Peter wrote:
and pay.
AFAIU, if you don’t pay then SkyDemon won’t work at all — it checks that you have a current subscription when you log in. All enroute charts and updates are included in the basic subscription.
Ha..“skydemon posts merge in another thread”
Now I understand….
Indeed; it took an hour of my life to merge about a dozen threads (379 posts) on SD. I do thread merging from time to time; keeps the place tidy and keeps threads mostly on-topic which is how most people who read EuroGA like them to be 
There are already at least 2 threads (this and this) on using SD and EVFR for airspace warnings, or a dedicated aviation-type GPS. As noted in these links, nothing seems to offer a complete solution.
http://forums.skydemon.aero/Topic24555.aspx
I understand that the Skydemon people hate AIP SUPs, since they are neither regular in timing (like AIRAC AMDTs), nor are they visible and easily decodable like NOTAMs. And some customers just don’t want to understand SDs side either. But gosh, that guy is just so terrible at PR matters, its beyond belief…
He also has never quite understood how exactly the DFS’s publications work… that’s SD’s second most important market…
But I actually agree that if you publish rules and want to enforce them with fines, you can’t make them secret and charge people to access them.
Not that I think the system in e.g. France was much more user-friendly because they provide the SUP AIPs free of charge. It is still a mess. But Germany is on a whole different level by not making these publicly available. I wonder if the AIP is actually the only source for this information, or if you could also find it by digging through all the Amtsblätter of every German municipality.
Rwy20 wrote:
But Germany is on a whole different level by not making these publicly available.
“Publicly” is not so well defined. If you register (for free) at the DFS website (https://secais.dfs.de/pilotservice/home.jsp?lang=en) you have free access to IFR and VFR textual and graphical NOTAM bulletins (e.g. VFReBULLETIN). So there is no real excuse for not knowing current restrictions along a planned route.
You clearly haven’t read the linked thread.
Rwy20 wrote:
But I actually agree that if you publish rules and want to enforce them with fines, you can’t make them secret and charge people to access them
Unfortunately, the AIP VFR-SUPs are not the only crucial bits of information behind a paywall in Germany. I have always wondered if this could be used as an argument should one ever be fined for something not publicly available.
what_next wrote:
If you register (for free) at the DFS website (https://secais.dfs.de/pilotservice/home.jsp?lang=en) you have free access to IFR and VFR textual and graphical NOTAM bulletins
There is a lot of stuff which is not being published on dfs-ais.de.
boscomantico wrote:
But gosh, that guy is just so terrible at PR matters, its beyond belief
Does not seem to hurt his business too much, though…
I think the SD guy handled it very well. And I agree with him trying to adress to root-cause and not a quick-and-very-dirty band-aid à la EasyVFR.
The outcome is good, the handling not. Of course there is no way to justify that a VFR navigator does not depict a restricted area that objectively exists.
