=================== CoPilot Version 3.5 =================== General Description ------------------- CoPilot is an application program for Palm OS Handhelds that performs flight planning calculations -- the calculations that you would usually perform with a ruler, protractor and an E6B calculator. CoPilot does time, distance, heading, fuel, and weight & balance calculations. It prepares flight plans (Canadian, American, and ICAO formats) with all the information required when calling the FSS. It also has utilities to aid in plotting routes on a map. CoPilot stores the data for past flights so that you can refer back to previous trips (or modify them for new trips). CoPilot is distributed as freeware, with an option of a donation. You can make a donation by "purchasing" a copy of CoPilot from http://www.palmgear.com, or by using PayPal to send a donation to ldavis@ieee.org Installation ------------ CoPilot is installed by double clicking on the CoPilot.prc file, and then performing a HotSync. If you have an earlier version of CoPilot, simply install the new version without deleting the old version. All of your data will be preserved. CoPilot requires that MathLib be installed on the Palm OS handheld to support trigonometric functions. MathLib is installed by double clicking on the MathLib.prc file and then performing a HotSync. MathLib is not required on the Handspring products since the functionality is already built in. CoPilot requires Palm OS 3.0 or higher in order to operate, and occupies approximately 200K of memory (including MathLib). CoPilot also requires version 2.1 or higher of HotSync. If you want to print information to IR equipped printers, you will need to have printing software installed. Printing software is available from: PalmPrint http://www.stevenscreek.com TealPrint http://www.tealpoint.com Getting Started --------------- There is a large amount of data that can be entered into the databases to improve the accuracy of the calculations. In order to get started, however, the minimum information required is: One entry in the Aircraft database (menu item "New Aircraft ..."): Aircraft ident on "Gen" form One cruise speed on "Cruise" form Two entries in the Waypoint database (menu item "New Waypoint ..."): Waypoint ident Latitude Longitude Magnetic deviation Waypoint databases are available from several sources: Paul Tomblin - http://xcski.com/~ptomblin/CoPilot Flight Data Systems - http://www.flightdatasystems.com These databases are installed by double clicking on the .pdb file and then performing a HotSync. Even if you resist reading product documentation, I would suggest that after you are familiar with the basic operation of CoPilot, you read the "Tips & Tricks" section of the manual in order to get the most out of the application. Contents of Distribution ------------------------ This distribution contains the following files: CoPilot.prc The CoPilot program Readme.txt This file CoPilot Manual.pdf The user's manual MathLib.prc A shared mathematical library (*) In order to read the manual, you will need a copy of Adobe Acrobat. If you do not have a copy, you can download a free copy from: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html The latest copy of CoPilot can be found at: http://www.handango.com or http://www.palmgear.com (*) A word about MathLib MathLib is a free shared library that can be used by any OS 2.0+ Pilot program that needs IEEE 754 double precision math functions. It's distributed under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License, and is freely available with full source code and documentation at the MathLib Information web page(http://www.probe.net/~rhuebner/mathlib.html). It's not a part of the CoPilot program; a copy is simply included in this distribution for your convenience. Note: MathLib is included in the Handspring Visor ROMs, therefore you do not need to load it on these devices. General ------- I would appreciate comments, bug reports, and suggestions for improvement. I originally wrote this software solely for my own use, but am more than willing to modify it in order to make it more useful for others. Send e-mail to: (Mr) Laurie Davis ldavis@ieee.org If you would like to be notified regarding future releases of CoPilot, please register at: http://xcski.com/mailman/listinfo/copilot-announce Version History --------------- v.1.0 First official release. v.1.1 Improved error messages in response to problems reported by users. Change to allow negative values of arm in weight and balance. Thanks to Jim Smolen for the suggestion. Corrected error in weight and balance graph display. If all eight values were entered, the last line segment was not displayed properly. Documentation updated to provide examples of preparing the weight and balance data for the aircraft database. v.1.2 Corrected problem with display on Palm OS 3.1 and higher. Some of the fields were improperly underlined. Added "Home Base" to American flight plan. Corrected problem with magnetic deviation in the Waypoint database. If the deviation was set to east (E), and you opened and closed the dialog box without explicitly setting the E/W, the deviation was changed back to the default, which was west (W). Thanks to Jane