[as the] Radar Sweeps

Evolution of my Electronic Cockpit: From General to Dedicated

At Oshkosh several years ago I bought a copy of Seattle Avionics Voyager for flight planning. Voyager is intended to be used both for ground-based flight planning and as an in-flight moving map and it is very good at both. But ultimately Voyager can be no more reliable than the Windows OS on which it relies. And in my particular setup that was a problem. So last fall I decided to replace my Windows-based, Voyager-running, Dell/NavAero “AeroPC” with a dedicated device that didn’t bring all the unreliability of Windows to my IFR flying and I have been very pleased with my Garmin 696. I have not had a single XM weather “outage” with my 696 - this was becoming commonplace with my AeroPC setup. In fact, the only place where the G696 has in any way misbehaved for me is on the ground, like clockwork, every 28 days. Garmin can’t seem to get their update software to reliably re-boot the unit after an update. As a result, 9 times out of 10 I have to remove the battery to restart it [kinda like a Windows laptop that is truly, hung]. But they say they are working on that…

Jepp vs. NACO

Ever since getting my instrument rating I have been a Jepp guy. My flight instructors were Jepp guys and I took a good hard look before committing to this more expensive alternative to government-produced NACO charts. What I found was that in many cases the Jepp charts are superior in readability, which counts when you are in the soup and you get thrown a last minute change by ATC or you need to divert to an airport you weren’t planning on and with which you are unfamiliar. But over the years I have been exposed more to NACO charts from a variety of sources and I have been starting to think they are actually workable for me.

Garmin FliteCharts: Good, not Great

So this brings me to my only problem with the G696: FliteCharts. They are NACO charts scanned by Garmin and they are “built-in” to the device, if you choose to pay for them. An annual subscription costs $395. Now, if you are a Jepp subscriber, you are used to paying this kind of money and getting a smaller-than-national coverage area. But with FliteCharts you get reduced-resolution charts that are not terribly easy to read, in a form factor substantially smaller than paper charts [see photos below]. When I purchased my G696 I still had a JeppView subscription and have maintained that [that makes two expensive subscriptions!] because I have been printing on demand Jepp charts for each trip as I need them because I just was not comfortable squinting at those FliteCharts. I was legal, but not happy. And I have had this nagging discomfort about having to actually use those low-res, scanned FliteCharts one day for a complicated approach I had not previously briefed. So I have been continuing to look for alternatives.

Can You Have Too Much Functionality in One Device?

There are other issues with combining a moving map with a chart reader. Navigating to an approach chart using the G696 is pretty easy: if you are not already on the flight plan display hit the FPL key, push cursor, cursor down to the destination airport, press ENT and then hit the soft-key “Chart”. From there you simply rotate the big knob clockwise to the approach you are interested in. That sounds much worse than it is - it takes about 3 seconds. But - and this is significant - you are now displaying the scanned chart, say, for the RAL VOR Rwy 9. If you want to check the weather again, or your position, or anything else, you will have to repeat that procedure each time you want to peak at the approach plate again. So it is not at all like having a paper plate, separate from the G696. In essence, I’m not happy with the notion that I have to *repeatedly* navigate to the chart to brief it, or check one more thing on it. With paper I avoid all that back and forth. Any time I want to glance at the plate I can.

ePaper: Best of Both Worlds

Of course, we all know the problem with paper: having a current version of the plate you want in the cockpit on every trip is expensive [NACO or Jepp] and fills up a large satchel which has just become heavy as well. Now I think I have found a solution I can live with for a long time: full-sized, NACO charts from AirBrief displayed on the Amazon Kindle DX. Here is the complete RAL VOR Rwy 9 approach, as represented on both the Kindle DX and the G696:

Can you read the plate on the G696? Yes, under favorable circumstances. And if you are familiar with the approach and just need a refresher, it’s no big deal. But if things are bouncing around a bit and you are looking at it for the first time you may need to zoom in. Here I have zoomed the G696 to show both plates at approximately the same magnification:

Note that the Kindle/Airbrief PDF representation is substantially higher resolution, even at the same magnification, and virtually the exact same size as a paper plate. If you were using the G696 you would now have to do some cursoring around to see the whole chart.

For me it is not an either/or. The G696 does a great job providing both XM weather and a moving map backup for my panel-mount G430W, whose display has actually failed once. And the Kindle DX permits me to be legal and have any plate I want in a matter of seconds. Now I don’t have to lose my G696 weather display to brief a chart. Cost: the Kindle DX costs $489 - a little more than an annual subscription for G696 FliteCharts. For now AirBrief is not charging for their service. We’ll see how that goes…

The Whole Country in 1/3 of an Inch?

I’m not sure if you can fit the entire US on the Kindle DX and I really don’t care. I loaded up the Southwest [CA, AZ, NV, NM, UT, CO, or SW 1-4 for you NACO folks] and that requires just over half a GB - 556MB - of the 4GB capacity. I also loaded up on some books from Amazon - the actual intended purpose of the device - and they take up some space, too, though a lot less than the NACO charts. I don’t fly so fast that I need to have Maine and California onboard at the same instant. I always have a laptop with me and can swap in another region’s worth of charts after dinner at the hotel - so AFAIC whether the DX can hold the whole country is a complete non-issue.

I will not be renewing either my FliteCharts sub when it expires this fall, or my JeppView sub.