a torturous application process) to get the EAD machine to machine downloads working and one week from the first phone call to the FAA until we had credentials, access methods, interfaces running and the full FAA data set loaded into production.
AFAIK there is still only one "proper" autorouter So, the situation is still very poor for serious IFR flyers.
Doesn't Eurocontrol and Afpex have a route proposal mechanism?
On the other hand, even if there was only one router, why is that still poor?
I guess with "filing is now free" you rather mean that the number of filings per year now not limited any longer. A big difference. Also, I talked to them at Aero and the "unlimited filing" is still - officially - a temporary promotion thing. We'll have to see whether unlimited filing becomes permanent.
BTW, you can file flight plans (VFR and IFR) just with their "basic" package, which is about 50 Euros a year. The only difference between this and the "full" service is the routing generator (which of course, is really the heart of the RR package).
Price of for the full package BTW has gone up from about 190 Euros to 240 euros this year.
Doesn't Eurocontrol and Afpex have a route proposal mechanism?
Read the other threads, but in a nutshell:
The Eurocontrol router (and all services that use it) does not support:
Multiple flight levels
Y/Z Plans
DCT's (other than a few specific ones)
Especially for normally aspirated IFR traffic, that often means no route or a very long one.
I guess with "filing is now free" you rather mean that the number of filings per year now not limited any longer. A big difference. Also, I talked to them at Aero and the "unlimited filing" is still - officially - a temporary promotion thing. We'll have to see whether unlimited filing becomes permanent.
No, Free filing is Free - as in no membership cost and no variable cost. Part of the advantage of moving off AFTN was the variable cost of filing basically went to zero. However, you don't get SMS messaging, autoroutes, support (especially not trip support or telephone support) in the free package.
