Jeppesen Internet Flight Planner (rant)

[LH2]

Do I understand correctly that the silly thing only works on Windows machines? What is the point of having an internet-based app that only works on one architecture? Can people really be so stinking stupid when it comes to technology?

Any suggestions for a proper internet-based flight planning service?

And I suppose that brings up one incidental question. Anybody know of any programmatically accessible online nav database (airports, navaids, waypoints, airspace), be it free or subscription based?

[LH2]

and even worse - it does not yet support Windows Vista

That sounds like a plus
(I'm assuming Vista is the 32-bit MS-DOS reincarnation du jour?)

What is really needed is some clever cookie who will do a Google Earth based flight planning application. Technically, that's not really viable today, but once full access to the DOM from within a document is possible, e.g. via ECMAScript (and I'm betting that will happen), I can see GEarth becoming a popular platform for all kinds of spatial applications.

[LH2]

ooh bitchy bitchy

Having a bad day, that's all

Should have been flying, if I wasn't in a country where people couldn't organise a pissup in a sangria factory

[IO540]

JIFP is Flitestar; the basic difference is that FS gets its data off a CD or HD, whereas JIFP gets it off Jepp's server over the internet. JIFP cannot be described as a "thin client".

The only way to make a platform independent version of JIFP would be in Java. So.... while we are slagging off Vista (justifiably IMHO) why not slag off Java too. It's a load of cr*p. Just about every java app I have ever used has suffered from odd behaviour, crashes, loads of bugs, weird java version dependencies (often works with an old version only) etc. I am not saying a decent java app cannot be written but they are rare, perhaps because java programming attracts the least experienced programmers.

The Eurocontrol Skyview project has some potential. This is a Java viewer onto a database which they run in-house. It's of little practical use as far as far I can tell (to pilots) and it's a while since I last looked at it, but there might be an airport database. They are difficult about giving access (they want to keep flight simmers out) so you may have to tell a few lies to get the login/pwd. And they kill your account after a few months of non-use.

AFAIK there is no free flight planning service for Europe that includes any usable charts.

For VFR, get Navbox.

For IFR (airways), you need Flitestar.

[sternone]

Do I understand correctly that the silly thing only works on Windows machines?

If you run on macs (like i do) install parallels http://www.parallels.com/ and run it from there, if you are on linux (like i was) then use crossover to run IE (you can also do that on the mac) http://www.codeweavers.com/

Windows sucks

Cheers,

[drauk]

If the origin of the complaint about JIFP is that you want to run it on a Mac, it does run very well on Parallels, as do all the Jepp programs (as well as they do on a PC that is). This includes updating a database using a Skybound card reader.

If you want to run it on Linux I expect it'll run under Wine or similar.

I don't agree that IFR means you *must* use FliteStar - JIFP does the job for a lot less money.

http://fly.dsc.net is Java and works perfectly in a cross platform way (developed on Mac, deployed without recompilation on Linux). Modern Java desktop applications are MUCH better than they used to be. The majority of Java developers are using Java IDE tools to write them these days.

[Edit: crossed with someone else recommending Parallels]

[IO540]

Yes, I meant to say Flitestar or JIFP for IFR. Both do the same job really. The choice will come down to the sort of internet access one has while travelling.

I didn't know DSC was written in Java. That site works perfectly. My experience of Java is from a number of apps and websites and has been more bad than good. My favourite IFR weather site, Meteoblue, has just been ported to Java and comprehensively trashed. It does, sort of, work, if you press Refresh enough times. The Eurocontrol approach plate site is one of the worst examples of Java.

[LH2]

AFAIK there is no free flight planning service for Europe that includes any usable charts

It doesn't have to be free, I am not that cheap (I think ). All I am expecting is that if something is labelled an "internet application", it will run on any modern, standards-compliant browser, regardless of what specific flavour of Linux I happen to be using at the time

Bit harsh to say that about Java - but everybody has an opinion.

Me too. It seems to have tried to be the solution to too many problems. Also much hype about its alleged "cross-platformness", however, lacking a comprehensively implemented standard (think C, or even ECMAScript) puts it at a serious disadvantage in this area. Plus, Real Programmers would never use anything with automatic garbage collection, would they? After all, there is nothing like a good old segfault (preferrably with core dumps littering the path.) to alert the user that something might not be entirely right with their software.
Ok, so I might have drifted a wee bit off topic there

http://fly.dsc.net is Java and works perfectly in a cross platform way

Yep, but it's server-side Java rather than client-side, so we're taking an inmense amount of variability out of the equation.
In any case, you know what would be great? Drauk's site with Dave Morrisey's design and especially the KML output options, fed from the Skyview project databases IO504 mentions above. Now that would be the canine's reproductive apparatus. In the meanwhile, Drauk's website is being great help during the strategic planning stage

[IO540]

I have often wondered how many people are hooking up into the Skyview database, especially after DAFIF was removed from public access last summer. One can also get reports from the EAD site, e.g. lists of navaids and their properties.

