Nice post Dennis.

I believe that the only flight planners on the market right now that use
Jeppesen data are Jeppesen's Flitestar and the AOPA Online planner which is
provided under contract by Jeppesen.

Flitesoft, Destination Direct, Aeroplanner, AirPlan, Voyager, the EAA
Planner (provided by Aeroplanner) and FlightPrep are flight planning apps
that all use DAFIF data.

I believe that virtually every Pocket PC moving map application relies on
DAFIF data. This includes Anywhere Map, NavGPS, MountainScope, NavAir, and
several others.

I wonder if perhaps Jeppesen didn't lobby the government to have this action
taken to recapture their monopoly position as a flight data provider. It
will certainly have the desired effect of taking out their competition, and
bring those few that survive groveling at their door to pony up large sums
of money for their data.

The ultimate effect will be that the number of products available on the
market will dwindle, and prices of the remaining products will rise. This
won't be due to natural selection from normal market forces, but from the
chokehold that Jeppesen will be able to exert on the industry. In the end,
it will be the consumer pilots who lose.

This data has been available so far due to a wonderful piece of legislation
called the Freedom of Information Act. It appears that our government is in
the process of dismantling the Freedom of Information Act along with other
freedoms that we have enjoyed in the name of security.

I certainly hope that this proposal gets shot down. I would even settle or
a compromise in which users of the DAFIF are allowed to pay a reasonable
licensing fee to have access to the data, and doing this could provide a
means by which the NGA could provide payment to those forgeign bodies that
want fees for their data. The fact that the Australian data provider want
to sue is assinine because they don't provide their data in electronic
format... you have to buy it on paper! How worthless is that? This is true
of Nav Canada as well... they don't sell digital data, only paper data.

Dean Wilkinson