Autorouter updates (merged)

Achima,

that’s great news again.
But could the DABS, AZBA and Belgium MIL airspaces be integrated by default (or user requested) in the briefing, especially when there is a Y or Z flightplan filed ?
The must would be to see the route filed onto the charts like you did with the sigwx and TEMSI charts.

Since I used autorouter yesterday for the first time, I just seized the opportunity to sign up to EuroGA.

I have to second the thanks of others here. It is a great tool and makes flight planning for IFR a breeze. A great thanks goes out to Achim and Thomas. I extensively used the instant messenger yesterday to delay our flight plan as needed, which takes a lot of stress out of a departure. My first mistake was to have filed the return flight two hours early, which I noticed when I checked my e-mails in the restaurant where we were for lunch. I was surprised to already have the briefing pack in my e-mail, which I had requested 1 hour before EOBT, to then quickly realize that EOBT was 14 minutes ago. A quick message to the autorouter bot quickly solved this. Then again lunch, coffee and paying the bill took longer than expected, but again that was no problem that couldn’t be solved with a quick message. I was still wondering if anywhere (maybe on the tower?) there is someone that gets annoyed after the third delay message, or is this a complete no-brainer for ATC?

Also a great new feature to be able to close flight plans. I still had to do it on the ground on the frequency of Bâle Info yesterday. I think somewhere here the question came up why closing a flightplan in the air is mentioned in the French AIP but ATC seems to refuse it every time. The answer is that they don’t do it in the air for flights that come from abroad.

I have had it happen also on domestic flights. Many times.

a warning for all – don´t get too excited about the new features and autorouter overall – read T&C first, don´t use the system to submit test flight plans no matter how non-standard they are. The system to be used for “to be flown” flight plans only.

Achim, could you also make the Nordic SWC available in Telegraph?

achimha wrote:

When filing with autorouter, you can now use the ARRIVAL HHMM message to issue an arrival message for the given time in UTC.

Where exactly do you send this message?

This is an astonishing feature. I have forgotten to close a number of flight plans in France. Got away with it, just…

Unfortunately, I am not getting anywhere with the Telegram messenger for inflight use. I have no coverage whatsoever anywhere above 5000 feet (=the vast majority of my IFR flight time). Could it be the hardware or the telephone provider have to do with it? I use an iphone 4 and 1+1 (Vodafone network). I have just flown all across the Northern half of Germany (Aachen to Lübeck), at FL110 and didn’t a single message out (until I was below 4000 feet on the approach into Lübeck).

So, for ground use it is fine, but for inflight, it doesn’t work sufficently for me to be able to call it a reliable tool. The lack of internet coverage is obviously not autorouter’s fault.

This may be of relevance.

There are areas where it certainly doesn’t work at all (Kent – the south east corner of England), getting LTE (4G) make a very big difference, and the cellular network could also have a big effect though that is more effort to test (would need to get a load of SIM cards). The phone is also likely to affect it – the way the telephony stack is written… if it is done to aggressively seek out 4G that will probably help, but 4G cannot carry voice or SMS (AIUI) so a phone may not be doing that (but a data device like a tablet might). It is possible that something weird like disabling 3G (but not disabling 4G) might help a lot – if that is even possible.

I have generally found that on say a 4hr flight, FL100, I might get connectivity a few times.

Obviously, for high reliability, a satphone is still needed.