I'm a great SkyDemon enthusiast, and today was to have been the day of my first trip abroad using it - but the weather wasn't suitable. The destination was the entirely predictable LeTouquet, which many others have blogged about. Nonetheless, I got pretty close to filing my first flight plan with SkyDemon and came up with some queries. The main one being that the border crossing waypoint (ALESSO) doesn't appear on the flight plan (or on the Plan view) - we filed this in the route manually when flying this trip with the club last year, and I think the regulations do require it.



1) Probably obvious to most people, but the aircraft ID format is GABCD, no hyphen and no omitting the first letter.



2) The 4 character aircraft type isn't validated against ICAO DOC8634. For my club's PA28, the program accepts PA28 or P28A - the latter being correct.



3) In the "other" field, SkyDemon worked out EET/LFFF0109 EGTT0125 for a total flight time of 1 hour 15. I understand this is saying we expect to cross into French airspace at 1 hour 9 minutes into the flight, but I didn't understand what the EGTT0125 bit meant - I think EGTT refers the London FIR boundary, but the time relates to after the flight should have ended.



4) In the Supplementary Information, the pilots name is shown but by default doesn't include any mobile phone contact number. From reading elsewhere, it's common to add this. Should this be in the format FRED BLOGGS/07123494849 or put separately in the Remarks field?



5) When I flew there last year with the club, the flight plan included ALESSO as the defined crossing point into France. Reading a few websites, it seems the French regulations do require crossing to be at a defined location, but ALESSO isn't shown on Skydemon (or in the flight plan). How do you add it into the route and flight plan?




--- CPL/IR/FI based in South of England

Where did you find this Alesso waypoint?

ALESO is a few miles north west of Le2K

Ah, the misspelling threw me. ALESO is of course present in SkyDemon charts, though airways reporting points are hidden by default so you may need to turn them on. If you route by it, it should appear in your flightplan.

You shouldn't get EGTT mentioned in a flightplan that goes from England to France. If you get this coming up, would you like to share the route file on here so we can take a look?

See attachment file (suffix .xml) with my flightplan.



I've had a play around with this and found a couple of strange behaviours. The problem with the extra routing seems to occur if you reverse the flight twice (using the reverse button), so that you are back to your original outbound flight. It doesn't seem to forget the inbound international crossing.



I also found that when reloading/opening the saved flight plan, it had "forgotten" where the waypoints were by name and I had to manually move away and back each one in turn. They had changed into Lat/Long positions rather than named points (including the departure airfield). Moving off and on again fixed that.



A few other niceties/suggestions...



If you change some of the supplementary fields in the flight plan and then press cancel rather than submit, these changes are lost. It would be nice either to have an extra "Save for Later" button (ie so you can be pre-prepared and then just file the plan when you've decided to go and with the latest timings calculated from current weather/wind conditions). A "preview" button would also be a confidence booster and could also be used for those who prefer/need to file using the standard form instead.



I'm still of the understanding that international flightplans do need to have a waypoint for the border crossing. Maybe this isn't what happens in practice, but a helpful prompt or even a rigorous check for this might be appropriate. I did read it in the French regulations somewhere, but didn't bookmark the spot.



But compared to using the AFPEx system, this does seem to be extremely straightforward and I look forward to using it "in anger" in the next few weeks.



Thanks


--- CPL/IR/FI based in South of England

This is a bug triggered by the fact that your route specifies an alternate back in the London FIR. That's why it's generating the extra EET entry. We've fixed the bug ready for the next release and thank you very much for bringing it to our attention.

Tim



Thanks for the rapid debug and fix - your company puts many software businesses to shame

Great service



DavidC

--- CPL/IR/FI based in South of England