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Electronic flight bags / electronic in-flight data

iPad Mini 4 + ‘juice pack’
Garmin Glo
Garmin Pilot (just started)
Runway HD (VFR)
Rocket Route (IFR)
Aeroweather
WeatherPro
Aviation W&B

I don’t stick the iPad to anything – I tend to use it like a paper chart/kneeboard.

Fly safely
Various UK. Operate throughout Europe and Middle East, United Kingdom

I don’t use an EFB

I run a win8 tablet (Lenovo Tablet 2) during the flight, which runs Oziexplorer which runs VFR charts (I have cover for all of Europe) and topo charts (showing the canyons, for crossing the Alps VMC on top) and connects to a Thuraya XT satellite phone for weather etc (50kbits/sec and $6/MB) which it gets from a private weather site (no advertising etc).

The tablet gets GPS over bluetooth from an old Emtac bluetooth GPS which is aircraft powered, has a ~10hr battery, and is fed from a dedicated rooftop antenna.

Otherwise, everything I need to interact with during the flight is in the panel.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Dave_Phillips wrote:

I don’t stick the iPad to anything – I tend to use it like a paper chart/kneeboard.

Today I flew an aircraft that is normally operated by other colleagues. The first thing I did in the morning was to remove their iPad holders…

We have Jeppesen Mobile Flight Deck installed, iBooks for the company manuals, and Mail for our PPS briefings (flight logs, weather, NOTAMs, Runway Analysis). Nothing else.

EDDS - Stuttgart

Peter wrote:

I don’t use an EFB

Peter, does anything on your list not exist on the iPad? It is obviously cheaper but terrain etc is all available on things like Garmin Pilot. You can even have synthetic vision. Just strikes me as a lot of hassle to go through to homebrew things that are easily available commercially.

Last Edited by JasonC at 21 Feb 19:52
EGTK Oxford

No way to get a satphone connection to an ipad unless you have a wifi satphone, or use one of the Iridium based products e.g. ADL120 which don’t do open internet access.

No way to run own-supplied charts on an ipad, except limited ones in a Mercator (rectangular) projection, which rules out most aviation charts. Oziexplorer never existed for it.

I agree some of what I have I could get but at a significant data cost. And what about e.g. Croatia and Greece?

The Ipad also shuts down when it has sunshine on it, on a warm day.

And it cannot use a bluetooth GPS unless it is one of the special Ipad compatible ones (like the GNS2000) and one of them can use an external antenna. The best you can do is velcro a GNS2000 to the top of the panel and power it from +5V – I spent some time messing with that but eventually gave up and put the GNS2000 on Ebay. The GPS inside the Ipad is no good (in my plane); loses reception easily.

Garmin Pilot looks interesting but it doesn’t solve the other stuff.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

No way to get a satphone connection to an ipad unless you have a wifi satphone, or use one of the Iridium based products e.g. ADL120 which don’t do open internet access.

Why do you need open internet access – if you can get radar, IR, METARS and TAFs?

No way to run own-supplied charts on an ipad, except limited ones in a Mercator (rectangular) projection, which rules out most aviation charts. Oziexplorer never existed for it.

What do you need own-supplied charts?

Also my iPad GPS works fine in the Mustang.

Last Edited by JasonC at 21 Feb 20:29
EGTK Oxford

I like to be different. It works for me

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

- I use the iPad Air with Skydemon, as back up also a Nexus 7 with SD, my mobile phone and paper charts. I don’t have a mount because I sit close to my instruments (I am not that tall and otherwise I cannot use the breaks ). If I would use a mount it would take too much from my cockpit view, the Air is not very small.
- I use the iPad with a kneeboard (MyGoFlight metal kneeboard with next to the Ipad a clipboard with paper to write things down – very happy with that because of the aluminium case which protect my iPad very well.)
- A full battery pack
- I mostly don’t have connection in the air (and I don’t have a satphone), so I use the Autorouter telegram only on the ground.
- For W&B I just use an ordinary excel file

On SD I have the approach plates en the pilotlog, but I always take also a paper version of the approach charts, a vfr chart and my pilotlog with me

BTW Peter, my iPad GPS works very fine. On all my trips I only once lost GPS contact and that was in Athens – jamming (first I lost the signal for the GNS 430 and a few minutes later I lost the iPad GPS. They came back almost both at the same time)

Vie
EBAW/EBZW

Peter wrote:

I like to be different. It works for me

Wasn’t a criticism, just an observation.

EGTK Oxford

I didn’t take it as a criticism. I realise where others are coming from, but I have a workflow which works for me and which I don’t like to mess with too much because I fly quite a lot (~180hrs in 2015) and have had many hassles with IT technology packing up at the worst moments.

For example I always print off the approach plates for all destinations and alternates, and rely on PDFs only for unplanned ones. Until some years ago I even used to do long trips with a little portable printer, but now I have at least two means of displaying PDFs, one of which is my phone (Samsung S6 – state of the art ) with reading glasses. I have spent much time testing tablets for sunlight readability and don’t like any of them. The consumer ones are all unsatisfactory, in the TB20 with its big windows (OK in a jet or a TP, because of the small windows).

And in the TB20 there isn’t room to mount anything. So any piece of IT gear has to lie on the kneeboard. That in turn leads to special requirements e.g. the touch screen must be capable of being disabled.

I spend my daily life in IT and get quite fed up with it sometimes. A lot of it just doesn’t work, or it works and then stops right when you need it. And some of it is total crap. Actually a lot of IT is total crap and the only reason the firms stay in business is because their “support” is done by a chimp call centre in India. In GA, one needs two ways of getting mobile internet, for example, and two ways of generating Eurocontrol routes. And two ways of filing flight plans. Been there, done that… and one can spend so much time before a trip making sure both ways actually still work. For example if you update anything on a tablet, you have to re-test all the features before you fly with it. So my tablet is almost never updated and lives in the plane.

So there is a contrarian view

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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