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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 finally got Ubuntu installed on my new laptop. I'm writing this entry with it. Here's the dining room table, right before I left. I'm backing up the old laptop and installing and updating the new one (lower right).
I now have the blog front page mostly in shape. There's now month and year archives, and all the pages link to the main page and all the sub-pages.
I abandoned blogger and the original craigsteffen.net in December 2009. I instated a new site then and set up blogging in pivot. I created entires there until May of 2010. I wasn't able to get the pictures from blogger working in pivot nor pivot to do entry categories. So I decided to write my own. It's taken a year and more. But now It's almost usable.