Garmin Pilot v10.3.4 Briefing Output Format Change

[gacoon]

Editted to refer to correct release 10.4 - could not figure out how to change thread title.
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Over on BeechTalk Garmin announced a new release of Garmin Pilot v10.4 It makes some improvements to viewing Notams and makes a major change to the Briefing Output. For the briefing output what they apparently did was change it to display the Leidos briefing output format. So I setup and planned a simple trip of about 100 miles. The output I got was sixty pages, all in long translated format for metars, tafs and a lot of other graphics stuff that takes a lot of pages to display. Compared to the old format its going to take a lot more time to read and assimilate the information.

I do not like this for the EFB - if I wanted a briefing like this I would use the computer. The old format was not perfect, but it was a lot easier to navigate to get at information. In flight the new one is going to be a disaster.

I am sending Garmin a recommendation to set an option in the Settings to either use the new or old format depending on user preference. For those of you that use this please send them for feedback, pro or con also: gpfeedback@garmin.com

 

[eman1200]

hhmmmm, I'm on 10.3.6...............

 

[gacoon]

If you want to try it go to >App Store >Garmin Pilot > Select Update, you will then get it updated on your Ipad

 

[jimhorner]

That is truely awful. 100+ pages, and the METARS are all in the translated format. Much more difficult to scan.

Completely agree that there needs to be a way to get backthe old format.

 

[MooneyDriver78]

It’s mostly notams and weather for every airport seemingly within 50 miles of your flight. My metars are not in translated format.
I just collapsed all and ignore most of it anyway. You can check notams and weather individually.

 

[jimhorner]

It’s mostly notams and weather for every airport seemingly within 50 miles of your flight. My metars are not in translated format.
I just collapsed all and ignore most of it anyway. You can check notams and weather individually.

You're showing the old (and,in my opinion, better) briefing. The new briefing in version 10.4.0 is a continuous thing without collapsable sections. As a test, I got a briefing for a flight from KSJC to KRHV, a flight of only 5.5nm. The briefing is 66 pages long! Kinda violates the name "briefing". Not at all brief.

And the METARs are fully translated as shown in the second picture.

 

[jimhorner]

It’s mostly notams and weather for every airport seemingly within 50 miles of your flight. My metars are not in translated format.
I just collapsed all and ignore most of it anyway. You can check notams and weather individually.

Oh, and for the same flight as you showed, from KMIA to KRDU, the new briefing is 121 pages! And these briefings seem to take a lot longer to load.

 

[luvflyin]

Don’t have GarminPilot, I’m a foreflitian. There have been times after an update that things didn’t make sense, not necessarily for briefings. I find out that there is something in ‘settings’ that solves my problem. Maybe there’s some ‘raw text or translated’ thing in Settings, or whatever Garmin calls it

 

[jimhorner]

My email to Garmin gpfeedback@garmin.com. Will be interesting to see what they say.

Hello,

I want to give you feedback on the new briefing format in Garmin Pilot 10.4.0.

Let me begin with a definition of "brief".

noun - a concise statement or summary
adjective - of short duration

Unfortunately, the new briefing format is neither concise nor short. As a test, I got a briefing for a flight from KSJC to KRHV. These two airports are 5.5 nm apart. The resulting briefing is attached below. It consists of 65 pages, and it took 14.6 seconds to download over a WiFi link with a 330+ Mbps download speed. The download over a cellular network (which is the more likely method when downloading a briefing at a typical general aviation airport) was 20.6 seconds when on an LTE network with 3 bars. I imagine that when on a 3G network the download would be significantly slower.

In addition to the percieved slow download speed (I will admit that I never timed the previous briefings, but they appeared faster), I have several other issues with the new format.

* Having the briefing in one, long, continuous document makes it much more difficult to quickly go to the area of interest. With your previous format, it was easy to go to the Notams, the METARs, the TAFs, etc. This new format makes that much more inconvienent.

* Having the METARs, TAFs, etc. in plain language, SIGNIFICANTLY ncreases the size of the file. For example, it's much more difficult to scan the lines of the METARs and see general trends in temperature, cloud coverage, ceiling, pressure, etc. A coded METAR provides a brief, short, concise way to evaluate trends and get a general picture of the weather. Having it translated to plain text means a lot more reading. In my opinion, the plain text is much less useful.

*On long flights, I usually refresh the briefing prior to takeoff, and it's convienent to have the NOTAMs easily accessible for review prior to reaching the destination. It's much more difficult to do that with the new format.

