Just got back from Oshkosh air show. This is the first time I was able to put an iFly to "real" cross country test flying there and back to Atlanta. I brought backup paper charts and approach plates, just in case, but I am happy to report that I did not have to use them but once (more on this later) operating in VFR, IFR, day and night environments. I received a backup battery just in time to take on the flight as well.
It was good to catch up with you guys at the show and I am very excited about upcoming georeferenced approach plates & weather interface features. Those two are definitely the most important additions to iFly functionality: can't wait to try them out.
Based on my experience with an iFly in flight, I would like to suggest a few, hopefully relatively minor from the coding perspective, improvements that you may want to consider integrating down the line as well. All of those would make locating the needed information faster in the cockpit. This leaves the pilot more time for other essential tasks, especially in the single pilot IFR situations. As requested, I will try to organize them in separate threads for individual evaluation.
One slight hitch that I ran into right away, is getting my clearance departing the home base: controller gave me routing different from the one I filed, through a fix, that I did not immediately recognize. I went to "Find Airport" page on iFly, typed in the fix identifier and ... nothing. The iFly returned to the map at my present location. That is when I had to pull out the map, find the fix and look up the updated routing.
What would be helpful if VORS and Intersections had an information page similar to an abbreviated version of what an airport information page looks like. The most important feature on that page would be a "Locate on Map" button that the airport page has. Then in a couple of clicks I could of found the fix, zoomed out and figured out the relative location to the course.
Likewise, this page could be accessed from the flight plan by pressing on the hyperlinked name of the fix, similar to how the airport page is accessed now. With the locate on map feature of the fix, you can go right away to any point of the flight plan directly without scrolling up and down on the map.
Thank you
Denis