Whooaah-
Our company has been using a program mainframe version of the EDS - System One FPS for about 10 yrs.
It's a sound program, is very keyword intensive. Our own programming dept. created a front-end interface (not GUI) to interact without using an enormous amount of keywords.
It is loaded with a jeppsen navdata tape every 28 days, which updates airways/radio aids, etc.
Building routes is fairly straight forward, and works best with canned company routes. Building random routes is possible, but sometimes strange results occur, requiring some editing. The flt. plans generated are very accurate, even after a 12-hr journey.
In the future, a more GUI-windoz based interface would be nice, showing a graphic of the route/wx/etc on screen. Allowing for drop-down windows displaying alternate minimums for various airports, and distances to the 10-20 closest alternates.
A improved wx alert system, alerting the user when metar obs. go below certain user settings, 2000' cig. & 3 miles vis. etc..
I've searched around for various systems here's some links:
http://www.navtechinc.com/ http://www.skyplan.com/ http://www.zoppel.com/index.htm http://www.globalair.com/planing1.asp http://www.nwaero.com/
I've heard the new Jepp system is fairly advanced, but have yet to see it.
Brgrds,
Marc