I just signed up to Navigraph and must apologise if this is answered elsewhere. I have tried search function but can’t find a specific answer to this, or any instructions in documentation.
So I am running Navigraph on iPad and installed the software on PC so that the moving map element works, which is great - and generally I really like the look of the app.
I created a simple VFR flight plan (EGPT to EGPD) and can’t find any way to export it out of the iPad. I downloaded the software to have Navigraph in the menu of MSFS and it came up there and my flight plan seemed to have automatically loaded into Navigraph in the sim UI, wjhich was great. However I can’t figure out how to get it from there to the Garmin Avionics of the aircraft. I’m using the A2A Comanche with a Garmin 530 and the export button (Load as active flight plan (only ATC, avionics not supported) doesn’t seem to load it.
So how do I get my flightplan into the sim Garmin, which presumably I need to do to get my AP to do it’s thing.
To reply to myself. I’ve noticed that if I use the addon avionics GTN 750 (currently free version, but may well upgrade) then the flighplans do export (same button → 'load active flight plan (only ATC, avionics not supported)… this seems to work, so I’m happy with that.
What I want to be able to do is sit somewhere comfy, open Navigraph on the iPad and create a flight plan. Then bring this into the sim and use the iPad as a reference/moving map with the overlays. So I think I can now do this.
Out of interest, has anyone at Navigraph considered modelling the UI around the various Garmin units? So for example, with the GTN750 - have the screen model the exact UI and button layout so we can use it as a mockup of the actual avionics from our desktop?
Unfortunately, things are not that simple. When you press Load as active flight plan in our in-game panel, the flight is exported to the simulator. It is then up to all the avionics in the aircraft to interact with the simulator flightplan, and catch any changes to it.
This used to be the case for all built-in avionics in the simulator. However, since AU1 when Working Title introduced their versions, this is no longer the case since these new avionics are more advanced internally and cannot rely on the simulators built-in flightplan functionalities. This means that they now read the flightplan once when the flight is started, and then don’t care about any updates (such as those introduced by exporting your flight from our panel).
There is nothing we can do about this at the moment. In a future rewrite of our panel, we will try to integrate with the new Working Title avionics, but I cannot guarantee that it will work with the GTN 750. It’s not our responsibility, nor is it immediately within our power to make it happen. We’d love for things to work, but at the moment there is at least as many flightplan managers as there are avionics developers.
We’re going to do our best to improve this situation in the future. Apologies for the inconvenience in the meantime!
I don’t see how we could provide anything better than the already available options. We don’t specialize in avionics, and we don’t have the resources to do such development at the moment. Some of the available options even integrate Navigraph services already!
What do you think could be improved with the PMS50 GTN750 or the TDS GTNXi? I’m sure the developers behind these addons would love your feedback!
So as mentioned, it works great with the PMS GTN 750. With the free version, as soon as you click ‘export’ the flight plan appears. I did upgrade to the premium version and in that you have to go into ‘import ATC flightplan’ and then it appears. So that’s absolutely fine. So if it works with the GTN 750, which I imagine is more in depth than the stock avionics, it’s a real shame that is doesn’t work in the stock. But at least people can download the GTN 750 and use that for free if they choose to.
I would suggest having an export feature on the iPad version (like the web version) because otherwise you don’t even have the option to load a flight with the flighplan from the iPad, which I guess means you have to re-program the whole flightplan into the avionics all over again once in flight, which is a pain.
For my comment about about Navigraph modelling the GTN750 and other avionics. I don’t mean to improve how PMS have simulated the software. I mean to model the UI. So for instance when I load Navigraph app on my iPad, I have the choice to also have the buttons of the GTN 750 shown on the iPad. So, instead of clicking the (for instance) zoom in/out… menu, comms, buttons on the panel in the flight sim, I can see those buttons on the iPad UI and click them there. That would make the iPad like the actual unit that we could have on our desks and interact with like the real unit. Some retailers sell full on models on these units for many hundreds of pounds, but this would just simulate the buttons in the UI displayed on the iPad.
