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How will the PPL be taught when paper charts disappear?

I’ve just read that one of the US chart publishers has packed up, citing lack of business.

Eventually, in PPL training, if this spreads, the schools will have to embrace some commercial product and basically get everybody to buy an Ipad and buy that product.

Then everybody will de facto fly everywhere with a GPS (because all the Ipad products are moving maps) and all the navigation exercises will become meaningless

How is this currently dealt with in say Italy which last time I looked had no usable VFR charts? Do the instructors hand out some local chart fragment? Training is usually very local anyway. Greece has not had VFR charts ever. How do they do it?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Which one Peter?

this one

From US AOPA:

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I guess this is unavoidable. In Norway, the good charts (military charts) are only published as paper, which is equally stupid. There really are no good electronic aeronautical charts available (except the ICAO raster charts, but they are not nearly as good as the military ones, and raster on a pad/phone is not the best combination). Got myself SD now, and the charts used there are not bad at all. So, my thoughts are that SD could publish paper charts themselves, as a special service or something.

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

There are still the official ICAO charts published by the various CAA’s. I personally know the ones for Austria and Germany, but I suppose it will be the same in most/all other countries?

LOAN Wiener Neustadt Ost, Austria

Its inevitable.
I guess paper charts will be used in practice to learn navigation and dead reckoning and then when the student takes the PPL he will be just following the magenta line on a screen.

In Greece the state has no published VFR charts, only VFR routes for routes inside TMAs which is just routes diagrams over white-blue (for water) chart. Useless.

So a private group came up few years ago and started some very good quality charts “only for training”.
http://www.greekhelicopters.gr/helos/?page_id=3132
Flight schools AFAIK use these for teaching and practicing navigation. What each private pilot does after the license is another issue.

LGMG Megara, Greece

I think it’s going to be a while before charts made by (most) CAAs disappear.

I’d never heard of this chart outfit, despite having lived for a few years in the United States. We all just used the FAA charts. I never even bothered with Jeppeson when I was flying IFR over there, I found the FAA charts perfectly acceptable.

Andreas IOM

it is inevitable. It is easier to fly with an electronic flight bag, because many charts fit into a small space. But a good thing about the tools is you can print “cropped charts” which display only the chart area that you need for your flight, which also helps in cockpit space management.

Although I don’t directly dislike GPS or iPads etc as a primary navigation device for VFR, I do worry about what I have seen. I know of a few pilots who have started to fly effectively IFR while VFR and rely on the traffic calls of ATC. They only glance out of the window as part of the instrument scan, of horizon, altimeter, magenta line. One of those uses the magenta line even in the circuit and only looks up on final… I won’t fly with him again.

Scanning out of the window is what I think should be the main focus, even more than today,of PPL training in the future; because VFR is see and be seen. I look out of the window, but is the other guy? And what happens when two pilots are not looking out of the window?

EDHS, Germany

italianjon wrote:

Scanning out of the window is what I think should be the main focus, even more than today,of PPL training in the future; because VFR is see and be seen

And what’s the point of flying if you’re not going to take in the awesome view you get from a few thousand feet up?

Andreas IOM

I hadn’t heard of this chart manufacturer, and have only ever seen FAA produced charts in the US. I think for the US, the immediate future of private pilot will be to use Foreflight or other tablet based presentation of charts and airport data, plus paper charts. I’d imagine most do that now. I don’t think periodically FAA printed charts will be discontinued for a very long time, if ever, because they are useful for training, planning, hangar discussions and the like.

US commercial airport information guides in printed form do seem to be disappearing, I had a subscription for page updates that I didn’t renew and the company called me on the phone. I was almost sad to tell them that loading new pages every time they were updated was just too time consuming, so I’d gone completely electronic. I still keep the old book in the plane.

I agree about looking out the window for VFR flight and don’t see the point in maintaining ATC contact for the vast majority of my flying.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 25 Mar 13:52
46 Posts
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