Hi Tim
The changes in the software are definitely a great improvement and I have carried out a “practice” flight plan from my home base of Conington, to Waterford in Ireland, going via Gloucester and Haverford West directly in a Piper Arrow III. As I am working out of the country at the moment I won’t be able to test this out for real just at the moment.
I am running these tests on an LG laptop running Win XP Professional. If others are not experiencing what I am, then I would be grateful if they would let me know.
My observations on the present release are as follows:-
It would be good to see a standard Icon on the desktop after installation.
As far as I can see, there is only one entry for the wind, but if one wants to fly a route using different altitudes; for instance, if one wanted to plan extra altitude for water crossing, the winds aloft could be quite different from the 2000ft wind. Could the wind box be made into a drop down with spaces for other altitudes and then this is reflected in the route plan?
The weight balance box is excellent, but I found a few issues.
In Aircraft Manager/Weight balance there are the variables, fuel, pilot etc and a + and – box adjacent. I take it that this is for modifying the lever arms. When trying to increase the value I got an error message
“Unhandled exception has occurred” etc and ending in (
Object reference not set to an instance of an object). If I now press the Continue button the error message disappears, but if I hit the Quit button the entire SkyAngel program closes down.
Conversely, if I want to decrease the values by pressing the (-) button, the whole line, (name and lever arm) disappears.
May I suggest changing
“Front Passenger” to
“Copilot” as this makes a clear differentiation between front and back seats?
The Polygon is the wrong shape in the sidebar because the weight axis of its graph does not tally with the figures input to the Aircraft Properties weight/balance envelope. However, the resulting Weight/C.G is correctly indicated as a figure within the graph.
After opening a saved flight plan, the aircraft properties weight balance envelope parameters that have been personalised for a particular aircraft, return to the default value. This means that the envelope parameters have to be re-edited every time the flight plan is opened which for a particular aircraft is unnecessary.
Lastly, when double clicking on airfields to view information, I found that some runways are represented in a way that make easy viewing, but others are so big that scrolling is necessary to view them. Is it possible to standardise the sizes?
Notwithstanding any of the above, I think this package is absolutely excellent and I can’t wait to get home and try the “In Flight” part on my recently purchased Win CE loaded 5" Touch screen GPS that I bought on Ebay
Best of luck
BTF