That’s great! It means that the GTN750 either has no flight planning system of its own or that they keep it in sync with the simulator. That is a requirement for this to work at the moment. As mentioned, we will try our best to add support for the new built-in avionics too, but even that is not going to be easy.
This is not possible at the moment - the iPad can’t connect to your simulator and even if it could, it would not be able to interact with the avionics for the same reasons that I outlined in my first response.
That’d be cool, but it is not what we at Navigraph do. That being said, there are ways of externalizing avionics from the simulator and using it outside of the simulator, even on touch screens. Here is an example:
I have seen it being done to use them with real hardware (such as G1000 frames with buttons etc.), but it would not be a walk in the park to set up. It’s part of the “home cockpit building” genre of flight simulators.
What you are describing here is not technically possible for an external party like Navigraph at the moment, and brute-forcing it by coming up with workarounds would take a lot of resources from us.
Additionally, anything we’d build could break at any moment when the developers of the GTN 750 decide to change something. We’d rather spend our time doing what we’re good at - building practical flight planning and EFB tools!
Thanks for explaining. One thing I don’t understand though… I don’t understand why the iPad lacks functionality that Simbrief has? I’m not familiar with all the various systems yet, but I think I read that Simbrief is free? When compiling a flight plan in Simbrief, I can import that into FS and load a flight with the flight plan loaded. Yet I can’t do that on an iPad? That just seems strange to me. Couldn’t you at least have the iPad flight plan saved somewhere (X-Box cloud?) so that flight sim can pick it up and load the flight? Otherwise the iPad is just working as a moving map, which I could pretty much do with Little Nav Map for free.
I mean, I’m happy with Navigraph because it is working with the 750 (which can be used to create flightplans from scratch so it obviously is keeping in sync with FS somehow) but for the majority of customers without the 750 (or unaware that it works this way) the iPad would be much more compelling if it’s flightplans could be used in the sim.
Can you do this with SimBrief from your iPad? Or any other tool? I don’t know of any integrations that can make this happen at the moment. How would we upload files to the XBox cloud? What is the XBox cloud?
I don’t think something like it exists, and I would not expect it to integrate with the simulator in the way that you describe. I am happy to be proven wrong - if Microsoft has already set up everything we need to send flightplans to the simulator remotely then of course we should consider integrating with that! I am just saying that, to my knowledge, no such thing exists today and if it did, the authentication process would be much more involved than us simply “saving the flightplan in the XBox cloud”.
The normal procedures that we see by our users is:
Plan flight in Navigraph Charts on your PC
Export the flight, either from Charts or through SimBrief
Load up your simulator and import the flight from your file (or enter it by hand)
Connect the iPad and use it to navigate to your destination, bringing up frequencies, airspace, charts etc. on your way there - just like real pilots.
The iPad has no direct connection to the simulator, and can thus not enable any “Export flightplan to simulator” button. That button is unique to the in-game panel, which does have access to the simulator that it is running in. I can see a couple of workarounds:
Plan your flight on your iPad, then open the MSFS in-game panel and export the flight to the simulator from there. This works fine today, as long as the thing you are trying to export to respects the simulator’s built-in flightplan. We can’t integrate with anything that does not respect the built-in flightplan, for reasons mentioned previously.
Allow exporting flightplans from the iPad version of Navigraph Charts, and let our users figure out how to get it to the computer from your device storage (the “Files” app in iPadOS most likely). The target location would vary greatly, and probably be different for every addon.
Create a bridge using custom servers and software that allows the iPad to connect to your computer via the in-game panel. This would require relatively large investments from our side, and you would still need to have the panel open for it to work.
The second and third options do not have any kind of priority at the moment, since no users are asking for such features. Additionally, they would both have the same exact outcome as just using the “Export to simulator” option in the panel in the first place. It is not possible for us to integrate any further than that without changing code in addons published by other developers.