Skyview has great potential, especially with the terrain charts which they show in some of their demo pics. I know a few people tried to make these work but failed - and so did I. One could use it to print off some nice VFR enroute charts. However, the interface needs a clean-up - the display output doesn't print properly and there is no way to print anything other than what appears on the screen.

There is also no "right-click to see Properties" on the airports. Maybe Eurocontrol don't have that data in their public database.

Server-side Java ... now I understand!

[englishal]

Shame the AOPA flight planner does't work in Europe. I think the idea of an online FP is excellent - I used to use Aeroplanner in the USA, and it also included much data for the rest of the world (GPS datachunks / ONC maps etc..) but that has been withdrawn now so it is not much use.

Any company that comes out with something aong the lines of Aeroplanner.com for European use will get my money as frankly it is streets ahead of anything available here.

[Tim Dawson]

There's nothing wrong with making an "internet application" Windows only. In case you hadn't noticed, the vast majority of people browsing the internet are using Windows.

Simple business sense dictates that you can therefore spend a minimum amount of money to reach most customers. If you want to develop something cross-platform you'll need to spent more money and probably have to do it on Java (clientside) which will mean your mapping will probably be sluggish. Java isn't known for its snappiness.

[drauk]

Drauk's site with Dave Morrisey's design and especially the KML output options, fed from the Skyview project databases IO504 mentions above. Now that would be the canine's reproductive apparatus. In the meanwhile, Drauk's website is being great help during the strategic planning stage

The "lack of design" on http://fly.dc.net is purposeful; it works on a Blackberry or a PDA or anything that can run the Opera browser which these days is most things. It uses no graphics for the most part so as to avoid data downloading charges when roaming. Lastly, I can't be bothered with putting the effort in to it having "a design"!

The trouble with the Skyview database is that it only covers licensed airfields.

I used to use Aeroplanner in the US and it was very good. The market here is just too small to warrant it. The reason fly.dsc.net is free is solely because I can't be arsed to charge 200 people 50 quid a year for something (with all that charging them for it also implies).

Server side Java is *incredibly* cross platform.

Desktop Java applications can be fantastic - the best in their class. Some (most) are dreadful.

LH2, so you really hate automatic garbage collection eh? Hmmm. Then you should stick with Jepp products which are SO well written and SO great to use and NEVER crash. Not like fly.dsc.net or PPRuNe itself which don't work at all and crash all the time. Oh, hold on a minute...

[Tim Dawson]

You gotta love people who hate automatic garbage collection. It's great to let them carry on writing software inherantly more error-prone while the rest of us use modern, productive languages and therefore often make more money doing so. Gives one a tremendous sense of job security.

[sternone]

Use Ruby on Rails !! (with Garbage Collection!)


Ruby has been introduced with a very strong and effective feature called as Garbage Collection. Although this feature is a part of many programming languages but Ruby has made it more efficient as it has the automatic mechanism of finding out and cleaning the garbage and thus freeing the memory automatically. This results in the reduction of the memory leakages. It effectively cleans up the dynamically allocated storage space in the memory and avoids a lot of application crashes.We do not have to release the memory allocation space in Ruby as we have to do in other object oriented programming language like C++. Thus the garbage collector of Ruby does the task of freeing the unused objects automatically, making Ruby more successful in programming languages.



In today’s programming era, when the programmers are looking for an environment which will provide them a very productive framework and also the concepts of Object Oriented programming, the best choice is Ruby on Rails. And so Ruby on Rails is the complete package full of features for a wonderful programming experience.

[IO540]

This is really digressing.... I've been programming since the earliest days of micros. Everything was in assembler. Then went to C. Never used dynamic storage allocation (malloc etc). Never even used C pointers. Static storage only. That way, everything is rock solid. Most of my code never had a bug (that was discovered by a customer). Takes 3x longer to write but if it's your own business... Makes me wonder how far we have come (not very).

Back to the subject, it's obviously very difficult to come up with a business model which works for GA in Europe. If there was no competition, then an online flight planning tool which contained the whole database and did flight planning, plog generation, notam display/deconfliction, weather, etc, could attract say 50k subscribers. That is the absolute upper end looking at the size of European GA. In practice, a large % of pilots don't do any flight planning (because they only bimble locally, or just can't be bothered), and a lot of the old-timers plan dead-reckoned flights by drawing lines on the chart, so we are down to say 10k. Then, take out those who already pay the £60/year or so for Navbox; I don't know their customer base but I guess we are down to 5k. If you already use Navbox then a new product has to offer substantially more, and it can't really without getting seriously into chart copyright issues. Then (in the UK, which is probably Europe's biggest GA scene) you have a few k subscribing to Avbrief (according to pilot forum statements from them) and this further erodes the value of this hypothetical product. So the most one would attract is perhaps a few k users, and for how much work? One full time job reading the national AIPs (which are not machine readable) and looking for changes, grabbing reports from the Eurocontrol database and parsing them for navaid changes, setting up a weather feed from somewhere (which in Europe always costs money, unless you are happy with just basic data, which can be obtained from the USA etc), and for all that you will be delivering what Navbox (plus a bunch of free sites for weather) delivers already.