I have several suggestions:

1. Provide the user an option to receive the old style of briefing instead of the new style.

2. If using the new style, provide the user the option to have METARs, TAFs, etc. be in the raw, untranslated format.

3. If using the new format, at least break it up similarly to the old style with category headings and the ability to collapse and expand sections for quick navigation.

4. This may be a stretch, but the biggest contribution you could make to briefings would be to provide a, possibly user enabled, filter to reduce the amount of extraneous junk and non useful information that comes with a standard briefing. Examples of such info from the attached briefing are:

* Turbulence AIRMETs in the flight levels, well above the planned altitude. Why not at least have this hidden with the option to show? Useless for the planned flight at 3500 ft. Altitude and distance filters would be great.

*METARs and TAFs from airports well away from the route. A distance of interest user input would be valuable
pages of convective outlooks for states and places hundreds of miles away from the flight. Why show that for a 10minute, 5.5 nm flight? Why show information about thunderstorms in Florida or the Great Lakes region at all if the flight is ocurring solely in the Western US?

*Massive amounts of NOTAMs, the vast majority of which are meaningless to a particular flight. Filter those and prioritize them by relevance and distance. As we all know, the NOTAM system is broken because it provides so much dross in addition to the few useful nuggets. Figure out a way to present the nuggets in the briefing and hide the dross. Besides, with your graphical display of NOTAMS on the map, is having this be part of the briefing really necessary? Same comment applies to the AIRMETs and SIGMETs.

You have a very good product in general, but you have significantly stumbled with this change to the briefing format.

Regards,

Jim Horner

 

[jimhorner]

Don’t have GarminPilot, I’m a foreflitian. There have been times after an update that things didn’t make sense, not necessarily for briefings. I find out that there is something in ‘settings’ that solves my problem. Maybe there’s some ‘raw text or translated’ thing in Settings, or whatever Garmin calls it

Yeah, I had looked for that. I couldn't find anything...

 

[MooneyDriver78]

Anyone going to SnF? If I go I will bring this up when I visit the Garmin booth.
I actually like the graphical format if they can cut down the notams and text weather.

 

[gacoon]

Anyone going to SnF? If I go I will bring this up when I visit the Garmin booth.
I actually like the graphical format if they can cut down the notams and text weather.

If you go to Leidos you can tailer the format of the output. If you do that it is a lot better. Compare the attached briefings, one from the new GP and one directly from Leidos for the same route but putting in customization for the briefing output.

 

[gacoon]

My email to Garmin gpfeedback@garmin.com. Will be interesting to see what they say.

Hello,

I want to give you feedback on the new briefing format in Garmin Pilot 10.4.0.

Let me begin with a definition of "brief".

noun - a concise statement or summary
adjective - of short duration

Unfortunately, the new briefing format is neither concise nor short. As a test, I got a briefing for a flight from KSJC to KRHV. These two airports are 5.5 nm apart. The resulting briefing is attached below. It consists of 65 pages, and it took 14.6 seconds to download over a WiFi link with a 330+ Mbps download speed. The download over a cellular network (which is the more likely method when downloading a briefing at a typical general aviation airport) was 20.6 seconds when on an LTE network with 3 bars. I imagine that when on a 3G network the download would be significantly slower.

In addition to the percieved slow download speed (I will admit that I never timed the previous briefings, but they appeared faster), I have several other issues with the new format.

* Having the briefing in one, long, continuous document makes it much more difficult to quickly go to the area of interest. With your previous format, it was easy to go to the Notams, the METARs, the TAFs, etc. This new format makes that much more inconvienent.

* Having the METARs, TAFs, etc. in plain language, SIGNIFICANTLY ncreases the size of the file. For example, it's much more difficult to scan the lines of the METARs and see general trends in temperature, cloud coverage, ceiling, pressure, etc. A coded METAR provides a brief, short, concise way to evaluate trends and get a general picture of the weather. Having it translated to plain text means a lot more reading. In my opinion, the plain text is much less useful.

*On long flights, I usually refresh the briefing prior to takeoff, and it's convienent to have the NOTAMs easily accessible for review prior to reaching the destination. It's much more difficult to do that with the new format.

I have several suggestions:

1. Provide the user an option to receive the old style of briefing instead of the new style.

2. If using the new style, provide the user the option to have METARs, TAFs, etc. be in the raw, untranslated format.

3. If using the new format, at least break it up similarly to the old style with category headings and the ability to collapse and expand sections for quick navigation.

4. This may be a stretch, but the biggest contribution you could make to briefings would be to provide a, possibly user enabled, filter to reduce the amount of extraneous junk and non useful information that comes with a standard briefing. Examples of such info from the attached briefing are:

* Turbulence AIRMETs in the flight levels, well above the planned altitude. Why not at least have this hidden with the option to show? Useless for the planned flight at 3500 ft. Altitude and distance filters would be great.

