By ckurz7000 - 4/9/2014 8:08:06 PM
I just returned from a 2 week flying vacation in the US which took me on a roundtrip from Baltimore down to Florida and back again. I took my iPad 3 on which I had SD as well as Forefligt installed. Mainly I would like to share my personal experiences and then add some of thoughts on how SD and Foreflight compare.
Although SD is a great flight planning and navigation program, there are some areas which deserve attention and could stand some improvement. In general, though, SD does a lot more things right than wrong. One tends to notice the critique points much more than the stuff SD does so well which is the reason you might get a stilted view of the general performance. This just as a short preamble before I get to it.
1) SD shows the long names of airports on the map which is (a) cluttering the map and (b) not helpful in ATC communication. ATC doesn't know about "Franklin Municipial - John Beverly Rose Airport". All they understand is the much shorter "KFTN". And there are numerous examples where it is even impossible to learn the ICAO ID of smaller airports from SD. My suggestion is to make it a user option to show either IDs or long names on the map. Certainly, ID AND long name should be listed in the information page of each airport.
2) Looking up airport frequencies is, for all intents and purposes, impossible for larger airports with more than one frequency. Take, e.g., Norfolk (KORF). SD lists 12 frequencies for this airport, all of which are labelled as "ON ADMIN". No mention of which one is TOWER, APPROACH, DEPARTURE, GROUND, UNICOM, etc, etc. You need a current Airport Facility Directory to find which frequency is which but that kind of defeats the purpose. In other countries, such as Austria, SD does a good job of naming the frequencies, though. This seems to be a US specific problem. My suggestion, obviously, is to go over the frequencies for US airports and give them their proper names.
3) I found the Pilot Log falling short of its potential in two areas: (a) no running totals for fuel, distance and time and (b) the frequency section is very incomplete. Let me discuss those two points separately:
On flight planning I usually want to maximize the distance I can go on a certain amount of fuel available on take-off. So I keep adding waypoints until either the fuel drops below my personal minimum reserve, I reach a range or endurance limit. Generally, I know that I want a short stop every 3 hours. And then I would like to know how far I've progressed at each waypoint along my route. Currently, you have to add up the fuel consumed, ETEs and distances for each leg in your head. Not good! My suggestion is to make available columns giving the running total of fuel, distance and time in the Pilot Log. This is very important information at the planning stage and also nice to know during the trip.
The frequency section of the Pilot Log is very incomplete. I may plan a flight 500 feet underneath the shelf of some Class C airspace but when flying, I might find myself in a situation in which I need to contact the controlling agency (either just for flight following without actually entering their airspace or, maybe, because I decided to fly a bit higher and go through the airspace). Currently I have no way of finding out the proper frequency to call up.
My suggestion would be this: When getting information on any kind of airspace (by long tapping on a point on the map), also include the controlling ATC frequency of that airspace in the pop up window. Make a separate Frequency Log page which has a detailed set of frequencies I might need on my flight in chronological order. You can still keep the terse (and often incomplete) frequency section on the Pilot Log page but make a separate Frequency Log page available that is complete and really does list all frequencies you may want to use on the flight. It would be helpful to allow the user to manually delete entries that s/he is sure won't be needed. But that's an option.
On my flight I simply had to download Foreflight because of these shortcomings of SD (some of which are US specific, I realize). For this reason I got a good side-by-side comparison of the two programs, often times switching back and forth between them while flying. As you might already surmise, the ideal solution at the moment is to use them both simultaneously. Flight planning is easier and quicker in Foreflight. It does give me running totals as well as per leg values. It knows all the frequencies, which are on the chart itself as well as available onthe airport info page.
Because Foreflight is geared specifically to the US market, it incorporates many things which would simply be impossible for a program that also caters to other parts of the world. Examples are live NEXRAD radar, live satellite (vis and ir) images overlaid over the map, forecast maps from the National Weather Service, TFRs, approach plates and procedures, etc.
What Foreflight doesn't have is a vertical cross section view or flight logs. It also is only geared toward the US and Canadian markets and would fail abysmally in Europe.
SD shines with its intuitive user interface and uncluttered maps. However, Foreflight isn't far behind in this respect.
There are other differences, of course, but these are the ones I deemed most salient. I hope SD takes these suggestions seriously and improves an already great piece of software even further.
Greetings, -- Chris.
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By Tim Dawson - 5/25/2017 1:51:47 AM
Do not expect SkyDemon to be full-featured in the US. There are much better products for the US market than SkyDemon, Foreflight being the best (in our opinion).
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