Avidyne have brought out their own Ipad app – the IFD100
AFAICT this is the only current means of electronically loading flight plans into the IFD boxes. Well, other apps are mentioned here
but they have virtually no applicability to European flying.
Does anyone know whether this app contains a “plain text entry” feature into which you could paste a Eurocontrol route such as
or even the simplified version (which isn’t directly available in any tool I know, without editing)
or even the simplest version (available from Autorouter)
The Garmin GTN route uses their Flightstream 210 bluetooth adapter, and AFAIK requires Garmin Pilot.
Does anyone know the answers to the above capabilities, and what database subscription (if any) is required for the flight plan loading functionality? The GP app itself is free. The one sub I would be happy to pay for is Safetaxi, which I believe is slightly over £100. But one would rather want that on the panel mount unit, to save fumbling around with a tablet in a tight cockpit.
Finally, neither anything from “Avidyne” nor anything “Garmin Pilot” appears in the Android app shop. So all this seems to be IOS-only.
Hi all,
No chance on the first one.
Almost on the second one.
Definitely yes on the third one.
The 2nd one works just fine except for two fields that I do not understand. I don’t know what “-N0152F100” means nor do I understand what the 11 suffix is on ORBIL.
I’ve attached a few screen shots of the IFD100 in action. The FMS and entry of flight plans is identical to the panel mount IFD. They run the identical software. In the third image, I set the flight plan view to single row and to compact view so you can see the whole thing.
You can do all the flight plan input on either the panel IFD, the tablet IFD, or the keyboard. You can even type it in as one long string on the keyboard using periods (“.”) between the elements.
BTW, the IFD100 is currently done for the Windows environment and the iOS environment. We still have the action to create the Android version.
The N0152F100 means that after the preceeding waypoint the speed will be 152kt TAS and the altitude will be FL100. On European IFR (Eurocontrol) routes you often see altitude changes, usually not because the pilot (or ATC) wants to do that but because it gets around some of the restrictions in the Eurocontrol computer 
And it isn’t possible to specify a new level without also specifying the speed.
For a GA GPS like yours, there is no climb/descend control (except on LPV, +V or ILS obviously) so the loading of such a flight plan would involve simply ignoring these terms.
ORBIL11 is a STAR. Sometimes in European IFR flight plans you get these. They don’t mean much in reality because obviously they could change based on the current runway when you arrive. I am sure your database includes SIDs & STARs. You could ignore these terms too in parsing the flight plan route, but why do that when the procedures are in the database?
The IFD100 app is really cool. I saw it at Sun ’n Fun. Essentially it gives you a second IFD540 on your iPad with crossfill of flight plans between them.
AviJake your IFD540 users in Europe would like it if you could load flight plans over Wifi from SkyDemon or at the very least from JeppFD :)
Hi Steve, good to see you here.
I gather from the IFD100 function being the same as the in-panel unit to mean that the “plain text entry” functionality is not available. That would be really neat, because the Euroga autorouter generates text strings like the 3rd example above and being able to cut-and-paste into the IFD100 would be much quicker than even building the plan manually step by step. I assume the challenge would be handling anything the IFD100 doesn’t understand.
Vince
Why would you want to load routes from SD, which doesn’t have a Eurocontrol IFR router?
Any plain text entry must be able to accept airway names, and (given editing hassles when in the cockpit and trying to minimise messing about) should accept DCT correctly.
The reason for accepting airway names is that ATC do occassionally refer to them.
Yes, we expect to be able to take flight plan input from SkyDemon and the Jepp app in the not too distant future. Some will happen before others I’m sure.
For any app developer who wants to take or send data from/to the Avidyne IFDs, all they have to do is contact me ([email protected]) and if they haven’t already signed up, I will send them a $0, lightweight license agreement. Once I have an executed license agreement I add them to our SDK developers distro list and send them the full 2-way SDK and associated documentation.
There are currently 19 different developers signed up (some are apps you’ve heard of and some are individual developers) and are at various stages of development.
Release 10.2 is the release that enables full two-way data flow and it should be out this summer.
And yes, the IFD100 runs the identical code as the panel mount IFD so both would have the auto-router interpretation challenge. I don’t realistically see us getting around to trying to interpret/decode that data anytime soon. It would be a great capability but there are currently so many projects ahead of it in the queue.
BTW, it may be well understood but the IFDs easily handle DCT and airway names now.
Peter wrote:
The Garmin GTN route uses their Flightstream 210 bluetooth adapter, and AFAIK requires Garmin Pilot.
ForeFlight is also supported. There could be more in the future but who knows since Garmin has its own product.
Peter wrote:
Why would you want to load routes from SD, which doesn’t have a Eurocontrol IFR router?
Even VFR-only pilots use GPS. As long as it can output a valid route (not talking about Eurocontrol here), why not?
Apparently Skydemon can now load routes into Avidyne IFR boxes.
Peter wrote:
Apparently Skydemon can now load routes into Avidyne IFR boxes.
You mean wirelessly? Wow.
