Foreflight, Bad Elf and iPad
Judy bought me an iPad for my 50th birthday last September and I immediately put Foreflight on it based on the advice of several customers who had raved about it. The Foreflight/iPad combination has been a winner for me with flight instruction both in the Redbird as well as in customer airplanes. I’ve gotten quite adept at using it and have taken it on trips in and around the local area as well as a couple thousand mile plus GA airplane journeys. For the past eleven months whether I show up in the office or at the airplane all I need to bring is the iPad and a pair of headsets and I’m ready to go from a chart and weather perspective. I’ve been so pleased with the service I actually cancelled my paper Jeppesen subscription in October of last year after only a month on the iPad.
If I had a complaint about this gear it was the onboard GPS would lose position occasionally which would wipe out the geo-location features of the software. I mentioned this to a pilot I fly with occasionally in the Sim as well as in his Cessna Skylane. He had bought a few external GPS modules for his iPad and offered to lend me one for the trip. I had heard good things about the Bad Elf GPS so I asked if I could try that one. The Bad Elf appealed to be because it makes a hard wire connection into the iPad. One of my long standing concerns with using generic non-aviation specific consumer electronics in the airplane is battery life. If the battery goes shingot you’re flying without charts. The iPad with Foreflight running and 3G data enabled really drinks up the battery power. I can usually get about six hours out of it before I have to put it on the charger. Turning Bluetooth on would likely drain more from the tablet. The Bad Elf comes with USB cable allowing you to charge both the GPS and the iPad from a cigarette lighter outlet. Well “charge” is a bad word. It allows you to utilize the iPad and Bad Elf and not drain the battery. I flew for seven hours with the unit on and plugged into the lighter and when I shut down in Oshkosh the battery was charged to the level it had been prior to using it. Disconnecting the elf and using the cigarette lighter charger actually charges the battery.
Anyway I was nervous about making such a drastic change vis-à-vis going paperless so I called Sporty’s and ordered approach planes enroute charts and facility directories for the trip for $80. The morning of our departure I sat at the kitchen table and marked up my charts/plates with post it flags. Once we were in the plane it was a different story, I looked at the first enroute chart and put it behind my seat for takeoff. Once we were in the climb and talking to departure I picked up the iPad and put it on my lap. The Bad Elf had captured and displayed our position on the chart. Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve used this gear for a while but I’ve always been sitting right seat instructing or monitoring the pilot flying. This was the first trip where it was all me relying on the technology.
It worked flawlessly, and if you don’t have one go buy one. If you do any sort of flying aside from saving you a ton of money on charts, the weather functions will eliminate the need to talk to flight service unless you really like speaking with them. Going forward I will print the approach plates (from fltplan.com) for my destination and alternate and just use the iPad and Foreflight for my charts. I could rave about the weather products as well but I’ll likely need something to write about next month.
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