The iPad. Which Aviation App is the best? Just pick one

I’ve heard a lot of chatter from friends and associates about using an iPad in flight and which aviation application is the superior product. At this point I think the aviation press and bloggers have wasted much ink and pixels about their particular preference. That said I’m going to chime in and clarify it for those of you who are still sitting on the fence in less than ten words.

Just go buy one! What are you waiting for?

I usually attend the two bookend aviation events that start and end the air show season. In April I attend the Sun and Fun fly in at Lakeland Linder Regional Airport in Lakeland Florida and I also attend EAA’s Airventure Oshkosh the last week of July. I’ve been going to the Sun and Fun on and off since 1990 and I’ve attended every Airventure since 2001 consecutively.

Pricing out the aeronautical charts for either one of those trips will explain to you why buying an iPad and ANY charting application is a wise move. Using Sporty’s as a pricing comparison I checked what it would take to fly from my home base in Danbury to Lakeland. I would plan the trip as either IFR or VFR based on whether the weather enroute met my personal minimums, so when purchasing charts for the voyage I naturally I would purchase both formats.  Sportys.com has a chart doctor function where you enter your departure and your destination and whether you’ll be flying VFR or IFR, then it selects the charts you would be need to make the trip based on a route width that the pilot selects.  I chose a 30 mile width and the application chose for me $124.25 worth of charts to make that trip. I added these to my shopping cart so I could see what the selections were. I eliminated the WAC and the TAC charts and two of the sectionals they chose that I didn’t really feel were necessary.  Then I added the extra approach plates for my enroute stops and that brought my total to $93.35. Shipping was the same at $15 so when you add it all up one trip to Florida and back would set me back $108.35

Lets look at the Oshkosh trip. This one is a bit different because unlike going to Florida travelling west in our latitudes generally means we’ll be heading directly into or paralleling fronts. For that reason the charting options must be expanded to include most of the possible routes you might be required to take.

Heading to Oshkosh from Connecticut the big decision for me is always to take the northerly route through upstate and western New York across Ontario Canada then into Michigan or Southerly through Pennsylvania Ohio Indiana Illinois then into Wisconsin. The northerly route usually adds another decision, which is to fly over Lake Michigan or around it. Around the lake to the north adds an additional two sectional charts and another enroute.  Planning for either eventuality makes it a $143 expense to buy the charts for that trip. Considering the event occurs at the end of July the charts usually expire on your way home, technically requiring you to buy another set for the ride back.

So for me to make just those two trips a year would cost $251 in charts that would eventually end up starting my woodstove vs. the $170 that Foreflight Professional or Wing-X Pro cost. And that’s just two trips. What about all the other flying for the rest of the year?  Regardless of your application preference it makes a lot more sense to use the electronic version without consideration all of the neat things features you don’t get with the paper like geo-location.

Last July heading to Oshkosh the iPad was instrumental in our being able to arrive within one day of travel. We dodged some monster storms this past year and flew the entire trip VFR in what I would call marginal VFR at best. Where the iPad really excelled was it gave us the ability to perform ad-hoc routing and course adjustments based on what we saw out the window combined with the data we were receiving from the XM weather product installed in our Mooney.  This was both on the ground for the big picture planning and while we were zipping along down low through myriad airspace and controlling authorities.

The routing for that trip is the subject of a lengthy posting itself, but in a nutshell we circumnavigated bad weather as we wove through Charlie and Bravo airspace in Cleveland, Toledo, Fort Wayne, South Bend, Chicago and Milwaukee We did this VFR with advisories as if we were IFR. So we were talking and squawking to ATC the entire time. It was the only way were able to get where we needed without the normal restrictive IFR routings and altitudes we would be given approaching or going through Chicago.  Additionally flying IFR would have put us in the clouds unable to see where the weather we needed to avoid was. This flexibility, flying VFR in marginal weather came from us having every chart in the national airspace system available to us in the two iPad’s as we flew.

By being able to pinch the display to zoom in from a sectional chart to a TAC we could see where we were going along with the ceilings and floors of the airspace and how that worked with the present weather.  I would devise a routing and Judy would input it into the Garmin 496 and we could see from the XM display how close we would be to the next cell if we chose that routing. 

We would have never been able to accomplish this if we had to keep track of, take out, fold or unfold the next chart and attempt to figure out what we would need to do next. Ultimately we ended circling the south west side of Lake Michigan through Gary Indiana and Chicago then Milwaukee at two thousand feet. This was a routing we had never taken before but we were completely aware of where we were in relation to the airspace and weather by the ever-present geo location icon moving across the map displaying our location exactly.

While we had the Stratus ADS-B product on board the resolution of the weather depicted as we got away from the coast was lacking. Like any other technology it is bound to get better as it matures and is more widely implemented. But for now lets just say that my XM Aviator Pro subscription @$100 a month is well worth the price and with the ADS-B products I have flown with -you get what you pay for. That in and of itself is a whole other posting for another time.