Initial Impressions

Some nice features, lots of rough edges. That’s to be expected for a beta release. Some of my initial observations below may have been covered in earlier posts.

I like the downloading of plates etc. Did not see a way to get a PDF of the nav log. Ideally, I’d like to download and print one file and take it to the plane. Some of the information could be filtered to make it less verbose, e.g., the TO minima are included for all airports in the state or the chart booklet.

I like the high-lighted minimums for fuel usage, cost, and time. Presumably this is computed based on the forecast winds. To be truly optimal I would expect occasional changes in altitude along some routes. That would be a feature not in any of the flight planners I’ve worked with.

The routing is rather strange at times (that’s been discussed in an earlier post). It would be nice to be able to plot the proposed routes on a chart - maybe I have not found the right button yet to do this.

The routing seems to be done without regard to terrain(MEAs) and air space. That’s true for airway and off-airway routing. For instance, KPAO to KDVT offers PMD V137 PSP at 7000 ft (MEA 13500). Planning KPAO to KABQ below FL120, offers the direct route through 14,000+ft mountains and through restricted areas (always in use at all altitudes). The distance and cost of the direct route is good to know for comparison but what I’d really like is an RNAV route that is as short as possible AND flyable with my equipment.

Direct routes have no intermediate waypoints. These would be useful for checking progress along the way. I know there are no charted waypoints on a direct route but it is possible to use crossing lines of latitude or longitude.

Talking about the nav log, cumulative distances may be useful.

Like the flight planner, my experiment with it is a work in progress.

Thanks for your feedback and sorry we didn’t reply to you sooner. We’re considering everything you’ve mentioned, particularly the MEAs.