Things have changed quite a bit in the general aviation arena. One of the great changes for the positive has been the advent of the EFB (electronic flight bag.) In the good old days, you were required (and still are) to have the appropriate aeronautical charts and flight planning for wherever you are planning to fly. These charts are updated twice per year, which means for me, buying two types of charts twice each year. About a $30 expenditure. No big deal. If you were going on a long cross country flight you might have to buy half a dozen charts just for that flight as well as the associated facilities directories. Now it is getting expensive. Additionally, these sectional charts could be unwieldy in the cockpit. All this stuff normally you would keep in some sort of flight bag, along with your whiz-wheel (E6-B mechanical computer), some rulers to make measurements and draw lines on the map and a bunch of pencils.

Over the last five years or so, the advent of FAA approved electronic maps and data sytems has made life a lot easier. For $100 per year I can get all the maps, Facilities Directories and weather briefings that I want with an app called ForeFlight, an EFB. There are other ones, but my friend Rodney (a retired B-52 driver) showed it to me and I was hooked. On my little iPhone, I have all that I am required by the Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs) to have. What more could you ask for?

Well, this is a very capable app which means it is very complex. There is a user manual which tops out at 441 pages. So what is a fella to do? Well, I fiddle around with the app and try to do stuff then search the manual (ctrl-F) to find what I need to know. As with so many other complex things (like my video editing software) nothing beats messing with it and watching YouTube videos. The way I figure, learning to do something with ForeFlight while airborne is not going to be a safe thing to do, so I need to learn it on the ground. When flying,you have to keep your head up and looking all the time for the idiot in another airplane who is trying to kill you.

The next time I go flying (hopefully tomorrow), I will have ForeFlight all programmed for what I want to do then just enjoy the flight.