I've just returned from a flight to the south of France, during which SD on the iPad has been an absolutely fantastic tool, not least from the way it manages to update the METARs via 3g at FL95 - extraordinary. And the iPad can play music through the Lightspeeds to while away the hours.

However, I'm puzzled by the use of local times within Sky Demon. This makes flightplanning confusing. For example filing a flight plan while in the UK but for the second leg of a journey starting in France means you have to put the departure time as it would be in the UK - which is neither UTC nor local time - in order to get the right zulu time on your flight plan (and visa versa). Then when you look at the logs, it's not clear exactly which time is being displayed - is it zulu, local on departure or local on arrival? Surely it would be easier to simply stick with standard aviation zulu time throughout? Or at least offer the option?

We do stick with UTC throughout, unless you've changed the option (in the change units screen) to use local time, in which case it'll be local time as defined on your iPad.

How puzzling. Under setup/change units/time I'm definitely set to UTC, yet when I go to Takeoff Time, under the rotating bezel it says 'all dates and times are local'

Ah, that is the one exception. My apologies for forgetting about that. The spinner element is a standard one from Apple and it does always deal in local time (your iPad's timezone).

Ok, so for the moment at least, when filing a flight plan with the start point in another time zone (like the second leg of a European flight) one would need to enter UTC + the local time offset (of the iPad), irrespective of the real local time at point of departure? I think that's how I finally got the right times into the flight plan for a recent flight

You'd need to enter the time in local time as defined on the iPad itself, yes. When you get to the flightplan window itself you should be able to see the UTC time entered on the plan.

Thanks. I do find this rather clunky, and I'm puzzled by the use of am and pm times in the setting of takeoff times too. This sort of confusing thing has never been used in Europe, and fortunately seems to be vanishing as a proper time specifier in the UK too, especially for schedules like flights, trains etc. Presumably this is something to do with iPad and its US origins (where they are hanging tenaciously on to the units of measure brought over by the Pilgrim Fathers) rather than the otherwise admirably clear FD software.

You'll only see am/pm markers if your iPad is set to US settings. No iPad set with European settings should display those markers.