Dear Tim,
learning from your November newsletter, that SD is considered as “Feature-Complete” gives me a strange feeling. For us, living close to the mountains, the absence of a proper T/C and T/D management possibility is a clear deficit! As you can see from the attached fpl, there’s no way to land in a valley w/out scratching the concrete, as SD is today. Of course, it’s possible to set the ACFT RoC/RoD to 1200 ft/min, but that would mean that all regular approaches or level changes would be done in a skydiver way as well, unless you change the ACFT profile for every flight. I would appreciate the following new feature:
In the ACFT profile there should be a Level Chg RoC/RoD and a max reasonable RoC/RoD field. In the pilot log, 2 waypoints should be created T/C and T/D using at a 1st glance the LVL change RoC/RoD, but these waypoints should be movable, with SD calculating the necessary RoC/RoD for TO and landing and cross checking it against the max values. May be these waypoints could be omitted for flight plans not exceeding 3500 ft altitude, for decluttering short/low hops. IMHO, a conscious T/C and T/D management belongs to every careful flight planning.
If you want to make it “Very Comfortable” the pseudo-ILS could take these calculated R/D values into account and they could be printed in the Pilot Log as well.