airspeedalive
Well-Known Member
Anybody here use LIDO for flight planning? I'm curious about the pros and cons of it.
LIDO Anyone?
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69beers
Well-Known Member
I use it, and have used it for around 7 years now.
Pros: It has limited capability to read enroute notam restrictions and can adjust your route/altitude. Has a few bells and whistles (notam decoder, waypoint database, etc). Has the ability to auto-uplink weather updates (taf, metar, sigmet) over acars to your aircraft on its own. It is a great flight planning system if you only have one or two flights (see below), but no so much it you're planning and following 23 or so international flights with etops crossings, Russian tracks, 5 fleet types, etc. For domestic it beats a whiz wheel and pencil.
Cons: It is a single-task system that only allows you to perform one function at a time (flight following OR flight planning). It is designed for europeans by europeans and not for 121 domestic/flag rules. The calulations are in metric figures and converted back over to standard with questionable accuracy. It is maintained by arrogant germans who seem far more interested in caring for the needs of customers like Air Pakistan than UPS. It was sold to us with all kinds of features that never materialized, such as the ability to interface with CFMU.
In the end it is an adequate system, but in my opinion it is not even remotely close to being worth the cost. There are far worse out there, and there are far better out there as well. For international dispatching I prefer Navtech, which also has its cons...namely my old boss working there now.:bandit:
Pros: It has limited capability to read enroute notam restrictions and can adjust your route/altitude. Has a few bells and whistles (notam decoder, waypoint database, etc). Has the ability to auto-uplink weather updates (taf, metar, sigmet) over acars to your aircraft on its own. It is a great flight planning system if you only have one or two flights (see below), but no so much it you're planning and following 23 or so international flights with etops crossings, Russian tracks, 5 fleet types, etc. For domestic it beats a whiz wheel and pencil.
Cons: It is a single-task system that only allows you to perform one function at a time (flight following OR flight planning). It is designed for europeans by europeans and not for 121 domestic/flag rules. The calulations are in metric figures and converted back over to standard with questionable accuracy. It is maintained by arrogant germans who seem far more interested in caring for the needs of customers like Air Pakistan than UPS. It was sold to us with all kinds of features that never materialized, such as the ability to interface with CFMU.
In the end it is an adequate system, but in my opinion it is not even remotely close to being worth the cost. There are far worse out there, and there are far better out there as well. For international dispatching I prefer Navtech, which also has its cons...namely my old boss working there now.:bandit:
McCrosky
Well-Known Member
Not by much.
I concur with Mr Beers. Except I may even be a little harsher, being only 4 years removed from NavTech
To be fair, no flight planning system will be perfect, but LIDO seems to go out of the way to sell you that it is, only to result in numerous ASAPs and self disclosures when is doesn't work as advertised. When brought to the Germans, the answer usually is "That's expected functionality".
IMHO, it's designed for non dispatcher, non free flight environment. For parts of the world where you don't have the luxury of planning directs across hundreds of miles, i think the optimizer works OK, though LIDO does likes to plan climbs and descents to a ridiculous degree. In a domestic US environment, they haven't connected every way point together. You can override this function but you lose any sort of built in safeguard that's suppose to keep you out of trouble... and shoot through restricted airspace. Of course, LIDO has been known to do that on it's on. A favorite example that's happened a few times to me, a section of airway is NOTAM'd closed for whatever reason... missile launch. LIDO reads the NOTAM, and won't plan that airway. However, it will instead plan a direct segment from two points on that same airway... essentially planning through the exact restricted area.
They'll tell you LIDO stands fro Lido In, Dispatchers Out. Not yet. As a matter of fact, I'd offer that LIDO brings a higher work load to the office. And from conversations I've had with other dispacthers worldwide, it'd not just a one carrier issue.
McCrosky
Well-Known Member
no, but i'm honored... and a little frightened.