Ah, I am on this forum basically because I love to fly. The routing engine is not 100% up to par yet to the one of Rocketroute. If it were, I would maybe promote it more, but we will be there with some cool integration with other apps and a hugely improved routing engine (the best I think). That said, I do not fly 500 hours per year. That is a little too much. I have a family and kids, you know :-)
I have around 75 hours this year, but I missed a good bunch of the summer due to exams. Plus, the two clubs flight school planes are inop. (The 172s engine didn't make it to TBO, because some idiots ran the O320 on 3-4 qts oil more often than the engine liked it, and then some nitwit pushed the 150 into a hangar door and we are currently waiting on the new rudder). So all of our 14 students and 4 instructors share our private 172 for the moment. I think I'll get to 100+ this year.
Unfortunately, not enough. After spending a lot of money on new wing fabric, new windscreen/top screen/rear screen etc. I was determined to at least make one trip a month. Didn't happen, summer happened to coincide with a very large project. Plenty of local flying, but not enough going somewhere flying.
Not anywhere close enough. I had been planning a long trip in Summer which fell through as exactly on the departure date the weather and some notamed items prevented the trip. Good as it would have been impossible to fly back 2 weeks later either due to again bad weather enroute.
All I managed this year were some "200$ burger runs". Not one of the "useful" flights planned happened. January to March was IMC throughout, April to June was unflyable 90% of the time due to horrible weather which allowed only half day trips and during which time days off and flyable weather never co-incided. Summer was fine but even there I did not manage to do the trips I wanted as on the days I had off, mostly thunderstorms or closed Alps prevented any use.
So I did 13 hours this year so far and by the looks of it that was it. The airplane did 40 hours altogether.
But the process takes 4 weeks if you are private. On NHS waiting time is 19!! weeks
As for the promotion of our AeroPlus Flightplan App mentioned above, I have some news to mention here. We have been collaborating with Tim Dawson of SkyDemon (SD) to integrate our Flightplan App with SD and the results are in now.
What you can do now is use our flightplan app to query an IFR route, validate and file it, getting push messages to update you on the accepted-status, sending delay messages or arrival messages (for if you arrive at a non-towered airfield). Then, you can push a button and the flightplan will open in SkyDemon and will show the route in SD including the altitudes/flightlevels, the IFR airways or the VFR route, giving you all the associated NOTAMS and Plates in one place.
For IFR routes we have our own routing engine. Basically it will cover level changes, directs and works quite well in 95% of the cases. In some cases it is still difficult to find a route from small local grass-strips to join IFR and fly to somewhere else. We are working around the clock to improve the engine and don't need to update the app for it.
For VFR flightplans, we have a smart VFR addressing engine, thus automatically addressing the correct addresses, adding the FIR boundary crossings and their estimates automatically as well as estimating the EET including the climb to cruising altitude.
Looking for anyone to seriously test the app, I can provide free credits for you to use the app for free for the next 100 flights. If you are interested, let me know. You can download the app from the AppStore for free. Per flightplan message send out you will normally have to pay approximately 45 eurocent, but if you are a serious beta-tester I will provide you the credits for 100 flightplan messages.