Hall for finding the bug. Corrected the equipment code for non RNAV equipped aircraft. Thanks to Jake Jacobs for pointing out the error. Added feature to scroll through legs. When in the leg edit dialog box, the page up/down buttons will scroll through the legs. Thanks to Jake Jacobs for the suggestion. Added a "Duplicate Flight" menu item. Added a "Reverse Route" menu item. Added button to allow inserting a blank leg into a route, or changing the waypoint between two legs. Thanks to Jake Jacobs and Chris Hobbs for the suggestions. Fixed a problem with deleting items (aircraft, pilot or waypoint) from the database. If the item was still used in a flight there may have been a crash when the flight was next displayed. Added a feature to simplify entering idents on the "Leg Edit" form. When you are entering an ident, you can stop when you have entered enough letters to uniquely identify the waypoint. You know you have entered enough letters when the waypoint description appears. Added a "Database Info ..." menu item to the "Options" menu. v.2.0 A number of changes were made in order to support high performance aircraft. Thanks to LCDR William Koyama for the suggestions: Climb calculations been generalized to support non-linear climb rate, climb speed, and climb fuel flow. The "Perf 2" aircraft form has been generalized to accomodate the data. Existing data will be automatically converted to the new format. The fuel units (weight or volume) can be specified on the "Gen" form. Added the ability to specify different climb profiles for two different altitude ranges. This version of CoPilot requires Palm OS 3.0 or higher. I apologize to those of you with Palm OS 2.0, but I could no longer continue to make the program run in the limited stack space available on OS 2.0. The new climb profiles require significantly more stack space for the calculations. A number of changes were made in order to support non North American users (special thanks to Guido Stercken-Sorrenti): Fixed a problem with handling input using non North American number formats (e.g. comma for decimal separator). Added a preferences form ("Options" menu) to allow the user to specify the units that will be used. The preferences form will pop up the first time the new version is used. This does not change how the data is stored, just how it is displayed. Added a "Fuel Density" field to the aircraft database so that CoPilot can convert between fuel specified by volume, and fuel specified by weight. Earlier versions of the program labeled the climb rate in the aircraft database as feet/sec rather than feet/min. The program assumed feet/min, therefore if you actually input feet/sec, you were seriously underestimating your climb performance. Thanks to Randell Chastain for pointing out the error. The new preferences allow you to choose the climb rate units. Fixed a bug in the track and heading calculation. If the longitude of the from and to waypoints were identical, the track and heading were not displayed and the ete and fuel burn were not calculated. Thanks to Skip Guild for pointing out the error. Added a "Duplicate Aircraft" menu item. Added support for Grafitti field navigation in both CoPilot and XWind. Corrected an error in XWind that caused the wind calculation to be off by 10 degrees for some conditions. Thanks to Skip Guild. v.2.1 In some cases the start/taxi fuel was not added to the fuel total. This bug was introduced in version 2.0. Thanks to Rick Sears for pointing out the error. Corrected error in display of magnetic heading when either the wind or the magnetic deviation forced the heading to be less than zero (should have added 360). Thanks to Terry Looyer. v.2.2 A number of changes were made to support very large waypoint databases. Waypoint databases are available from several sources (see the "Getting Started" section of this file): Database search performance was improved. A "Find Ident" function was added to the "Select Waypoint" dialog. Corrected an error that prevented the calculation of ETE for some aircraft. Thanks to Don Rogers for pointing out the error. v.2.3 Corrected an error which caused the Route database to use more memory than required. Thanks to Jake Jacobs for pointing out the error. Corrected a bug that caused corruption if the user tried to select a flight with the scroll keys but there were no flights in the database. More changes for large waypoint databases: Databases are now backed up only if they were changed. Data for waypoints used in the route is cached to speed up screen updates. Added scroll bars to the "Waypoint Note" field in case more lines of data is required. Corrected a bug which caused fuel data that was measured by weight to be corrupted by a HotSync operation. I suggest that all existing users check their aircraft database to ensure that the fuel data (Start/Taxi Fuel, Cruise Fuel Flow, Climb Fuel Flow) look correct. You should also ensure that the Fuel Density field is correct since the conversions are now done properly. Thanks to Oliver Dismore for finding the bug. Added a "Waypoint Info ..." menu item that displays the creation date for the database and other information provided by the waypoint database provider. A number of users have had