Very much so, and I think the quality will ultimately depend on
how many pilots fly with it, and
how many of them are willing to report errors, and
how receptive the vendor is to feedback
Almost nobody in the UK flies with anything other than the CAA charts. I suspect that almost no German pilot flies with anything other than the German DFS charts. And same for France.
So in the three biggest GA areas, Jepp get almost no feedback.
And in southern Europe, there is much less GA activity...
So VFR charts will always be a bit of a problem if you want to do VFR touring. For a long trip, one has to mix the chart types
In that one, I used a mixture of French SIA, Jepp, ONC, and ONC marked-up from Navbox (for CAS).
It's a bit like when somebody squirts some lube into your elevator trim mechanism that freezes solid at -10C. When you complain, they say "we have been doing this for 20 years and never had a complaint" 
To their credit, Jepp provide uniform coverage over much of Europe, and they also sell the whole lot on a CD (the "Raster Charts") for about €300.
These can be viewed under Flitestar VFR Europe, which is fairly cheap at £85 from here.
I am not quite sure what products these will run on as a GPS moving map... is there software for the Ipad now? The old FliteDeck could never run the Raster Charts. The only product I know about for sure is FliteMap; a version of FliteStar which was discontinued in 2005 (but can still be found) and runs under Windows.
Peter,
Having enjoyed browsing the newest French 1/2 mill. chart from your earlier link, I can no longer get the chart to show, just a blank screen inside the web page surround. What do you think have I done wrong, my English pal in France can still see it on his pc ?
mike hallam.
Success !
I have retrieved the Chart, by switching off my advert suppressing option. Could also screen print with my little old free prog. Very happy, I hope they keep it available for planning too.
mike hallam.
I've always thought that the UK CAA maps are pretty good
Yes, and I think the German DFS maps are great. Ah, and my friend Patrick from Paris considers the French maps to be great.
I think Jeppesen got the business of cross country VFR flying. Their maps used to be terrible but they have gotten better in the last years and while I still consider the German DFS maps to be better, I have been flying with Jeppesen only for years because I know they are consistent.
Most pilots never leave their home country (or home traffic pattern) so there is sufficient business selling country specific VFR maps and I think most CAAs are legally required to produce those maps. The German DFS offers maps of surrounding countries which apparently are quite popular, otherwise they wouldn't keep on producing them.
I have started configuring Skydemon to use the DFS style charts now as I think they are much better at differentiating Class A, Class D and CTRs....trying all the available options: UK, French, Italian, US and German (as well as Skydemon's own style), I find the German depiction to be the best
One thing that I would have like to have seen come out of all this euro harmonization is a common VFR map
I thought one of the purposes of European harmonisation was to provide a level competitive playing field thereby giving more map makers the opportunity to sell their products over a wide area. What you are proposing is a restrictive practice more akin to Communism!
Well, if you want harmonized VFR maps for all of Europe, buy the Jeppesen VFR maps. They all look the same for all of Europe...
Or take the airspace and facilities data and give the user the option on presentation style....as Skydemon do
That would require the national map publishers to publish the data in a vector format, so it can be layered, rotated, etc.
None of them do that - AFAIK.
Even when the UK CAA sells the stuff to Memory Map, all that MM gets is the bitmap image. No layers, nothing. What they get is what you would get if you bought the paper map and fed it into an A0 scanner. Well, what they get is electronic and thus better quality - basically what you would get if you did a load of screenshot tiles in MM and joined them all together in Photoshop, but you get the idea...
Firms like Skydemon generate their own data from various sources - Eurocontrol, the national AIPs, etc, in vector format, so it can be rotated etc. This is how the Jeppesen app basemaps (Flitestar, Jeppview, etc) are done too. But if you get the Jepp "Raster Charts" you get bitmap images which don't rotate.
I think the CAA etc are afraid of publishing the data in vector format because if they ever did that, and it was cracked, the database could be maintained "out in the wild" from the published updates, very easily, custom tiles made downloadable over the www, etc (see e.g. the Eurocontrol Skyview tool for a somewhat crude non-VFR example) and they would lose their publishing income.
Or take the airspace and facilities data and give the user the option on presentation style....as Skydemon do
Or allow the user to make up their own style...as PocketFMS do.
Boscomantico, what charts did you go for in the end? I found your initial post, and the subsequent replies quite interesting.
I'm planning on a trip to La Rochelle at some point so I just ordered the 2 SIA 1 mill charts from SIA (the link Peter provided) and the NorthWest and SouthWest half mill IGN charts from Transair in the UK.
I wanted the SIA charts specifically for the IFR reporting points. Something inside me thinks maybe I should have just bought the 2 half mill Jepp charts (assuming unlike the IGN half mill, that Jepp has the IFR reporting points) and then maybe I would have had the best of both worlds. But it seems most people favour a combination of SIA and IGN so I hope I made the right choice :-)
