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What to choose - SkyDemon, Jeppesen FD, JeppView, Garmin Pilot

There simply isn’t a great solution for Europe.

The IFR community is very small – of the order of 1% of the VFR community – so you can see where the money is, for tablet apps. And Jepp own the commercial and certified-avionics sphere. The national CAAs deliberately do not publish the airspace etc data in a directly machine-readable form so everybody making these “apps” has a lot of work to do each month; probably Foreflight didn’t realise this at first.

And the accuracy of VFR products is only as good as how many people in a given country will report errors. In some countries, the reporting rate (in English, back to SD in the UK) is going to be very low.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

CharlieO wrote:

I can see that Autorouter works well esp. for folks from the UK, also ForeFlight is probably now much better if you are in the UK. However, I am flying mostly in Central Europe (Czechia, Austria, Slovakia, Germany, Slovenia, Croatia) and there, the VFR functionality of SkyDemon seems to be superior. At the same time, I am working on my IFR, too – and I was also thinking of a single tool for both VFR and IFR. Am I really out of luck, especially now that JeppFD is being discontinued?

@CharlieO, ForeFlight might be good for some IFR flyers in the UK, but quite a few use SD anyway – for flights at FL100 and below you pretty much fly OCAS and navigate all around CASes, and for that SD is the best.

EGTR

I can see that Autorouter works well esp. for folks from the UK, also ForeFlight is probably now much better if you are in the UK. However, I am flying mostly in Central Europe (Czechia, Austria, Slovakia, Germany, Slovenia, Croatia) and there, the VFR functionality of SkyDemon seems to be superior. At the same time, I am working on my IFR, too – and I was also thinking of a single tool for both VFR and IFR. Am I really out of luck, especially now that JeppFD is being discontinued?

Czech Republic

If you are flying regularly IFR on random routes (eg corporate pilot) Rocket Route tends to be used a lot.

Oxford (EGTK), United Kingdom

Thanks, answers my question perfectly. I have been using autorouter and with its Telegram integration for delays or updated briefing packs I can’t fault it. It handles the long routes well, and sure there is the occasional manual intervention needed but otherwise an excellent tool for free.

But loads of people have told me I should get one of the apps as they are much quicker for IFR replanting, but I was struggling to see the benefit of either.

I use JeppFD for the charts and I guess ForeFlight might be a bit slicker for loading those.

DA62
EGTK, United Kingdom

slowbird wrote:

I use SkyDemon for VFR, but still undecided between Foreflight or Garmin pilot for IFR. Does anyone have any experience of both, particularly the best one for filing Eurocontrol IFR plans?

Allegedly, both of them aren’t the best, comparing to Autorouter, that also supports all the Telegram integration features etc…

EGTR

I use SkyDemon for VFR, but still undecided between Foreflight or Garmin pilot for IFR. Does anyone have any experience of both, particularly the best one for filing Eurocontrol IFR plans?

DA62
EGTK, United Kingdom

I use Foreflight for IFR, incl. a subscription to Jeppesen – by far the easiest way to get Jeppesen. Also displays the Golze weather data btw.

I presume you use Foreflight Plus? By including Jeppesen for the whole of Western Europe (Jeppesen annoyingly ‘split’ Europe into two subscription packets): What is your Annual cost for Foreflight?

Rochester, UK, United Kingdom

I started using Air Navigation Pro in the early days of my PPL training. Switched to SkyDemon very quickly. The whole planning functionality including the possibility to pack everything and have a nice operational flightplan available is just amazing. For VFR everything is in there in my opinion!

For IFR (I just started IR training) I am now using ForeFlight. I still need to get used to it for using it for VFR flights as well (I probably don’t want to use two different software tools..). FF was perfect when I was in the US but a lot of features there are still not yet available in the european version, maybe this will come?! (e.g. weather charts and forecast models, FBO management etc.)

All in all I support the two dogmas: VFR = SkyDemon, IFR = ForeFlight

LOWG, Austria

mmgreve wrote:

I use Foreflight for IFR, incl. a subscription to Jeppesen – by far the easiest way to get Jeppesen. Also displays the Golze weather data btw.

I presume you use Foreflight ‘Pro Plus’?
What therefore with Jeppesen is your total annual cost?

Rochester, UK, United Kingdom
101 Posts
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