Dear Skydemon Team,

I am flying in the German HEMS sector and have found Skydemon to be an excellent tool for my operation.
Though some additions to the current state of the software would make my life even easier:

-‌‌As a HEMS Pilot I also rely on the NOTAMS for Heliports, like temporary closed Hospital Helipads. This information is currently provided to me via the app VFRiNOTAM‌‌. This essential information doesnt show up within Skydemon. Any chance you can also feed this information into the Skydemon system?

-I have‌‌ manually imported the HEMS Heliport Database of Germany into Skydeamon as User Waypoints which is very handy. I would be very helpful if the "Direct To" suggestions would also list the User waypoints and also the Heliports within your own database. At the moment this tab only suggests airports. As a HEMS pilot I rarely ever fly to a place which has a runway. I always have to hit FIND and then search for my destination.

-HEMS is very time critical, so a button on the main map/flight planning screen with direct adress entry would be very helpful.

-W‌‌hen flying towards our destination/accident site, we start to discuss which hospital would be suitable for the reported sickness/injury. A button showing the closest user waypoints / heliports at my destination would be a valuable tool in that very moment.

-Since a lot of the HEMS aircraft are not equiped with TCAS a partnership with Flightradar or preferrably GliderTracker would be of huge help for traffic avoidance. I guess this is the least likely feature to get as it involves another party and their willingness, but I think it should be brought up anyway. For now I rely on the limited features of Pilotaware.

-The weather/rain tab is useful for planing, but a view similar to lightningmaps.org that shows lightning and when it happened‌‌, would be even more useful. Its hard to distinguish rain from actual thunderstorm at the moment, since the colors also dont match the colors of our weather radar and in the past Ive seen actual lightning come our of areas that only showed a light blue on the map.

‌‌-Fuel planning is currently not taking into account that we always land were we go and never go "via" a waypoint to our destination. HEMS is basically always a tringle from the base to the accident to the hospital and back to base. So we have three startups/shutdowns. This is not really selectable within Skydemon at the moment.

-For fast performance calculations it would be handy to have a button to directly enter the current fuel. Since our weight of the machine, crew and equipment doesnt change during the day, we would have a direct output of useful load for the current situation.

-We also fly‌ secondary HEMS night missions (long distances all across Germany) and heavily rely on information regarding the ED-R150 military low flying areas. I can see this has been discussed in the past, but I would also like to emphasize that bringing this data into the software is very important for us HEMS pilots flying at night through German airspace.
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I guess most of the suggestions fit our mission environment in HEMS, but do clutter the screen for other users. In that case a HEMS or Helicopter selection would be a way to adapt the software for rotary usage and keep the status quo for our colleagues in fixed wing.

My 2 cents after happily using Skydemon for one year now.

Cheers,
eivissa‌‌‌‌‌
‌‌

Thanks Eivissa, that is some very detailed feedback. We cannot possibly act on all of it at once, and maybe not all of it at all, but we certainly appreciate it.

T‌‌he most urgent item for me is that we appear not to have all the HEMS heliports in our database, according to you. I would like to get this rectified with DFS who are supposed to provide this data to us, I believe. Could you give us some examples that I can take to them? Once we've got the heliports in our database we can look at the Direct To functionality to make sure that works in the best way for you.

W‌‌e should also have all NOTAM, there is no reason why we would be missing any. So I'd like an example of a NOTAM which is currently in force (and will be for the next few days) so I can try to find out why you're not seeing it.

E‌DR150 is a conversation occurring offline with DFS, and not just us. There is no legal definition for the area, at all, which is the root of the problem. It's not something we have any influence over, as you can imagine, but we have certainly brought it to the attention of the right people and are monitoring it.

L‌‌‌et's get these things sorted and take it from there.

We have received confirmation from DFS that they do not maintain data on those heliports and I don't think they have any intention of doing so. Would you mind contacting me directly to discuss this further? You can use the contact form on our website to get hold of me, just mention it's about the HEMS discussion in the forum.