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by Scourched

The online tests and videos match my experience in the private pilot with jeppesen. This review is not about the content.

This review is about the download ability in the app. If you have no problems being tethered to WiFi. If you can afford to download 185+mb videos over your cellular connection the app is great! However if you like to download videos at home to take on travel, the functionality is severely lacking. The video will start downloading, but they take forever to download. If you switch apps, your downloads resets to zero and stops when you switch back. The download functionality is rendered useless by this. I’m doing this on a 15Mbps connection so it’s not the internet connection.

by L Pogo

I downloaded this about 2 weeks ago and have completed about 1/2 of the course. I was following everything fine until about the 25% way through the program, I am guessing because it was fairly simple stuff. When things get more complicated they really rush through the charts and explanations and might cover 5 topics in a 8-10 minute video. It is almost like they are assuming that you are already exposed to a decent amount of the IFR language, charts and acronyms. I constantly find myself going back on the video to try to figure out what he is talking about. Personally, I feel that a 17 minute video with many new introductions is completely overwhelming. I am taking this course because I am a novice and do not know IFR and the charts.
I also purchased the private pilot program 2 years ago and found it to be better and it didn't just whip through the explanations and terminology's.
I am not impressed for the price they charged. Wish I had tried one of the cheaper ones first.

by Bdashnz

For whatever reason the developers of this app store any videos downloaded for offline use in the app’s “documents” directory, meaning that they’ll be automatically be backed up to iCloud as part of iOS’s iCloud backup feature. This is not only a waste of iCloud storage space (I can download the videos again via the app if necessary), but in my case it prevented iOS from backing up altogether as uploading 6GB of instrument training videos over my slow DSL connection would take an eternity. I’m very lucky that nothing happened to my iPad in the weeks between downloading the videos and iOS notifying me of the lack of completed backups, as it very likely would have resulted in losing important data.

Additionally, the offline download functionality is poorly implemented. Want to download all videos in a given section? The app will begin downloading all videos at once, leading to it taking an eternity for even a single video to complete. What’s more, if you switch away from the app for more than a moment or two, the video downloads are interrupted and you’ll need to manually start them again. And start again they will. Even if the video was 90% downloaded, an interrupted download will start over from scratch. This means that on all but the fastest connections you’re forced to sit and keep your device awake to let the download complete, lest you be forced to start the download over again.