There are many pilots who are worried about filing flight plans during the Olympic air space restrictions. As far as I understand SD will open for the flight planning and making it free during the Olympics, in the SD light, which is absolutely brilliant.

I would like to know if there is a chance of having a dummy olympic SD light "sandbox" for many pilots to get used to the new:
1) Airspace Restrictions (R112 in particular)
2) File a flight plan (many are not comfortable with this bit)
3) Get an "Approval Number" (and remember it)
4) Get to grips with the boundary crossing location and crossing time (+/- 30 min) issues
5) Calculate back in time to determine when you release the breaks in order to be on time (with all the things that can go wrong)
6) Calculate when to turn the nose homewards, when "just having some general fun" outside the R112 zone, in order to hit the boundary location on time and avoid a serious diversion...

Even if the FP error checking is not perfect and the Approval Number is just a dummy number, it will give pilots confidence in advance of the "file a flight plan day" which next is on the 5-6 May.

This practice would also generate some more user feedback and give everyone a bit more peace of mind.

Maybe others have some thoughts or better ideas on this subject, avoiding too many staying on the ground!?

Which field on the SD flightplan is equivalent to Field 18 on the AFPEx form? I am running SD full version and on I-pad. I can only see 1 field for "remarks" on the SD version which looks to me like it is in the area for additional survival info. Is this the one to put in contact details for the approval no?

My brief experience this morning was to file a test only, so wanted to put in EGGOLYMP only but couldn't see how to delete the automatically generated addresses. I put a remark in that it was a test flight plan. Received an email from SD to say it had been filed with the auto generated addresses but did not include EGGOLYMP - I assume that it did go there. Cancelled the plan and got a similar email confirmation. Therefore phoned ATLAS control to confirm cancellation just in case.

The main point I see is that normally, I wouldn't want to delete the auto generated addresses, so not really concerned about that, but if a plan is cancelled, does SD also automatically cancel with the EGGOLYMP address even though the confirmation email to me doesn't include it?

Ron

I can't claim to be an expert but I have just had an Olympics FPL accepted (after two failures on AFPEx and one on SkyDemon) - Yippee.