Hi, I may have missed earlier posts, so apologies if this is already covered elsewhere, but a couple of comments....

When I'm planning a flight, I find there's often not enough features displayed on the map to use as waypoints .  I know I can search for towns, but to plan a route in my neck of the woods (NE scotland), I have to use my CAA maps to identify features, that I then have to search for before I can identify them in skyangel.  I'd much rather be able to see any significant towns or villages on the software directly.  There are very few towns actually displayed, and those are not named nor for the most part can they be used directly as waypoints without adding a user waypoint (at least as far as I can see).  Even most of the larger towns are not displayed (huntly and keith for example).  Is it therefore possible to make these smaller towns and villages appear as zoom level is increased and for these to be usable directly as waypoints?  It would make planning much easier to just pick a point off the digital map than have to identify one first elsewhere.  Same comment for lakes/lochs (names would be useful too - perhaps only when a place is hovered over?)

Search function also returns some odd results or no results for towns that are significant as waypoints.  Ballater, reasonable sized town, gives a little village (i presume) called ballaterich or similar nearby.  Rhynie, small town or village west of Insch VRP is posted in a different place to that shown on the CAA maps.  Huntly - returns somewhere in England with a different (similar) name.  Keith returns dalkeith.  I know there are thousands and thousands of towns and villages to put in the database, but until they're there, the basic flight-planning is compromised.

I like the software, love the Notam plotting and weather features, but planning in sparsely populated areas would be made much easier if the few identifiable landmarks were posted as  matter of course and in exactly the right places. 

Anyone else have similar issues?

Steve

May I also add that the towns and villages in the NE of Scotland are slightly misaligned from their real positions.



This was first detected on a recent flight when my post flight track imported from SkyAngel Plan, showed that I actually turned some miles short of the SkyAngel position for a village, even though I actually turned on top of the village. On looking at today's release (v0.9.10) I see that as I zoom in the software does indeed now act as you described, with more towns and villages being displayed as the zoom level increases. However, this new functionality also now makes it easy to see the misaligned centres of population. If you zoom in to the area of the Moray firth coast in the vicinity of Elgin and Buckie you can clearly see that all the coastal towns and villages (Lossiemouth, Buckie, Findochty, Portknockie, Cullen, etc) are all placed some 1 to 2 nm south (i.e. inland) of their actual positions. The position of the marker for Elgin is some 0.6 nm W of where it should be, Keith is 1.5 nm SE of where it should be, etc. Although some of these errors in position are very minor, some errors have been as much as 2 nm.



Apart from these minor errors in positional data the software is superb and I am a big fan. I often use Plan to get a idea of timings for a particular route - if the route will take longer than the time I have available then I can very quickly and easily adjust it before carrying out full flight planning. I will upload the final route to InFlight to act as a backup to standard VFR nav techniques (it's very handy to check if you are indeed where you think you area and for quick and easy position reports and ETA checks).



Great work Tim - keep it up!