Hi all,
First of all, I find the Navigraph desktop app incredibly handy and it leaves very little to be desired. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it has many features that I wish some real-world EFBs had…
I’ve been tossing up whether to post this “wishlist” feature for a while now, but why not.
As I’m sure we’re all familiar with, in many instances of a real world flight might not follow its planned route for the whole flight. ATC may provide track shortening enroute or provide instructions such as “from waypoint track direct to waypoint”. It would be really interesting if there could be an ability to “overlay” FlightRadar24/FlightAware/any other ADS-B data on the map in the Navigraph app. It could appear as a grey line that the user’s inputted/planned route could appear over the top as usual.
This could have several potential fields of use:
-
Help users to figure out which route an IRL IFR flight took when a real world OFP/flight plan route is not available from a source such as FlightAware or EdiGla.
-
Help users follow aircraft vectors onto an ILS or visual approach where a STAR or transitional procedure is not generally used/available.
-
Help users figure out how exactly an IRL IFR flight was navigated through a particular portion of airspace for things such as track shortening, ie when they entered Germany’s FIR, they were given direct to the last waypoint in the FIR for time saving/track shortening, or were given a shortened STAR/approach procedure, etc.
-
Help users follow a diversion procedure of an aircraft, where ad-hoc or non-standard en-route and approach procedures may occur.
-
Help users understand potential VFR procedures that may apply in certain places that they are not familiar with. For instance, VFR arrival/departure routing or VFR lanes that may not appear on Navigraph’s VFR map (such as VFR lanes on Australian VTCs, for instance). Or to generally follow where a VFR flight flew.
I completely understand why all of this might be “easier said than done”, I do.
Now, at the moment, you can sort of achieve all of this, it just takes time. If you have a FR24 Gold subscription (or have access to one), you can download the CSV file of the flight, and use a service such as this: https://track2plan.apps.cronin.nz/ to convert the file to a PLN. Then, you can import it back into the Navigraph app using the “Import from File” feature. This will give you a broad overlay of the IRL aircraft’s track however, it is imported as Lat/Long waypoints (so there are maaany waypoints, potentially slowing the app) and furthermore, the space between each Lat/Long waypoint is often too far to decipher some information such as departure routing. And, since you have imported this data as a flight plan, you cannot add your actual flight plan route over the top. An example of this is shown below:
As you can see, not ideal, but at least you are able to get an understanding of where the IRL aircraft was actually routed.
In short, it would be nice to have some sort of native feature to support this.
Kind regards,
Ben Long