ForeFlight/Jeppesen

Now that Col. Jepp has awakened to the pilots' understanding of how valuable tablets are in our cockpits, how about cutting us all some slack on the ridiculous pricing? Could we see a bundled package deal in our future now that it is all but certain the volume will go up?

But an alternative, such as Seattle Avionics, remains a good alternative.

Last time Seattle was mentioned here, a few folks mentioned something I hadn't thought of: chart and navdata for non-US users. Seattle doesn't have it, Jepp does. I am guessing that means we won't see SA navdata for Avidyne hardware until/unless they add support for other regions. (IIRC Seattle doesn't even have support for NavCanada data products, which you'd think they'd support).

Who says Seattle Avionics doesn't have non-US data?

Edited by pburger - 09 May 2017 at 11:26am

Don't know about all the nuances.

I doubt that Seattle would be able to provide data for the IFD GPS unless Avidyne works with them.  They would need the data format information which isn't public.  They might be able to reverse engineer it but that's likely a licensing violation and more important, they could miss something or have an error that won't be found until users trip over it.

Being wedded to a high cost supplier would be a competitive disadvantage if others are able to source lower cost data.  Avidyne is aware of this.  I think Steve said that they had talks with Seattle in the past but at the time they didn't have complete data.  It sound like they have it now.  Maybe Simpson can comment on this.

Our plane has an IFD and a Stratus II and we have a couple iPads with ForeFlight.  I wonder what capabilities we'll have by this Summer when the new ForeFlight version is available.

Jeppesen is owned by Boeing. Big companies will often dump subsidiaries. ForeFlight could be an interested buyer that wants to get their feet wet.

Seattle Avionics, bonus operation.
If it only works for US, southern Canada and the Caribbean, so what; at least some of us could take advantage of the price difference.

GO SA!

One way or another, this makes for interesting bed fellows.

Yes, this is really disappointing especially since Avidyne was saying all along that if charts were available on the IFD540 they would also be available on the IFD100 at no additional charge and without reducing the device count. Avidyne and Jeppesen have really not been in sync on this one.

Jeppesen has always been a monopolist boondoggle that profited from Honeywell, Collins, and Universal nav systems, well overpriced I might add, to serve airline and corporate aviation. Now that ForeFlight has entered into the picture maybe there is a slim chance that the database industry could be more reasonably priced for the bugsmashers and flibs. I'd entertain a lifetime subscription or even a multiyear discount. But, we're The Database Company; we don't care because we don't have to.

You guys don't know how lucky you are having options in the USA. In Europe, the only option to Jeppesen is the (free) national IFR charts. That sounds like a good idea, except that each country has its own format which results in looking for info in different places, and in some cases having to calculate the MDA/DH because it's not listed as such on the chart. Quite a few do that, simply because they can't afford the Jepp charts.

Garmin has "Garmin Data" or Jeep data. Garmin  a lot cheaper. So Avidyne should have Seattle Avionics Data and Jepp data.