And you could quickly check, how far the trip to a distant place really is.  Plus find out whether a certain town has some airports nearby or not.

I have this topic under „suggestions“ but there was not much happening.  So I want to bring it up to discussion again.

The missing European data is a key point that I miss using EV.  I often have a theoretical question on how far and how many hours away a certain destination is.  This is not a Flightplanning question, this is just an estimate.  
EV will not know anything unless first downloading detailed country information.  
Why do you display all the colorful airspaces, but nothing else?

Hi Leif, thanks for your message. The answer is slightly technical, but the bottom reason is database size. The airspaces need to be all present, since we don't want anybody who incidentally wanders across a border to have no clue of their immediate surroundings - and the total size of the airspaces is, due to their structure, not that big. Country information however is a different beast and eats up a lot of storage & processing power. You can download all of Europe at once, but we wouldn't recommend it! Therefore it was cut up in country sized chunks which you can load and unload based upon the need of the moment. Depending on size, three or four countries in your selection shouldn't pose a problem - and maybe help alleviate your distance estimation challenge?

In the old EV3 there was a European basemap, and it was not so big.  You mentioned the country information, which includes a detailed map and terrain.  
But I have the basic EV3 map in mind, and I am really missing it for quick reference.

Hi @leif,

Thanks for the heads-up! I’ve merged both topics to keep things concise.

Raster basemaps are coming back! Here's a sneak peek of one of the options that will be included in the next beta.

In this screenshot Germany is activated but Denmark is not, the basemap still allows you to see across the border. Some basemap options also display airports, though mainly at deeper zoom levels.

Searching for locations outside the activated country already works using the "Google" option in the search menu. You can enter place names, zip codes, addresses, airfield names, or famous locations—just like in Google Maps. The UI is still a bit limited, but it's functional.

Cheers,
Tim

Oh great !  That helps a lot.  Please include airfield information for all of Europe. 
I never used the google search before, but if you know the name of an airport outside the downloaded countries, you can center the map on it and place a „direct to“ to find the time and distance.

Thank you for the implementation of raster maps in EV 4.4.9

However I am disappointed, as even the downloaded countries will change to the raster map when enabled.  I was looking for a  basic map outside the downloaded countries.

Furthermore a European Airport Database is missing.  The google search will only work for searching places with a known name.  In case I am looking for an airport in the vicinity of a certain town, google will not be helpful.  Their database may include decommissioned or purely military airfields.