iFly GPS Forum

I know RealPlan is brand new and I think it is going to be an excellent tool.  After using it for just a short time, I'd like to throw out some suggestions.

• Include a max leg duration in addition to fuel reserve.  I can carry way more fuel than my bladder can take.  My first try with the planner had me at nearly a 7 hour leg...  As a work around, I increased the amount of fuel reserve I want, but it would be ideal if the planner would calculate how many gallons to buy at each fuel stop accounting for the ability to tanker fuel from a cheap fuel stop or not top off at a more expensive stop.  Buy X gallons at stop 1, Y gallons at stop 2...
• Include a max duration per day so that it uses winds for the next day for legs that may fall into the next day.  As the weather systems move over night, what is ideal one day may put you into a headwind the next day.
• Include avoiding IFR weather.
• Include a time of day optimizer that looks at winds aloft and weather as a function of time.
  • Avoiding IFR might give you a poor route in the morning that improves during the day as visibility improves and celiings go up.
• Include the ability to select which MOAs (and other airspace) to avoid would be nice.  I generally like to avoid MOAs and restricted airspaces, but there are certain ones that from experience I know I'll be able to overfly on a weekend.  I also live in a MOA and I'm surrounded by more so some of the routes it was giving me don't make sense.  Instead of flying a corridor of MOAs through a gap in restricted airspace, it had me go all the way around.  I'm assuming the logic was that it flew through 1 less MOA to clear my airspace, but it sure took the long way around (which required an extra fuel stop).  I'd like to be able to click the avoid MOAs button, but go into a more detailed prompt to say except for the ones I intend to fly through.  For now, I can manually change the waypoints, but I don't know how that would have affected the optimizer.
  • Question about the current optimizer, does it take into account published altitudes, times of day, and days of week?
  • I tried to manually put in the first few points into the flight plan to get out of my local MOAs before running the flight planner, but this is breaking the optimizer, it crashes one of my tablets and it's still at 0% after 9 minutes on another tablet (eventually crashed the entire app).  I don't think this is a great work around since it forces waypoints which defeats the purpose of the optimizer, which may only be fine at the beginning and end of a flight.
• In the summary after the optimizer finishes, include each leg in the summary.
• Allow for a max duration above a user defined level.  Some people put on O2 at lower than required altitudes especially at night and it would be nice to be able to account for the amount of O2 you have onboard.  That might get a bit more complex becuase you shouldnn't asssume you can get an O2 fill at each fuel stop so it may be a total duration over the entire flight and not per leg.
• Is there a way to specify how tight of a mountain pass I'm willing to fly through?
• Not sure how to address this, but something to consider.  I'm willing to fly at high altitudes until I'm out of O2, but that doesn't mean I want to fly straight across the Rockies, which is what the planner comes up with for a flight from SoCal to Wi.
  • I'm also willing to fly at 1000' AGL through a pass, but not for the duration enroute.
• I think the most flexible way to address several of these suggestions is to have the optimizer be partially interactive.  I'm thinking maybe run it simply on origin -> destination.  When that comes back, allow the user to tweak the results then reoptimize over that, and iterate on the best solution.  From the above points, I would have modified the points going around the MOAs to go through the corridior, reoptimizing would change the fuel stops and eliminated an entire leg.  I would modify the routes to fly valleys through the Rockies and the AGL settings in those passes, then reoptimize again, etc.  Basically, I would like to add a few constraints, but as few as possible to still get the benefits of this RealPlan capability.

Congrats on the capabilities of this initial release, keep up the great work!

Great ideas Jayson, thanks for posting.

I'd like to know about food options too, but I don't know of a highly reliable source for that infrormation, especially one that could be consumed by automated tools.

Best single source I know of is http://www.fly2lunch.com/, but it's still only crowdsourced and not entirely reliable.  Restaurants come and go more frequently than you might expect, and it can be a long time before that's captured here, usually as a user comment.