To go beyond that you need to get charts and they are super pricey - a few hundred quid on the price per user straight away. And that would still be a mostly VFR-only product.

Jepp hang on in there because they make money on commercial ops which happily pay 4 figures per year for whatever service they use from Jepp. I bet that even at £500 a year the GA sales of Flitestar IFR are insignificant to them; the total European private IFR population is probably 3 digits. I wouldn't like to guess what their sales of the £100 Flitestar VFR are worth but probably insignificant.

So, that's the background. You would be trying to flog a dead horse into a market which is tight as the proverbial (witness the people moaning about a £15 landing fee, having spent £100 going there) and where a lot of people wouldn't do flight planning if you paid them for it.

A few people have made brave attempts e.g. MT in Germany whose £5000 (entry level) product is aimed at god knows who; possibly turboprop/bizjet pilots.

Technically something very good could be done but I don't think it would make money overall, by the time you killed off the other players. One could make a "job" out of this which would pay for some food, flying and an ex wife, but one would never get rich.

[Tinstaafl]

www.fltplan.com is an example of the sort of things that are available elsewhere in the world. The mob I work for use it for all our flight planning & scheduling within the US & Caribbean. The service is free but with additional pay-for services *and* submits US domestic & Bahama flight flight plans. You'll need to register but that's free.

The site works in any web browser I've tried: IE (), Firefox, Opera etc under any version of Windows (another ), various Linux distros including my Sharp Zaurus PDA.

[FakePilot]

Which languages are these?

[LH2]

There's nothing wrong with making an "internet application" Windows only.

LH2, so you really hate automatic garbage collection eh?

Nope, I said Real Programmers would never use it. You obviously never seen any of my code, or any assumption that I might be included in the above category would be immediately dispelled I do like segfaults though--there is no ambiguity as to whether there might be a problem or not.

The "lack of design" on http://fly.dc.net is purposeful;

Oh, I wasn't referring to the graphic design of the site. I entirely agree with your approach, especially after years of regularly sitting behind 4800 baud links with telnet and Lynx as the only viable approaches. I mean he's got some good (if not essential) features like KML generation, and something else I can't remember.

Server side Java is *incredibly* cross platform.

It might be so, I wouldn't know. I never really ventured beyond single-letter named languages (Ok, I will do atrocious single-letter-and-symbol-twice programming if pushed against a wall). My only gripe with Java is that there seems to be an awful lot of shoddy apps written on it.

Everything was in assembler. Then went to C. Never used dynamic storage allocation (malloc etc).

Would I be very mistaken in assuming most of your experience is in embedded systems?
I did work on a couple (embeddable, but not embedded) projects where malloc() et al. were strictly forbidden, and boy, it makes you think about what you're doing.
For the rest, I agree with your (IO & Drauk) analysis of the business factors behind the current situation.

btw, the EAD site previously mentioned has some useful stuff on it.

[IO540]

Would I be very mistaken in assuming most of your experience is in embedded systems?

Yes. Stuff that has to work, with more or less zero bugs. Z80, Z8, Z180, Z280, 80x86, H8, AVR. A good compiler generates the same code for pointers as for explicit arrays, and the latter is far more solid.

There are quite a few "technology types" in GA, and lots of them are software developers. It's tempting to wonder what could be done better and no doubt this is what has resulted in super sites like Drauk's. Myself, I have looked into various avionics products but a quick analysis shows the difficulty of flogging something into this market.

Which is not to say it can't be done, but I don't think I would try a comprehensive online flight planner, on likely subscription volumes alone. Look at Avbrief - they have not (apparently) improved their product for years, and have gone on the record (in another forum) saying they make more money from a few airline customers than from the whole of UK GA.

There is another issue with an online flight planner: the cost of the bandwidth. On PAYG GPRS/3G this is typically £10/MB when abroad and this rapidly becomes quite significant. I did try JIFP briefly and reckoned on spending £5-£10 on a quick flight planning session. One can't use an internet cafe PC because the application (Flitestar, basically) has to be installed locally. The only cheap way is to have the app installed on a laptop and connect over wifi or an ethernet cable. But even wifi is getting pricey now, with almost every hotel charging for it by the hour. And most pilots do not have mobile internet access - judging from how many never look at notams

So I don't think an online planner would reach a broad audience.

LH2 - the Eurocontrol site contains various report generation features, and while these are PDFs they can be machine parsed.

One checknut is that AFAIK there is nowhere to get CAS shape coordinates. DAFIF used to have these; machine readable, but now there are just the national AIPs which have to be human-processed.

If you have a commercial requirement, Eurocontrol will sell you the data. The site is run by an outfit called Frequentis and they sell various tools. I don't know any more than that, never having looked into it.

[sternone]

Which languages are these?

Geek language