Arinc Direct yesterday announced that it now offers mobile flight-planning services that pilots can access on Blackberries or other personal wireless devices. The Arinc Direct Mobile service features nearly all the flight-planning functions and features of the company’s existing Web-based portfolio.

Operators can create and file flight plans, view their planned route with weather radar overlays, update departure times, retrieve weather information in text format or see the status of flight plans in their account.

“Our customers come up with many of the best ideas for new services, and this was one of them,” Arinc Direct business manager James Hardie told NBAA Convention News. “Arinc Direct Mobile is suitable for all our regular Web site users who want to create and file flight plans and crew briefing packages without having access to a PC.”

Separately, Arinc Direct has announced the availability of its new global weather radar service for operators using the Honeywell Primus Epic avionics suite. The graphical Expanded Weather Radar service includes coverage of major world regions for which aviation weather radar data has not previously been available.

Initially the coverage area will span North America, Europe, Japan, Korea, Guam and Australia. By the end of the year, it will be extended to encompass much of eastern Asia including Malaysia, China and Taiwan.|

Arinc has said that it will be willing to support the graphics for the use of Extended Weather Radar with other avionics suites once they are upgraded to support non-U.S. radar. According to the company, the Primus Epic suite is the only one that can support the products. Further work would be needed to ensure that datalink requests from the avionics would generate an automatic response to deliver the application.

Expanded Weather Radar also provides accurate overlays of the true local radar coverage. This outline allows pilots to identify parts of a flight path where severe weather might develop without being detected by ground radar.
The new service has been added to the standard Arinc Direct flight service portfolio and is available at no extra cost to customers who subscribe to the company’s graphical cockpit weather service.

According to Hardie, Arinc offers an integrated set of cockpit, cabin and operations services for business aviation users. To deliver all the required data, it uses Sabre for flight planning; Meteorlogix and WeatherNews for weather data; Navtech for notams; iJet for intelligent risk systems; Aircraft Performance Group for runway analysis; and the European Aeronautical Group for its navigation database.

Arinc Direct has made progress on several of the developments it announced at NBAA’06. For example, having introduced Inmarsat Swift64 satellite communications in the business aviation market, the company is now reporting growing numbers of clients selecting the service for voice/data connections in the cockpit and cabin.

Arinc also announced the start of datalink services for Gulfstream PlaneView cockpits, and it has since extended this to the Dassault EASy cockpit. And, following the introduction of European coverage for its Skylink in-flight Internet service last fall, the U.S.-based company has started live tests for North American coverage and expects to make further announcements later this year about extending this operation.