When planning a VFR-route we need to have a waypoint every 30 minutes of flight when filing a flight plan.

How do you handle this today? Adding manual waypoints or?

Is this a feature that could be implemented so that you could choose e g a certain amount of flight time or a certain distance between waypoints and that SD automatically creates them along your planned route?

Although Safety Sense leaflets mentions this, looks like its not actually obligatory.

With Mode S, need to talk to ATC over water etc, not sure how necesary it really is. However, I imagine you can just add a waypoint and SD will insert in the Route part of the FPL.

D

Hello PinkLeader, Can I take the opportunity and ask if it is your understanding that Mode S is now obligatory in a flight over water? Look forward to seeing you @ Bgby perhaps July/August.

Very Newbytheway

DurhamTeaseAirport

Hi

My view (not definitive) is that it cannot be required. % of UK fleet with Mode S is still pretty low and some have no xponder at all. If it was obligatory there wd have been much more noise about it -- complaints etc.

Look fwd to seeing you at Bagby.

D

Nothing to do with the water, more with national rules (and different implementations of the European Mode S schedule). So still slightly confusing situation in Europe, you have to check GEN 1.5 in the AIP of each country.
IIRC, large parts of immediate Continental European neighborhood are already mode S mandatory (e.g., Germany, Netherlands), or de facto so (e.g., Belgium where you need it for VFR in Brussels controlled airspace which seems to cover half the country). In UK it's mandatory for some controlled airspace, and you'll need it for IFR in CAS pretty much everywhere. France seems to be still ok with Mode C if VFR.
So fun VFR bimbles in UK/France are probably still ok without txpr/Mode C for a while, but once you do serious touring or go Europe outside France then that war seems pretty much lost. Most friends I know with latter mission profile have switched over the last 2-3 years.

Many thanks for an enlightening account. So long as the UK, France and perhaps Spain are OK, I am delaying the conversion to mode S, until my KT76A goes off. Then it would be compliance time, probably with a Trig 31 direct replacement.

Very Newbytheway

DurhamTeaseAirport