he was not connected to a wi-fi network. Consequently, the application did not provide airspace updates.
Many years ago I was in a computer shop and a customer walked in, returning a PC which she bought the day before. She said “this doesn’t have the internet in it”.
The PC didn’t even have a modem. We can all laugh now but there probably still are people who think that “the internet” is something which lives inside your computer.
The above incident is in a similar category, but not quite because the way the notam briefing system works is that if a notam doesn’t appear then you are supposed to assume nothing is notamed. There is no “no notams issued” status. This is a monumentally stupid way to design a system, especially one where the pilot can be prosecuted for a criminal offence. Some countries don’t distribute certain notams to foreign countries, for example.
But this is still nothing to do with SD or any other satnav app being liable for enabling a map layer to be suppressed in declutter settings!
You have to accept this Warning whenever you open the app.
I dont want to sound like a „hater“ but SkyDemon has been with me from Day 1 of my Flighttraining, over 7 years ago. And till now SkyDemon became better with every release and i just loved the fact that you could hide or show pretty much every detail – wich is the big plus side of a vector map. Also SD can be used on a propper 24ich screen with a proper mouse and keyboard, wich for me sure is a buy/no-buy item. I hope they go back to the „old normal“ with the next one but i will also give EasyVFR a pretty close look.
As great a tool Skydemon is, I can only reiterate and advise everybody NOT to rely on the airfield admin information within the app for airport opening times, particularly in Germany.
Despite SD saying that they get this data directly from German DFS, it is often different than the data in the public release versions, sometimes just marginally so, but that make it even more tricky. How can this happen?
Try to spot the difference…
AIP / Jepp entry:
Skydemon app:
Doing this is the most horrible job because there is no machine readable source.
From my beta testing activities, I know a guy who was going to do something like this and he was going to employ a slave (his word) in Vietnam or some such, and then a second slave out there to check it.
But obviously that would not catch this sort of thing.
Basically an app developer will do it right for the main watering holes, in his main markets.
A lot of the data in satnav apps is in the same category actually…
AFAIK, SD say they get the data from DFS and import it directly, so there shouldn‘t be any slavework involved.
This one really actually isn‘t subtle at all…
What’s even more helpful than posting here, when you find a mistake, Is to drop them an email. I have found they were very responsive.
Not the case. I have of course done so previously (other German example airfields) and they don’t seem to be able to fix these problems, for some reason. So, raising awareness is the only cure. And yes, that might help someone. Don’t rely on that data…
Thanks for this! I too often rely on apps to get me where I’m going.
I’ll fall back to calling everyone all the time now.
Much previous discussion on this, and if this was posted on any UK site the poster would receive a beating… from the fan club or from the owner himself.
SD was racing against time, with other apps appearing, so packed the app with many features, many of which are not understood by many users or which are difficult to maintain (like this example). The owner, the guy who wrote it, is famous for telling his customers how the world is… so reporting issues can be a painful process.
It is a good tool for straight satnav but you have to invest time into understanding the user interface and config, and have to understand that a lot of the data cannot possibly be reliable simply because it isn’t published in a machine readable format.
This is also why the EuroGA airports database doesn’t carry stuff like opening hours or IFR or VFR. It would be hopeless to maintain that. But people still ask for it…
Nowadays, for opening hours you see the airport website, or in some cases, or universally in eg Greece they are permanently notamed. And beware because some airport websites have them in local time.
More fun ‘n‘ games…
