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HomeHomeDiscussionsDiscussionsiFly Wish-ListiFly Wish-ListNav Log PrintoutNav Log Printout
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7/4/2020 1:00 PM
 

I know nav logs have been discussed before--but I'd like to renew the request for some relatively easy way to print them out on paper.

Why? Because I think it's good to have a written nav log while flying into new territory or when a on complicated flight plan.  Just in case. For example, in case the electrical system fails and I have to navigate by pilotage with all screens dark. Not likely, true, but possible. Also good for preflighting in a water closet and other odd situations.

But the best reason is to have a paper copy to leave with my wife when I travel without her. [Ominous rumble-music.]

The best workaround I've thought of is to make screenshots and print them out. (With a hardware version of iFly--720, 740, etc.--you can photograph the screen with a phone or some other camera.) But you're then working with pictures and wasting printer ink like crazy.

So my wish is for is some way to copy the relevant data as text, for editing, saving, and printing.

There's not much hope of doing that on the current iFly hardware devices, but surely there must be some way to do it on tablets, phones, and Windows machines.

The data for each flight plan exists as a text file with the suffix .ifp. Here's one from Windows iFly for a flight from Virginia to Florida. I copied it to a thumb drive and loaded it into my Mac's Text Edit app. (Not sure whether there are non-printable characters in addition to what you see here, but the file is 133 bytes and I count 124 characters and spaces here.)

1003
Taj to Searey Central
True
False
False
AM:37.30488993, -77.21517639;AP:GGE;AP:SSI;AG:28.96057129, -81.46678925;AA:3FA8;

Taj is my house. Its coordinates follow "AM."

Searey Central is 3FA8, the last item in the plan.The numbers preceeding "3FA8" are coordinates for a waypoint (a turn around the corner of a Restricted area in florida).

GGE and SSI are airports.

Missing is all of the in-between calculated stuff--headings, distances, times, fuel consumption, etc.  Clearly, iFly knows how to convert these data to a flight plan within the app. So all we need is either some way to export the plan as a complete text file with the calculations done, or a stand-alone program to do the calculations separately or on another machine.

It's easy to find flight plan files on a Windows machine. So a Windows .exe standalone might be an easy do. iOS devices now have a "Files" app that give access to (duh) files, but only from those apps that save their files where the Files.app can find them and copy them to the Notes app or an iFly-specific flight plan app. I don't know about Android.

(I'm down on Windwoes, though, so I also wish for iOS iFly to be ported to Mac Catalyst. Then I'll be in GPS clover.)

 
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7/4/2020 3:11 PM
 

Until develops what you want, I copied the route you posted, pasted it in the Flight Plan area of SkyVector, removed the "AP:"s and "AA:"s and it came up with this which was a .pdf:

Perhaps that would be an option.  It looked like you could put a bunch more information in, AC type, airspeed, fuel, etc., so presumably the other boxes would be filled in as well.  I think this is the first time I've been on SkyVector, so I don't know anything more about it than this.

 
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7/4/2020 3:45 PM
 

Don, just join up to fltplan.com for free and get all the printouts you want.

Dick Welsh

 
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7/4/2020 3:55 PM
 

Genius,  Mike! I've used SkyVector.com for decades to see charts, but never even noticed that it has a flight plan feature. And copying and pasting the iFly plan is really cool. It still requires finding and copying the .flp file, but it's a really neat idea anyway. Thanks! (But I still wish iFly had it built in.)

 
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7/4/2020 4:03 PM
 
desert flyer wrote:

Don, just join up to fltplan.com for free and get all the printouts you want.

Dick Welsh

Thanks, Dick, I'll do that and see how my wife likes it. I think the new AOPA flight planner works similarly, too, although I haven't tried that yet, either.

Alas, your suggestion and Mike's both require entering a plan into something else--doing it twice, that is. So I still have the wish for iFly to do it all. (And the wish for a Mac version of iFly, as well.)

 
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