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.

Bump.

Thank you for this post. I will be going to Florida this summer for some hour building. After having got used to SD's interface I'd rather not switch over to something like Foreflight which is aimed at the US market. The first issue you have addressed has definitely been fixed since the time you wrote this post.
1. It does show the airport identifier i.e. X59, KVRB.
2. It seems that for most airports it does say the frequency name i.e. UNICOM, CTAF, ATIS. But I also found some airports where it says "ON ADMIN for several frequencies"

Does anyone else have experience using SD in the US? Do I need to be aware of anything else? I will still be buying the sectionals and the airport and facility directory. 

Last year I flew in the USA using SD without a problem, including a flight from Los Angeles to Tucson. I always printed out the PLOG and chart from SD, and I carried the Sectional but never had to use it. I also printed out the airport description from AirNav to supplement the info in SD, but I didn't bother with buying an AFD and I had no trouble even when diverting to an unplanned airfield.

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.

This is already possible. In the map layers menu select Airfields then Identifiers and you can have name, ident or both as you wish.

I also did fly in US using SD and found the frequencies inaccurate. But much bigger problem was that it did not load restricted areas properly. There was a forest fire with restricted airspace and SD did not show anything... (Colorado 2016). I asked the pilots and basically no-one uses SD there...

I started this thread in April 2017, more than 3 years ago. And I am happy to say that SD has been listening to users' requests, including some of mine, and evolved the program a lot since then. One has to realize that publishing a flight planning/navigation app for the US market is a lot easier than doing the same in Europe. SD has made the decision to cater to European VFR pilots and therefore doesn't pay a whole lot of attention to what would be US specific solutions. That's fine and I am very happy with that decision‌.

If you want to fly in the US, you can get a free 30 day subs‌‌cription of Foreflight which is a perfect fit for the US market. SD will work OK there but there are intricacies -- like, e.g., TFRs and weather information -- which are better handled by Foreflight.

Greetings, -- Chris.‌‌