Ive just bought a new IPad 3 and have downloaded the SD App.
After playing with the unit for some time now, I'm coming to the same opinion of just about everyone I've met who also has the SD/IPad combination, and that is what a fantastic piece of software this is for the IPad.
I can't wait to jump into the Arrow and try it out in the air!

However, there is one small niggle I can't seem to figure out and that is to do with the Aerodrome Charts that are accessed via the PLATES tab.
Does anyone know how to set it up so that the Charts always appear upright for reading instead of 90 degrees rotated as some of them are?

Well done Tim on keeping the momentum of improvement continually in the right direction.
It really is the very best airborne navigation software around today!

Many thank
BTF

I wondered that too :-)

My thought: 'electronically' the page is being displayed correctly! If you look at those plates that rotate through 90, you'll see that the top heading on the plate is orientated correctly (i.e., portrait), but that the diagram printed in landscape. So, the iPad is displaying it as it thinks it should be for reading! I am no computer wiz, but I'm hoping that those very clever people at SD can introduce a simple quick fix to this issue.

There is no simple quick fix for this issue. We either develop our own PDF viewer (expensive) which allows for rotating the pages, or suggest to the plate publishers that they publish landscape plates in landscape orientation, which makes much more sense.

If anybody finds the delivery of landscape plates in portrait format undesirable, please contact the plate publisher and let them know.

Tim, I note you say that there is no quick fix, but could your software experts add a button to 'rotate through 90' in the header for the plate pages, as found in some picture programmes?

That would be a quick fix. We cannot add such a button to the default PDF viewer in the iPad, which we are currently using.

Please contact ais.supervisor@nats.co.uk if you find the delivery of a landscape plate inside a portrait PDF to be a problem.

My own quick fix is to use the the iPads rotation "lock" button when displaying the chart and rotating the iPad to suit!

I agree that is a quick fix, and works easily 'on the ground', but with my iPad joke mounted in the air, not sure it's a practical solution when airborne!

I'm in debate with AIS, and certainly the more of us that ask them to produce a plate version suitable for electronic display, the more chance we have of solving this minor issue. ais.supervisor@nats.co.uk

Another solution would be to allow upload of pdf documents manually. This would solve two things:

1) I could obtain the public chart myself, rotate it in Acrobat and Upload the rotated chart to SD.

2) It would allow me to upload custom charts or charts that aren't available yet such as VFR approach charts.

What do others think?

-- Chris.