If I print the VFR charts all the time I can just as well buy two sets – that’s a lot cheaper :-)
If I print the VFR charts all the time I can just as well buy two sets – that’s a lot cheaper :-)
For the price of a complete set of VFR charts for the last ten years (in which I did maybe two private VFR flights myself) I could have bought an excellent printer, a heap of paper and even the computer to feed it with data :-)
until last year: CAA half mil for UK , Cartabossy for France, JeppVFR for Germany/Spain
navigation mainly using Garmin Aera on the yoke and old monochrome GPS in panel
from this year: Skydemon for everything, backed up by Cartabossy UK/France/Germany when Ipad gets confiscated by my kids (usually 5 minutes into the flight)
with Garmin Aera/panel GPS still main navigation devices, skydemon for updated airspace and notams mainly
IFR: print out AIP charts for destination and alternate on a4 paper, ipad with whole AIP set
haven’t touched a Jepp IFR chart or Aerad for some time
fortunately the stacks of Jepp or Bottlang binders have been relegated to the attic.
I find it problematic that you “teach” something.
In my experience, students will just naturally do it either one way or the other on their very first nav-ex flights.
It seems it is a gene thing that divides us pilots into tthe track up and north up groups.
Let them do what us natural for them.
Teaching them something is like teaching small kids to grab the spoon with the right hand only.
FYI, I have recently heard that Skydemon is about to solve the problem with the TMA VFR sectors in Italy. It took them about one year, without previously ever issuing any type of warning to their customers.
However, the fundamental problems still sussists (i.e. any aeronautical information that is only published in a “map-format” or other information that is not part of the AIP at all). As an example, the french national parks (effectively prohibited areas) are still not shown in SD.
SD will eventually have to fix those issues otherwise Jepp will (eventually…….) eat their lunch in the major non UK markets (Germany, Benelux).
What next – isn’t the VFR section of the CPL/IR a bit of a charade, in that the nearest that 99% of the customers will ever get to “VFR” will be a visual approach to a runway (yeah, I know that is an IFR procedure 
), and if they were flying “GA” they would use some GPS device?
I find it problematic that you “teach” something.
Our students pay a lot of money to become airline pilots. If I teach them something in the beginning that needs to be retrained differently again at a later stage, they will (rightly!) ask “why didn’t you show it to us that way in the first place?”.
If I were to instruct someone who is going to fly privately for himself only, of if someone comes to me at a later stage in his training and already is used to hold his chart in a certain way, then I couldn’t care less. He may have a slightly harder time doing the instrument scan when he does his first type rating, but that’s not going to be my problem then.
Highly standardized ATPL training cannot be compared with typical mixed VFR/IFR flying most of us here do. I am SURE that Lufthansa does only track up up too … because in such an environment all you care about IS the track. But in a GA cockpit with printed VFR maps NORTH UP still does have some advantages, at least to me :-)
In fact, those ATPL sausage machine cadets are not taught to become pilots in the classic sense, they are “flight managers”. Really a different world than the GA scene.
Well it really depends too: I have a close friend who flies A340-600s, but he was F-104 pilot and a Tornado instructor and flies 172s regularly, and I know another guy who was a 767 Captain for AA and has a HANGAR full of planes
… and then I met this other guy in the tennis club and when he saw that that i was studying an approach chart on my iPad he made a comment from I understood he is a pilot too. I asked him and he’s an A320 captain and after 5 minutes I realized that the guy is absolutely not INTERESTED in flying. Comments like “It’s my job”, “i would never fly in small airplanes again”, “i have not been to GA airport in 20 years” … I showed hin some pictures of the SR22 on the ipad and he had NO IDEA what it was. “There’s small planes with glass cockpits today?” he asked ….My A340 told me that sometimes he tells his 1st officer to fly a manual ILS approach in bad weather (because he’s check captain too)… and many times the young copilots almost REFUSE to do it and he can see that they’re scared … “Do I really have to do that, Captain”?
