I would love to see a trip planning feature which includes multiple flights in a single plan and a briefing for the complete trip.
For example, if I were to plan EDMY -> EDMS -> EDNITTE -> EDMQ -> EDMC -> EDML -> EDMY, I would like to define which airfields I would be landing at, e.g. EDNITTE, EDMC, EDML and EDMY and at which airfield(s) I would be using for refuelling (for example EDMC). Also the expected ground time for each stop should be able to be included in the planning.
An example for planning trips with multiple flights, can be found in the (now sadly defunct) iOS app CoPilot from ljd-tech.com.
Thanks for suggesting this, Toby. In fact this idea has been on our "development wish list" for about 2 years - it was about the tenth idea to be put on that list, and is rated there as "under consideration". The list is at https://easyvfr4.aero/community/vote-development-wishlist/ (The list is sorted "newest first" there, so this item is about ten up from the bottom on-screen so you'll need to scroll a log way to see it there.) Alternatively you can jump straight to its post on the list at https://easyvfr4.aero/community/vote-development-wishlist/multistage-routeplanning/ You might like to copy/paste your posts above there, or put a link there to them, and also click on the up-arrow icon to up-vote it. (Better if you copy it there rather than me do it for you so that it appears appropriately linked to your name not mine).
Unfortunately we have been much busier completing all the basic features of EaysVFR4 and sorting out bugs than we had anticipated, so we have not yet made as much progress with things on that list as we had hoped, but as you will see if you follow the first link above, quite a few of the items on the list have been addressed already.
Best Regards
Stu B
Team EasyVFR
Bug free basic functionality is understandably more import than bells and whistles… ?
I’ve played around with some rather primitive software in Python to “automagically” find the best route between two aerodromes, e.g. break a trip of 1000km into legs of between 150 and 250km each. It is not all that trivial and extremely slow with the huge data files, which my solution requires. I pre-calculate all distances between all airfields, filter the results and then search for the “best” route. Good fun to try but not really usable.
It’s intriguing how complex problems can arise from what at first sight appear to be a small number of simple elements! If you add in that different airfields have different operating hours and that fuel sales may also be subject to further scheduling constraints it gets even more complicated but somehow we humans can come up with practical (though not necessarily the absolute optimal) solutions!
If the information is in the database filtering out legs which are too long or short, aerodrome types, allowed aircraft, fuel type availability etc. is fairly simple. Including opening times, notams, weather (winds aloft) and the like would be much more complex.
The main reason why we haven’t implemented multi-stage routeplanning yet is it would break compatibilty with EV3. Grouping multiple routes in one routeplanning file is not very complex, just as other features we have in mind like hand-written annotations on the map that get stored with routeplanning files.
To be honest we don’t know how many EV4 users actually use EV3 in parallel; If most EV4 users are now EV4-only we could consider starting implementing this.... ?
just to let you know Rob, I'm using EV4 only since its performance has reached a most satisfactorly stage!
Hi Rob,
This is a bit concerning to me...
As I think you know I have both Ev3 and Ev4 running in parrallel using Ev3 for primary navigation and traffic, with Ev4 as backup.
If there is going to be a divergence of Ev3 and Ev4 at some point I would like to hope there would be a formal announcement of this happening?
Alan.
Hi Alan, in this case you simply would not use this extra EV4 feature of storing multiple routes in one tripfile. We are internally evaluating of we maybe can use a different fileextension for such multistage routes so ev3 simply doesn’t recognize them as routes or popup a warning when a user is about to use a feature in EV4 that is not compatible with EV3. Nothing decided yet.