Rest Break Optimizer

Keep it simple

Needs way too much extraneous information to work. City pairs? Date? Who cares.

For me this app is the Windows version of a crew rest app. It’s not intuitive. It’s hard to read. It’s not obvious. First you’ve got to add all your favorite airports. Then you should set up the possible city pairs so it’s easy to program the breaks and get all your FAR 117 rules covered. Already it’s cumbersome. The best apps automatically use UTC time. This doesn’t. Ultimately here’s the issue. I don’t want an excel spreadsheet. I want easy to fill boxes with large enough font to read. No one likes FAR 117. I don’t need to see all my sleep cycles. I’ve got a 9:43 minute flight. I just want a break schedule. My flight is 14:53, just give me some simple options. But this app is too much stuff, too small and too hard to find numbers. I appreciate the effort. But the reason the first iPod became so popular was because it was so simple. I tried to get other crews to use this app. In nearly every case I was greater with glassy eyed pilots saying, yeah but this other one is easier. In fact most would do it manually rather than use this. In general we pilots want the KISS principle. This app missed the plot.

Some effort was put into this app but the data entry is too complicated. The key pieces of information are number of flight crew, out/on time, and perhaps time back to the flight deck. In the apps I use for rest calculations I just enter a start and end time and number of crew. Also, typing the numbers in via keyboard would be preferable to the dialing method.

Very advanced Crew Rest app. Share and enjoy.