All in all, this is not a limitation in Navigraph software. It is the result of a simulator that does not allow remote loading of flightplans, and an ecosystem of addons and in-game panels that all have their own flightplan managers which often do not care about the simulator (ATC) flightplan at all beyond the first start of the simulator.
The best experience you can currently get is to either load the flightplan from the world map before stating the flight, or use the features built into the addons like PMDG company routes or the many SimBrief integrations that exist out there for example. “Uplinking” a flightplan from your iPad directly to the simulator is not technically doable without tradeoffs, workarounds and significant costs.
I realize that this is not good news, but unfortunately there is not much that Navigraph can do to fulfil what you are asking for - except for the ways that I have already mentioned using exported files or the in-game panel. Apologies for the inconvenience!
The iPad app can do a lot more than just show your position on the map If you are missing any features in particular, you are welcome (and encouraged) to post them in the Wishlist !
We’re continuously working on adding more features, and the wishlist helps us prioritize!
No need to apologise… I’m really enjoying Navigraph - it’s a lovely app to use and clearly a lot of thought has been put into making it very enjoyable to use.
I don’t know much about X-Box cloud, but when I am in the FS2020 world map, and hit spacebar to bring up more options, and then space again to load - the option. is there to load from X-Box cloud. As this is a cloud service it might be accessible to iPads and thus a flightplan created on an iPad could be loaded from that menu in the same way you can load a flighplan from Simbrief. The method to create a flight plan on the iPad is really nice and it’s a shame to feel like there’s no point in doing so because it cannot be used.
And finally, just to re-iterate, I am currently able to create a flightplan on the iPad (even while FS is running) and then load it from the load flightplan option in the GTN750… so I am not meaning to sound critical… everything is working fine for me. Just a suggestion to widen the scope of the iPad’s use… but if it can’t be done, or you are focussed on other aspects then fair enough.
Unfortunately, that is not the case. Probably for the same reason that we don’t allow anyone to store their flightplans on our servers, but it is still possible for our users The cloud option in that menu is “in-house” and not meant for external use, it requires authentication access that we don’t have and most certainly cannot get, unfortunately.
Are you saying that the “Load from Xbox cloud” option can be used to load flights from SimBrief?
I am happy to hear that it works! I want to make sure that you get the details and explanations that you deserve in order to understand why what you’re asking is not possible from our perspective. We value all feedback we get, and I really mean that!
Well I looked into the X-Box cloud and all I could get it to do was load and save from within MSFS, so as you said, there doesn’t appear to be access for 3rd party apps - nothing obvious anyway.
Thank you very much for patiently explaining what current limitations in the FS ecosystem mean in terms of what you can do with Navigraph… I really appreciate that.
I’ve been using Navigraph quite a lot over the last few days and am really enjoying it. May I ask, do you get the weather from Meteoblue the same as flight sim?
No, we get our weather from the NOAA GFS (Global Forecast System) which is often used by real-world weather channels and similar authorities. Meteoblue uses proprietary weather models.
If you are interested in seeing the differences, you can check Meteoblues website!
A couple of highlights:
GFS is available at a higher resolution
NEMS30 (Meteoblue) reports seemingly consists of 1hr periods of data, while GFS comes in batches of 3hrs
They all have the same source of truth (the real world), but the models are different so the predictions don’t always exactly line up. On the linked Meteoblue website you can also see these differences in a few handy graphs, where you can see that the models tend to agree to a significant extent!
I’m happy to report that the latest update to the in-game panel (8.4, available in the Navigraph Hub) now does support exporting the flight directly to all avionics you can find in the default aircraft inside the simulator. That includes the G1000!
If you are missing any features in particular, you are welcome (and encouraged) to post them in the 
The cloud option in that menu is “in-house” and not meant for external use, it requires authentication access that we don’t have and most certainly cannot get, unfortunately.