trouble creating the data for the aircraft database. I now check to see that the data makes sense, and warn the user if something does not seem right (e.g. the "Start/Taxi Fuel" is more than an hours cruise fuel). v.2.4 Fixed the "Last Backup" date on the "Database Info" form. I inadvertently broke it in version 2.3. Fixed a bug which caused newly created databases to not have the backup bit set, therefore they were not backed up by HotSync. This bug was introduced in version 2.3. Added the magnetic track to the information displayed on the route data popup form. Thanks to Stephen Thorn for the suggestion. Fixed a bug which caused the edit commands on the OS 3.5 command bar to be ignored. Fixed a bug which caused the climb distance to be in error. Thanks to Paul Underwood for pointing out the problem. v.2.5 Fixed intersection function. I broke it in version 2.3. Removed potential incompatibilities with Palm OS 5.0. Fixed a bug in weight & balance. If a database was edited with the w&b form open, the w&b form was refreshed from the database, and any new changes were overwritten. Thanks to Jean René de Cotret for finding the bug. v.2.6 Eliminated sorting of waypoints when a new waypoint is added (I put it in the correct place right away). Significant changes to the "dot" button. The "dot" button that is displayed before each waypoint on the route form has been modified to facilitate route editing. Thanks to Gerry Gardner for the suggestions. Added "intelligent" waypoint input. Default value for initial waypoint of a route is the homebase (as specified in the aircraft database). CoPilot also remembers the first character of your recently used idents and automatically fills in this first character in ident fields. Thanks to Gerry Gardner for the suggestions. More changes for large databases - improved the waypoint cache. v.2.7 Added more "tests of reasonableness" to the aircraft database. Moved display of magnetic track to the main route page in place of the true track. Thanks to Ray Barrick for the suggestion. Fixed a problem with database names that was created in version 2.6. This bug made it impossible to download a database if version 2.6 was the first version of CoPilot to be installed. v.2.8 Fixed a bug that was introduced in version 2.7. Databases were not properly saved when CoPilot was used for the first time. Thanks to Howard Slutsken for pointing out the problem. v.3.0 Changed flight plan to show initial altitude. Route item only shows altitude if it has changed from the last leg. Thanks to Joe Kabara for the suggestion. Functionality of XWind has been moved into CoPilot (see Options menu). Added density altitude and true airspeed calculations (see "Options" menu). A popup calculator has been added to facilitate numeric entry into fields (see "Edit" menu). v.3.1 ** IMPORTANT ** Corrected a problem with climb rate measured in metres. If you entered climb rates for your aircraft in metres, you will have to correct the numbers since they will now be wrong. Added an option on E6B calculations to input true temperature or indicated temperature. When CoPilot is launched for the first time, default databases are installed which match the examples in the User's Manual. Corrected some anomalies in the operation of the popup calculator. Modified definition of sunrise and sunset to better match the official definition. Improved color support (proper highlighting of all buttons). Added function to estimate the cost of a flight. See the "Flight Cost" item on the "Flight" menu. There is also a new form for the aircraft database. Thanks to Gerry Gardner for the suggestions. The calculator now preserves the result when the calculator is closed. If there is a number selected when you open the calculator, that number is loaded into the calculator. Thanks to Gerry Gardner for the suggestions. The format of the Route form is now configurable. Click on a column header to choose what data will be displayed on the form. Thanks to Glenn Robertson for the suggestion. One of the major problems that users have had is calculating the climb fuel flow. Most light aircraft manuals only specify the amount of fuel required to climb to a specified altitude. The "Climb" form has been modified to optionally allow the user to enter the "Fuel Used" to reach the altitude rather then the "Fuel Flow" at the altitude. The contact field in the flight plan is now "sticky". It defaults to the last contact entered by the pilot. There is no longer a contacts field on the pilot database form. Items in the flight plan that used to have default values (Flight Rules, Type of Flight, # of Aircraft and SAR Time are now "sticky". On a new flight they will be set to the last value entered by the pilot. Basic printing to an infrared equipped printer has been added. You must have PalmPrint or TealPrint installed to use this feature. Thanks to Ryan Pettit for the suggestion and the assistance. Please let me know how well this works. It was only possible to test this on a very small number of printers. I would also like to hear if there is other printing software that should be supported. v.3.2 Corrected a problem in the E6B calculations. The TAS was displayed in knots, and the density altitude was