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It all started when I went to renew my subscription to Flight Guide. It's a set of
publications put out by a company called "Airguide Publications".
They contain non-official information about airports in the US. The
great thing is they contain(ed) information about the airports that
wasn't in any official source. They list hotels and businesses at or
around the airport, and they have airport diagrams for airports too
small to have official diagrams in the official FAA stuff. They are
(were) awesome tools for the VFR pilot. Although I let it lapse a
couple of times, I had an active subscription for most of the time
between when I got my pilot's license in 2007 through last year.
After I got my instrument rating last fall, I realized my subscription had lapsed, and I went to renew it. Well it turns out that they were changing their format and the old format is no longer available. Huh. I started digging into their web site, and I noticed one of their products called Fight Guide iEFB. Hmm...I wonder what that is and would I want it?
There's a set of descriptions for Electronic Flight Bags (hardware and software), and Airguide has apparently decided to spend a lot of their time building one for the Apple iPad. An EFB application has and displays charting and reference informationt for operating at airports and flying between them. It can contain charts, frequencies and departure and approach information which before pilots carried in their flight bags (the big heavy bags that pilots carry onto the airliners).
At first I didn't feel a burning need to swtich to electronic stuff. While I certainly love gadgets, I have enough to think about when I'm flying. However, I thought about it and did some math. Instrument publications change over a lot faster than VFR publications, some of them every 28 or 56 days. The information in those publications is free (as a product of taxpayer money), but getting them on physical paper costs money. I realized that keeping myself in publications for the parts of the US that I would want to fly in would cost me something on the order of $300 per year. The electronic EFB applications generally require a subscription service; Flight Guide's cost like $75/year for everything I want. Given the great cost efficiency increase by going electronic, I went ahead and invested in an iPad.
The flight guide app does have charting, but I don't think it's the
best app. The one that I use when I'm flying is ForeFlight. It's a great
interface, it's very smooth, and it's very very SIMPLE. I find it's
great to use in the air. Here's ForeFlight on my iPad displaying
instrument en-route charts with a highlight flight plan:
And displaying an instrument approach:
This is roughly my setup when I'm flying:
I have the iPad on my left leg mounted on an leg
mount from Ram Mounts. That's a kneeboard on my right leg
(basically a clipboard with a strap). I have a note pad clipped in it
for writing down clearances and frequencies and stuff. This is
obviously not taken in an airplane; I just took this at home for
illustration purposes. When I'm flying, normally there are rudder
pedals and things in front of my feet instead of, in this picture, a
cat. I've flown with this setup for real, lots in VFR, and also in
simulated instrument flying for practice and in on case an actual
instrument approach. It works very well for me.
What's interesting is that air carriers that carry passengers for hire have been working on getting FAA approval for using iPads for charting devices. This February, a company called Executive Jet Management got approval from the FAA to use iPads (with Jeppesen Mobile TC application) as their charting source (article on Wired) (article on Gadget Venue). The second article is interesting because it says that they have approval to use the iPad as a sole source of charting information.
The reason that I bring this up is that yesterday, United Airlines announced that they are going to be issuing iPads to their pilots to replace bound paper charts and publications. So, for once, this is one trend that I'm actually in on the ground floor!
I've been figuring out how to make proper bar graphs in gnuplot, so
that I could make this chart. This type of bar graph doesn't work
with "with impulses" if you make the line width wide; the bars extend
below the horizontal axis and it looks like crap. Instead, you use
the plot command thusly:
plot './hours_flown_quarters_2011aug06a.dat' with boxes fs solid title
'hours flown per quarter'
Here's the graph of my flying hours through the present. I've done
pretty well over the last year. The important thing is to keep a
steady level of hours to stay current.
I spent a little time walking around the fly mart at Oshkosh. Since it was the last day, the booth selling nice models of airplanes was selling them off fairly cheaply.
I bought a very nice model of a B-52 Stratofortress
bomber. I've always had a connection to that airplane because my
uncle flew them in Vietnam for the US Air Force.
I find the sticker on the bottom terribly ironic:
My wife isn't necessarily a fan of all airplanes, all the time.
However, since the model is made of WOOD, it has a place in our living
room, at least for now. The important thing is, though, that the box
is just the right size for Pangur:
I mostly visited vendors I was interested in and stuff like that at
Oshkosh, and I didn't walk the flight line looking at pretty airplanes
hardly at all. But one thing I did do is take a look at "Fifi", the
only B-29 currently flying.
On the drive back from Oshkosh to Illinois, I got to see a tow
airplane towing a glider aloft. I got a great view of it, but this is
the only photograph of the event that I got. My phone camera (the only one
I could get to easily) kept focusing on the windshield.
The blog software is working (mostly). I don't have the sub-blogs linked from the main page I just realized; I'll have to take care of that soon.
I've made this goal before, but I'll make it again. Now that I have a basically-functional blog, I'm going to post every day here for a month. I won't always have photos, but at least every couple of days have something pretty to look at.
I went to the Airventure Oshkosh airshow Saturday and part of Sunday. It was cool, what I saw. I ended up not walking around and looking at planes very much because I had specific things to do and people to talk to. So I didn't take very many photos.
One I did was some sky writing that was going on. My mother once said that "skywriting" didn't actually write, they generally just did circles. This was probably in response to something in a children's book that had an airplane producing perfectly ligible writing. This writing isn't as good as if you printed it, but it's pretty good considering it's smoke suspended in the air and is at the mercy of wind.
Here the airplane is just finishing the "G" in "Oregon", which is a pretty long letter to write on a windy day, particularly when the "E" has 4 separate segements. Most of the time when I take pictures of stuff at Oshkosh, it tends to be of specks which are too far away to see clearly. Most of the time I want more zoom on my camera. This is one of the very very first times I've wanted a wider-angle lens at Oshkosh.