Hi all,

 

Firstly I apologise if this is in the wrong forum but couldn't find a more suitable place to ask my question!

 

I have recently been watching Frooglepete on Youtube describing planning and executing some flights using Aivlasoft's Electronic Flight Bag in his PMDG 737NGX, all very interesting stuff.

 

So I looked up this EFB from Aivlasoft, it looks very in depth on first reading the manuals! I haven't bought it yet but see you can download it free for 30 days from their website! Now I don't at present like to spend ages and ages planning a flight, I just want to get flying. However I can see a benefit to using proper charts, enroute and sid and star charts...........It might be interesting to learn more and maybe take some of my flying to the next level..............But then again do I want to get bogged down with lots of complicated fuel planning and so on!

 

So I wonder if anyone else uses this Aivlasoft EFB. Does it make life easier or is it another thing to set up and mess with for ages before getting down to the flying. What do you think if you do?

 

Does it have any impact on FPS when running in the background with FSX and all the other addon's we all accumulate over the years.

 

I have a Laptop as well as my PC so can run the display unit on the laptop and still run fsx full screen, woohoo, but is it fairly easy to set up?

 

Are there any similar products out there that do the same job, as I like to do my homework first and not just buy the first thing I see. Money is short these days and I don't want to waste what I have.

 

I would be very interested in anyone's thoughts on this subject as I haven't really seen any posts on the forums mentioning the subject of flight planning tools.

 

Regards and happy flying,

i've only been flying a couple months now, but i'm running aivlasoft on a secondary pc.

 

i think it's an awesome program, and definitely adds to the immersion when flying.

 

when you say "bogged down with complicated fuel planning" that's stuff most people here enjoy doing, so i believe your post may have turned off some people from answering. flight sim-ing is really just another form of role-playing.

 

but back to aivlasoft, it is not a simple install, it took me the better part of a day to get it all running and i consider myself a PC guy.

 

really it all boils down to how computer literate you are.

 

unless your pc is extremely slow it should have no effects on it at all.

You can use it for flight planning, but imo that's not really its main strength.

 

I prefer building my routes through other planning software such as fsbuild, and importing the fsx .pln file into the efb.

After the route is in, aivlasoft basically runs itself. Even the screen automatically changes based on phase of flight.

I'm trying it in the networked mode on my laptop and its working great so far.

 

What I mainly use it for is taxi awareness and finding the right gate I want. Approach procedures (STARS) are a plus but the data comes from navigraph which doesn't always include all the altitude crossing restrictions.

For that you still have to look up the approach chart and get those numbers for accurate managed descents.

 

Another huge plus is the Vatsim interface it has. Boundary lines are drawn for online controllers and all available frequencies are displayed at all times.

Messing with the atc window on fsinn is a pain sometimes.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone...typing errors imminent

it is not a simple install, it took me the better part of a day to get it all running and i consider myself a PC guy.

Oh, I read over the manual and followed what it said, had it up and running in about 30 minutes on my laptop, feeding from/to my desktop..

I thought the install was fairly straight forward, but I do use Win 7 Homegroup too, so none of the hassle with network shares :-)

 

The moving map on it seems awesome, especially at airports, never ever get lost again :-)

Hi RCITGuy, Gregowen, and 777fan,

 

Interested to here your running this EFB through Windows7 homegroup set up. I have set that up on my PC and Laptop, so that would make things easier! cool. I wasn't trying to imply that FSX wasn't about being as realistic as possible, but sometimes I just don't have the time to spend with lots of detailed planning and just want to get flying! However it would be great to learn more about route planning if it's not going to take ages to set up, hence my question about time spent setting up the EFB before a flight.

 

Anyway, food for thought and thanks for all your comments.

 

Happy flying,

Hi Dave

 

Seriously, it was a doddle to setup, about 30 minutes, and without any further instructions i was able to navigate my way around any airport using the real-time map, so for me, that was an instant result, and that alone was worth the purchase price, let alone all the other stuff it does, when i get time to figure it out...