Suggestions for improvement

[Armand]

Thank you so much Tim for this great software which I use for preparing all my flights. I would have a few suggestions :

a) When alphabetic characters (e.g. "above 3000") are keyed in the "Passing Alt" field, Plan-G crashes. Allright I know such information should be written in the Notes field, but everyone can make mistakes and it is frustrating to loose your carefully crafted flight plan when finalizing the altitude profile. Would be nice to have foolproof feature such as rejecting the entry with an error message rather than a direct crash

b) A nice feature would be to have the possibility to add free text in the FP, for instance below the Departure/Arrival Airport section. Could be used for entering traffic pattern details, fuel budget, Alt airport data or any other information useful to the pilot

c) It is only possible to print the full FP, i.e. I am not offered the possibility to print single or selected pages. Don't know if this is a general issue or related to my printer's driver (Canon).

Having the possibility to export the FP to a word processing software such as Word would also be a useful feature, though I understand it may not be a priority

Kind Regards

[bliksimpie]

Thank you so much Tim for this great software which I use for preparing all my flights. I would have a few suggestions :

....

b) A nice feature would be to have the possibility to add free text in the FP, for instance below the Departure/Arrival Airport section. Could be used for entering traffic pattern details, fuel budget, Alt airport data or any other information useful to the pilot

..

Kind Regards

+1

yes I would dearly love to have a free text box that can be printed right at the end of flight plan printout. Would really be great to have some freetext area.

Another suggestion.
1) Maybe in future there is plans not to have just one speed but variable speeds for climb/cruise/descend

As an interm would it be possible to make the speed fields change-able. It still can default the speed in from the speed box that you con complete but allow you to manually go and over write the speeds so that I can change the climb sections and descent sections speeds to get much better expected time per flight leg. Now you just have one speed for all and it do make a difference to the times when you try and fly a flightplan and compare the leg times.




Much appreciated. Have a good Christmas and thanks again for this amazing piece of software.
Keep well.
JB

[tim arnot]

a. Ok, thanks. I'll make sure it gets on the list to be fixed

b. Seems reasonable. I'll put it on the list You know you can type into the Notes column for each leg...

c. I'll look into that. I think there's an add-in for MS Office thaat allows you to open & save XPS format in Word.

1. There is actually the infrastructure for a variable speed system in Plan-G, it just didn't get finished. You could try adding a <TAS> tag to waypoints in the .plg file, but I don't think it'll have any effect (although it will in the future if I finish it)

[bliksimpie]

Thanks Tim

[bliksimpie]

Tim I checked the notes at the end of each leg and it will be sufficient for entering a radio frequency or two but not much.

What I normally would like to type in the requested free text box is as follows, so you see it is a bit much that I need to be added when a flightplan get printed.

--------------------------------

   Min   Usage P/H   Pound   Gallons   ;   Ave Spd   150   Distance   167.5   knots
Taxi................   2   150   5   1   ;               
climb..............   15   400   100   15   ;   Empty.............   -   -   4550   
cruise.............   40   340   227   34   ;   Crew...............         340   2
decent...........   12   150   30   4   ;   Fuel.................   -   -   -----------   
Taxi................   2   150   5   1   ;   Pax..................   -   -   1360   8
----------------   -----------   -----------   -----------   -----------   ;   Load................   -   -   800   
subtotal........   71      367   55   ;   ----------------   -----------   -----------   -----------   
----------------   -----------   -----------   -----------   -----------   ;   subtotal........         7050   
Reserve.........   45   340   255   38   ;   Max Weight..   -   -   8450   
Other.............   5   150   13   2   ;   ----------------   -----------   -----------   -----------   
Hold...............   10   340   57   9   ;   Totaal............         1400   Under max
----------------   -----------   -----------   -----------   -----------   ;               
subtotal........   60      325   49   ;               
----------------   -----------   -----------   -----------   -----------   ;               
Trip Fuel.....         692   104   ;               




Edit... oops my lineups not so good.. but you get the idea

[jlindblo]

Fantastic Idea and lots of information.  Unfortunately my graphics won't refresh properly and I end up with a mass of color wiping out the map. It's probably just a setting but I can't find it.  Also .... it doesn't import my flight plan for some reason, example:  Phoenix to Dallas.  I see a trail, I see that's it's following my flight path in the cockpit ... (GPS).  My system is a Q6600 with a Nvidia 8800 GTX and a OCZ Vertex2 for the hard drive. My connection is Verizon ....  any ideas anyone and I'll try them out.  In the meantime I'll keep learning ....   :^))

[jlindblo]

Any suggestions on how to clean this up?  If I close and reload it's clean but it soon overpaints to where my map is unreadable.

[tim arnot]

Change the sync mode to 'Sync' so it isn't redrawing every 5 seconds would be my suggestion.

[ribitt]

I'll add my voice to all the comments about an excellent program. Thank you.

My frustration comes when editing a flight plan by dragging waypoints. I have great difficulty getting that fickle finger of editing fate to grab the mid-leg editing point, particularly when it is a long leg over snow capped mountains. Zooming in is great, but the hot spot doesn't expand to anything larger than the original pin-head size.

Ribitt

[tim arnot]

The drag boxes are provided by Google Maps. Nothing I can do about their size, I'm afraid.

[Gunk]

I am running  v 2.02.481 and NO problems.  My suggestion is a minor one but would be helpful.

In the VIEW menu, Plan Elevation, a notation (small ICAO or WP#) of the waypoint at vertical end of each Suggested Altitude box would make it easier to correlate the Plan Waypoint to the Elevation projections.   

Man I can't believe I am suggesting this....  :P This program is so good why would anyone want to change it... >:D If it isn't broken don't fix it.

P.S. Thanks again for enlightening me on reading the "target" elevation correctly. ;D

Wayne K/Gunk :)

[jlindblo]

Tim,
   Thanks for the suggestion to change to the "Sync" mode .....  that fixed it. I appreciate.

Guess I need to read more carefully. 

[ou81aswell]

It would be nice to have an indicator on the status bar that told us when Plan-G was redrawing and when it was finished.

[FlyingAxx]

Hello Tim,

The improvements of G-Plan are obvious, thanks for that.

However, I would like to have the ability to drag waypoints / airports / fixes / just the place where my mouse pointer shows up etc. to the flight plan. The rubber band is quite nice but sometimes long and as already said elsewhere the dot is not always easy to find.

A really nice to have would be the ability to read not only Lat/Lon where the mouse points to but as well the altitude This info would help to plan the minimum flight levels and the routing towards an unknown airport. A minimum altitude information between two waypoints of a given leg could amend this well, even if both information would be more or less only give an idea.  8)  I know that Google Earth shows this altitude information but Maps doesn't (even not in the "Earth mode" so I don't know whether the data is even accessible. Dreaming should be allowed...  ::)

Ah, nearly forgot two other things:

* First it would be nice to have the capability to define bearing points.
* Second: As you might want to reuse sometimes waypoints being already in the plan. It would be nice to have copy and paste function within the flightplan.

Cheers,
Axel

I wish all of you a happy New Year!

[scott967]

Here is a suggestion.  When printing out the flight plan, the departure and arrival airports section prints out the runways.  This includes the fictive "star" runways used to activate crosswind runways.  To suppress this, I recommend that you test for runway length < some nominal amount, maybe 50 ft (I think ADE uses 10x10) and not show or use any runways that fail this test.

scott s.
.