Well, the german VFR AIP consists mainly of the VACs (a holy grail around here), and MFDVFR obviously includes them (just like the VACs for all the airports within the coverage, even for airfields that don’t officially publish one). But really the concept of VACs gets blurred with the integrated approach of MFDVFR.
Skydemon includes Croatia, IIRC.
And yes, the coverage is dismal. It’s not important where 90% of the private pilots are based; it’s where they fly to in summer. (I know, many pilots don’t tour, but those who do are Jepps customer base).
No Spain/Portugal, no Italy (just yet), no Scandinavia, no Poland, Czech, no Balkans, etc.
Interesting. I hadn’t realised SD failed to include all the VFR charts. As Bosco says, you must have these in Germany.
IIRC, SD includes the VFR approach charts wherever they are available for free by the respective national authorities, some of them are even georeferenced. For Germany, one can subscribe to the DFS-charts to be displayed within SD for something like EUR 70 p.a.
Even Skydemon (looking at their website today) doesn’t cover Croatia and Greece.
The website must be out of date! I have both Croatia and Greece charts loaded on my SkyDemon
Does this mean that jepp includes all vfr approach charts in this program?
If so then surely there must be a lower “add-on” price for jeppview users?
Yes and yes.
But again, I personally would not want to trade my VFR terminal chart coverage of entire Europe for a coverage of “Central Europe” only. So I stick with Jeppesen FD /Jeppview VFR for now.
What is a VAC after all? It’s merely a zoomed in version of the 1:500.000 chart in the vicinity of an aerodrome, with a few features like traffic circuits (where published) added. The fact that we used to have separate VFR enroute charts and VFR terminal area charts was only due to the fact that we lived in the paper era, and thus different levels of “zoom” and detail required separate sets of charts. Nowadays, in the “digital age”, it is only too logical to integrate it all into one product, and let the amount of detail displayed be determined by the zoom selected by the user.
I had not even heard of VACs until very recently. In the UK people fly with Pooleys (or similar) airport guides which contain the airport diagram and describe the circuit requirements etc. The UK doesn’t have a history of using VACs, but then the UK also doesn’t have a history of wanting to pay for anything 
I think the main reason people pay for the “Jepp VFR Europe” add-on for Jeppview is to get that basic data for the whole area, because most countries don’t publish such directly usable guides.
This shows how JeppFD zooms in
although the colour scheme (can you find the Alpha taxiway markings A1 A2 A3?) needs to be re-done. No way is this anywhere near as readable as a normal paper plate printed out of Jeppview, and by the time you have zoomed in far enough to read “A1” if asked to taxi there, you can’t see the rest of the airport.
I would bet Jepp spent as much time transferring the airport diagrams from JV into JeppFD-VFR as they spent transferring the VFR maps…
Yes, VACs are mostly a big deal (literally!) in the german speaking countries. That’s because we tend to have very elaborated noise abatement procedures and therefore (more or less) prescribed tracks for traffic circuits. If you don’t want to get into trouble in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, you need to know about these and follow them (like it or not). And, as a consequence, certain people and companies make a lot of money with that information.
However, actually the UK is not so much different. Many smaller airfields do seem to have some sort of unofficial noise abatement procedures. In most cases, one will find an (amateurish) drawing on the airfield’s website, which indicates a proposed track, places to avoid, etc. An example is here. So the difference really only comes down to the fact that in Germany, we do have that information readily available, from a single source and in a uniform format. The British flight guides often only tend to have a very short textual description of the procedures to be followed.
The only real difference is that there doesn’t seem to be such a fierce “circuit obsession” in the UK like in the german speaking countries.
But the above example of Old Buck is actually a good one to show that a Jepp VAC is of little use in these cases, because the precise circuit procedures are not depicted on their charts. That’s because all that Jepp do is “copy” the information from the AIP (and the AIP does not contain these types of information). They obviously can’t page and monitor all unofficial airfield websites continuously. So the only way for visiting pilots to be really in the know is to always check the airfield website as well before setting off (to be honest, when one calls for PPR, they will point pilots to the procedures described on the website), so it actually does all fall into place.
The only real difference is that there doesn’t seem to be such a fierce “circuit obsession” in the UK like in the german speaking countries.
Want a bet?
Given a bit of time I can dig out the ~ 25 page “VFR arrival guide” published for the Sywell event. Some of the stuff in it is totally incredible e.g. the non-radio holding patterns. But, yeah, that won’t be in any VAC either.