displayed in feet no matter what was specified in Preferences. Thanks to Jean-Marc Souffriau for pointing out the problem. Fixed a bug that was introduced in version 3.1. The preferences were not properly preserved. Thanks to Hans Jörnen for finding the problem. The waypoints are now divided into system waypoints and user waypoints. Downloaded waypoints are put into the system category. Typically you would create any new waypoints in the user category. With this feature your manually added waypoints are preserved when you install a new downloaded database. When you first install this version, ALL of your existing waypoints are put into the system category. You can manually move any waypoints to the user category, but be warned that CoPilot then considers this a different waypoint. If you used the waypoint in a route it will be removed from the route (because it looks like the waypoint was erased). v.3.3 Airway field added to leg data. This is used when specifying the route in the flight plan. Thanks to Jean René de Cotret for the suggestion. If the From and To waypoints are the same, the leg is now considered a "ground leg" and an optional stopover time can be added. This time will be added to the total ETE. Thanks to Jean René de Cotret for the suggestion. "Cumulative ETE" can now be chosen as one of the columns on the "Route" form. Thanks to Jean René de Cotret for the suggestion. A facility has been added to the "Flight Cost" form to turn off individual items without having to erase the cost value and description. A checkbox is provided for the fuel cost, and other cost items can be turned of by selecting blank in the selection popup. Thanks to Jean René de Cotret for the suggestion. Fixed a bug with data entry on the "Flight Cost" form. If the user preferences were such that "." is a thousands separator, and "," is a decimal point, it was not possible to enter data correctly. Thanks to Maik Standtke for pointing out the problem. Added the ability to send aircraft, pilots and waypoints to another Palm handheld. The transfer methods available will depend on your device, but beaming is usually available. See the new menu items on the "Record" menu. Added the ability to put the print output directly into a memo. In previous versions, you could only edit weights on the w&b form if you left the corresponding weight blank in the aircraft database. This version uses the weights from the aircraft database as default values, but you can edit any of them on the w&b form. When selecting a waypoint to insert (the tiny "dot" button on the "Route" form), there is now a button to find a midpoint. This button will list the twenty waypoints that are nearest a point that is a specified percentage of the way along the leg. CoPilot will now detect and properly handle a read only waypoint database file. This will allow waypoint files to be moved to external memory cards using utilities such as PiDirect. Thanks to Bruce Nye for the help. Warning - Handera devices appears to be incompatible with PiDirect. Added a facility for calculating the winds aloft (see Options menu). Thanks to Clyde Campbell for the suggestion. Fixed a problem that caused a crash when pasting data from the calculator into the flight plan. Thanks to Bryan Hawkins for finding the bug. v.3.4 Fixed a bug in the midpoint finder. If the selected waypoint was in the user waypoint database, it was not selected properly. Added metres as a valid unit for measuring arm. Thanks to Alistair Symes for the suggestion. v.3.5 Waypoints are not erased from a route if they are not found in a waypoint database. The route will not be displayed if the waypoints are not found, but if a correct waypoint database is reinstalled, the route will be ok. This was causing problems for users that moved the waypoint database onto external memory. If they forgot to enable the external memory, their routes were all erased. If MiniNav is installed, a button will appear on the "Flight Description" page to take you directly to MiniNav. If you have a GPS attached to your Palm, MiniNav will provide enroute navigation support for your flight. Thanks to BlackHawk Systems for supporting CoPilot within MiniNav. If AeroTimer is installed, a button will appear on the "Flight Description" page to take you directly to AeroTimer. AeroTimer will provide enroute timing for CoPilot flights. Thanks to Philippe Caïric for supporting CoPilot within AeroTimer. Note: AeroTimer has not yet been released. It will be released on PalmGear within the next few months. Fixed a number of problems with the coloring of buttons on the Route form. Added a number of new button bitmaps for high density devices. Added the ability to specify a waypoint as a radial and distance from an existing waypoint. There is a new "Waypoint" menu on the "Edit Waypoint" form. Fixed a problem with Palm OS 5 which sometimes caused erratic operation of the buttons on the "Route" form. Thanks to Tod Klingler for all of his help in debugging it. When you are dragging legs on a route to a new position, you can scroll the route by dragging off the top or bottom of the route. On very fast devices the scrolling can be too fast to be useful. I have made a change to limit the rate of scrolling.