So, it's... Well, kinda worthless, no? I guess it'll show you where the fastest winds aloft are, but not what'll actually give you the fastest trip.
That's something I'd love to see in ForeFlight, but it's a fairly difficult problem, especially in normally aspirated airplanes. For accuracy's sake, you have to enter an awful lot of data (climb rate, airspeed, fuel burn, etc. for maybe every 1000 feet up to your service ceiling as well as cruise TAS for each altitude... Yadda yadda yadda...) so it's not necessarily an easy or user-friendly problem to solve.
I've made a spreadsheet to calculate such things for a turbonormalized plane, which makes things much easier - Since the power settings for climb and cruise will remain roughly the same from the ground up to as high as you can maintain the desired manifold pressure, the climb rate, indicated airspeed, and fuel burn should be roughly equal at all altitudes. But even that spreadsheet is fairly complex.
Should I pop up here and reiterate that this feature has been in the (evil company) ChartCase Pro for years now?
It does require all the data input for your aircraft to work. And it doesn't do power settings -- you enter your best speeds at each of a list of a dozen altitudes. It also won't actually do the calculation as to "What's best", but it WILL draw your typical climb rate on the V-Nav portion of the screen at the bottom, and will change your speed in the nav log appropriately at level off, and use the closest speed you claim for that altitude, etc.
It will also allow climbs and descents mid-trip, say -- if you have to cross the Rockies, but then you'll descend and continue for 300 miles after that at a lower altitude, and it'll put the appropriate speeds in for the climb, the cruise at high altitude, the descent, and the lower cruise, and it'll calculate the climb and descent points along the way as you tell it you want to cross XYZ fix at a certain altitude.
It'll show you where that climb or descent needs to start to hit your numbers you entered into it. (If your airplane won't do those numbers, you'll have to swag the difference, of course. So you put something conservative in for climb and descent and know it's not 100% accurate.)
You can do an arbitrary number of climbs and descents throughout the entire trip, if you like. It'll switch to your climb performance numbers for climbs, your descent numbers for descents, and the closest altitude cruise numbers for level flight, during the creation of the flight plan.
If you then just poke at the "top" altitude you want for the segments, you can watch the ETA change and pick the "best" speed for your flight. It'll use winds aloft from DUAT(S), or live from the XM Weather receiver.
The only annoying part was that the entire route's waypoints are continuously updated with the current conditions and speeds once you're flying, especially if you have the XM hooked up. Winds aloft and ground wind changes actually automatically update the flight plan/log on the screen, and this was one of my complaints... if you wanted to see if you were ahead or behind schedule you had to print the flight log out or turn off the wind features to find the original times, since it would update all of them continuously according to your groundspeed.
But if you had the original plan printed out or you went to the screen where the PDF was available -- I iike writing on my flight logs, so I printed them -- you could see if you were hitting checkpoints on time or not. The ETE and ETA numbers were dead on, but you could pull the throttle back and slow down and they'd change. That's correct behavior, but you had to have something to reference how that affected your original ETA estimate.
So ChartCase Pro is not 100% accurate doing all the V-Nav speeds, etc... but it's really really really darn close. It's at least as close as any paper Nav Log if you feed it with the correct information and fly the plan it creates.
I'm never going back to it, due to the company's behavior, but I do hope Foreflight catches up to their feature-set in the V-Nav regard.
All the airspace is displayed on the V-Nav strip too... you can see that you're flying under the Class-B shelf, not have to tap and wait for a block to come up and read the altitudes, and interpolate that information. The little airplane's truckin' along under the shelf in the scrolling strip that shows the V-Nav stuff.
And it doesn't stop there... cloud layers are depicted on the V-Nav strip too, from current weather (if you have the XM receiver plugged in) or the last weather downloaded before you launched... as you punch in an altitude for cruise, the V-Nav strip at the bottom updates, and you can see that you'll be above a cloud layer somewhere 100 miles down the road, but it ends before your destination (if that's how you do things... VFR over the top like that), or you can change the altitude and it'll show you underneath the layer.
Software-wise, it's really good stuff. Hardware-wise, there's no good options anymore for putting it in the cockpit that come close to the portability and brightness of the iPad. They locked themselves into Windows, and they're paying the price now. They have a totally crippled iPad EFB package out now, I see... but it's not even close to the feature-set in FF, let alone in their flagship product.
It's seemingly "minor" stuff, that's a lot of work to code. I know. That's why I'm willing to wait on the other vendors. I'm a little bummed that I won't have XM along this year for the trip to OSH though. It was very useful last year, line of t-storms, alter course to the south, fly along them, done. I'll have to work harder for that information this year.
All in all, it *could* be a very interesting year for announcements from aviation software companies at OSH this year. I'm still crossing my fingers for XM weather on the iPad... from anyone. If they want to release it just PRIOR to OSH... that'd be great... unless they're making plans with Mother Nature to turn the weather off for everyone to get there first.
XM Weather is the one huge thing I miss going to the iPad. If I were doing any serious weather flying, I'd have to go back to CC Pro, and that would make me a sad Panda.
(Don't tell him I open a command prompt every day on my Mac. He might take it away from me. Especially if he finds out I write shell scripts and perl in it instead of AppleScript. I think secretly, his liver knew every time I opened a terminal window on a Mac, and it died a little inside every time I did. I may have been the cause of the death of Steve Jobs liver!)