*METARs and TAFs from airports well away from the route. A distance of interest user input would be valuable
pages of convective outlooks for states and places hundreds of miles away from the flight. Why show that for a 10minute, 5.5 nm flight? Why show information about thunderstorms in Florida or the Great Lakes region at all if the flight is ocurring solely in the Western US?

*Massive amounts of NOTAMs, the vast majority of which are meaningless to a particular flight. Filter those and prioritize them by relevance and distance. As we all know, the NOTAM system is broken because it provides so much dross in addition to the few useful nuggets. Figure out a way to present the nuggets in the briefing and hide the dross. Besides, with your graphical display of NOTAMS on the map, is having this be part of the briefing really necessary? Same comment applies to the AIRMETs and SIGMETs.

You have a very good product in general, but you have significantly stumbled with this change to the briefing format.

Regards,

Jim Horner

These are all excellent suggestions!

 

[jimhorner]

If you go to Leidos you can tailer the format of the output. If you do that it is a lot better. Compare the attached briefings, one from the new GP and one directly from Leidos for the same route but putting in customization for the briefing output.

That's certainly better than the GP version.

Still, (and I realize this isn't a GP issue at all) there's a lot of junk in the NOTAM section, isn't there. And the whole thunderstorms in the Florida panhandle and Great Lakes region still irks me. Seems like the briefing and NOTAM system could be brought into, at least the latter part of the 20th century if not the 21st century. Why, oh why, is there so much junk in there.

 

[jimhorner]

These are all excellent suggestions!

Thanks.

I got a response from Garmin within about 20 minutes of my sending the email. I don't believe in revealing the contents of someone else's email so I'll just paraphrase here and say that they acknowledged getting a lot of feedback from users on the new format and that they plan to make changes with more options including Classic Text, Standard, and Abbreviated. No scheduled release date, however...

I really think they'd have a winner if they figured out a way to filter out all of the useless and irrelevant info and present the briefing to the pilot in a truly useful format. That would be so much better than just dumping the Leidos output to our screens. Why do we really need Garmin Pilot for that? I could just as easily do that with my own login to WXbrief.

I flew from San Jose to Tennessee and back last week with overnight stops in Oklahoma on the way to TN and in El Paso on the way back to CA. My version of GP was still using the old briefing format. Fairly easy to get the info I needed. As a test, I just rebriefed the CA to OK leg using the new briefing system. 25 seconds to get the brief over high bandwidth wifi, and 124 pages, including 60 pages of NOTAMS. Sheesh...

 

[midwestpa24]

Seems like the briefing and NOTAM system could be brought into, at least the latter part of the 20th century if not the 21st century. Why, oh why, is there so much junk in there.

Part of the problem with the NOTAM system is it is all designed as a massive CYA for the FAA, airport operators, tower owners, etc. As long as we issue the NOTAM and its available for pilots, it absolves us of liability for not notifying pilots of anything that isn't 100% to standards.

 

[jimhorner]

Part of the problem with the NOTAM system is it is all designed as a massive CYA for the FAA, airport operators, tower owners, etc. As long as we issue the NOTAM and its available for pilots, it absolves us of liability for not notifying pilots of anything that isn't 100% to standards.

Yeah, that is abundantly clear. Still wish there were a way to filter out the dreck in the briefings. Do I really need to know that airport A's taxiway lights are OOS when I'm planning a day flight to airport B 50 miles in the opposite direction? Sure, have that info available in case I need to divert for some reason (and a unplanned total solar eclipse shuts out the sun making the taxiway light info now important during a _day_ flight) but I'm more interested in airport B's info. I know, preaching to the choir here, but to me, that would be a much better thing for Garmin to be working on, a better way of briefing info.

 

[Richman67]

It looks like they simply ported the PDF that's generated by the default settings from the Leidos website. While I happen to like the Leidos briefing, they start with a options box that lets you tweak all kinds of stuff, and the HTML version of the briefing comes with a clickable index sidebar that lets you jump around and has sections greyed out that don't have any content. Just saving/displaying the default PDF version seems pretty lazy.

I'm a long term GP user, but I grant you the FF brief is pretty darn neat. I think Garmin was probably trying to emulate that by just doing what Leidos did, but the result definitely missed the mark.

 

[TimRF79]

Interesting thread, I HATED the old GP brief and therefore NEVER used it.
After building my trip in GP, I would go to wxbrief.com rebuild the trip and get the briefing there.

So for me, I LOVE the new format as is and have no problem scrolling past non relevant information.