Possibly the very last update for Jepp Flitestar

I think that’s right – for light GA. Flight planning in that market is moving to the Ipad. Jepp still run the corporate version of Flitestar which does various jet performance calculations and anyway Flitestar is a very feature-rich program.

I think Flitestar VFR (now about €100) has failed in the VFR planning market. There was always Navbox which did basically the same job and worked a lot better, and more recently we have seen other more slick tools. The only big plus of FS VFR is that you can load the Raster Charts DVD into it, but those have come to an end now, with 2013 being the final issue.

Also that add-on was about €300 which then makes it €400; admittedly that gives you a very nice VFR planning tool with “real printed” maps but I doubt many VFR pilots want to pay €400.

FS IFR is something else, and remains great for automatically generating enroute strip charts for an airway based route etc, but one doesn’t need to do a lot of route planning when IFR and anyway I don’t think two pilots do it the same way. A lot of people just fly with a list of waypoints

JIFP (basically Flitestar but with the database being online, so always up to date) is still on the Jepp website.

AFAIK this could never load the VFR Raster Charts.

But it was cheaper – about €150/year for Europe IFR versus €500/year for the standalone version (including updates).

A few years ago I did some tests of this stuff and found JIFP would load a number of megabytes during a typical planning session. That is OK when at home, on any half decent UK contract, or when abroad on a contract which has a decent amount of roaming data included (many but not all of them have). Otherwise it is way too expensive to use.

FliteStar has been on the sunset list at Jeppesen since April. No further development to be expected.

I am sure you are right Peter but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad product, or one to be avoided. More often than not, the old stuff is the best, most bug-free, most tested by pilots who fly “for real”. I think it’s a pity that Jepp seem to have dropped the whole PC-based GA market and are moving all new stuff to the Ipad – except Jeppview 4. You can’t print out of JeppTC or JeppFD except one page at a time. The IOS user interface is really quite crippled (no decent keyboard or pointing device, etc). JeppFD is a rather limited product right now and is likely to remain so for a long time, in terms of both geographical coverage and what many would call competitive features.

I realise that you as a Jepp dealer may be limited in what you can say openly but where do you think the market is going? Can Jepp dealers make any money out of their IOS products?