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Jeppesen Mobile Flite Deck VFR / MFDVFR / Foreflight Mobile

http://ww1.jeppesen.com/aviation/products/mobile-flitedeck-vfr/index.jsp?cid=exfb5501789

For now, it covers Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and the UK. It's a separate product and requires a subscription of its own.

You can request a free trial

€349/year just for those few countries is quite pricey.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I will download it as a trial, but I agree about the price. At twice the price of the very feature rich SkyDemon (which also does IFR) and other similar products (e.g. Pocket FMS), I wonder what it will offer that the others don't. It is us unlikely to be guaranteed chart accuracy.

€349/year ??? For five countries?? They gotta be joking, that's almost six times (!!!) the ForeFlight subscription that covers all of the US.

I've said this before, but I think Jepp Germany putting out this App is actually a real bummer, as they now are totally disincentivized to license their charts to anyone else

The "charts" on that app are not the "VFR/GPS" 1:500k charts which they have for years been selling on paper, for much of Europe.

This app has a similar sort of chart but it is a layered database - like the other products currently on the market. This means the map can rotate according to your track, be decluttered, etc.

Jepp continue to sell the paper charts and they continue to sell the "Raster Charts" DVD which contains digital versions of those, with the same "nearly all of Europe" coverage, which in the latest version goes all the way down to Croatia and even includes a bit of Greece. That DVD is about €300.

Obviously the Raster Charts product is a CAD database, and must have been for many years (like the UK CAA VFR charts, etc). And like the UK CAA charts, Jepp have never sold that database as a database - they have only ever licensed it as a flattened graphic image. I recall a product called something like Flymap which offered these charts. Obviously they have to run North-Up only. Rumour suggests that Jepp wanted about €300/year for the license so you can work out the impact on the retail price of anything with them that covers the whole area!

My guess is that for Mobile Flitedeck Jepp started a parallel effort which is to convert the above database into a format which is suitable for running as a GPS moving map, with the layering etc. I say this because the charts do look similar to the Raster Charts.

Why they have such limited geographical coverage, I have no idea. It makes it really pointless.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I agree it's pricy but they promised more countries to come, unfortunately not all for which they have paper maps.

I have done a very basic trial. Besides the fact it took 10 minutes to download the UK coverage charts over WiFi, as a basic, uncomplicated, uncluttered, set it and fly it package it is OK. But I wouldn't go any further than 'OK'.

There is a basic flight planner with use of the interactive map, where you can move a track to include different waypoints. If you want to alter the altitude for each leg you can only do so in the 'NAVLOG', and that's the only think you can change (so you cant define whether to climb before of after the waypoint is reached (which is a nice feature of SkyDemon)). And then you can 'Go Flying' where besides the chart, it will give very basic information about enroute frequencies. I don't know if it will alert you to possible airspace infringements as I haven't taken it up in the air.

Feature wise if say is it about 10% of what SkyDemon offers. If I had just bought myself an iPad and rushed out to purchase this without a trial, paid my EUR 349, and then saw other products with many more features at much less cost, I would be extremely unhappy. Unless it came free with any existing subscriptions I had already paid for, and didn't have £150 to spend on something much better, I cant see what use it is really....

It is obvious that Jepp have not been a big player in the UK VFR business for some years.

Not long ago a colleague bought a copy of Flitestar VFR Europe (basically just to run the Raster Charts DVD - FS VFR is a rather poor program by itself). It came from UK's biggest pilot shop - about £95, which is not a bad price for chart data (a selection of layered chart types) for all of Europe, and then for about €300 you get the "real printed" Jepp charts for nearly all of Europe, in electronic form from which you can print out sections.

The date on the pack made it a 3 year old stock. You get one free update I think, by registering and going online, and the program hasn't changed in years anyway. But obviously this product has simply not been selling at all in the UK.

In the UK, the very English-centric flight planners we all know about dominate the market, but maybe Jepp sell loads outside the UK? As an exporter for some 35 years I can tell unlimited stories about how cultural barriers within Europe make a pan-European English-language product really difficult to sell, without excellent local presence. You can translate the menus easily enough but customers will still refuse to buy a "foreign" product.

So maybe Jepp, with their Frankfurt base, know their market...

I still wouldn't buy any flight planning product unless it covered all of the Europe which I might conceivably fly to (including Croatia and Greece, in my case) otherwise one is just throwing money out in multiple subscriptions, and throwing money out is really easy in this business.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I wouldn't underestimate the power of the name particularly outside the UK.

EGTK Oxford

I wouldn't underestimate the power of the name particularly outside the UK

Thats a fair comment, it is one of the biggest names, and for IFR (if I did it a lot), I would buy the Jepp electronic IFR plates, and possibly the IFR charts too.

But the VFR product is lacking in features. I dont know the take up of the other products in other European countries, and I understand what Peter says about cultural boundaries (this is a topic I spent a year studying recently as part of a Degree course), but assuming these other products are available in regional European languages as well, and there is a regional licensee or distributor, I cant see how this Jepp product will dominate the market. I could very well be wrong though.

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