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!
Kind Regards,
Malte