IFR with an iPad

[Colonel]

Not sure if you guys are trying to be funny or not but …

They both have a SPOF of the L1 1.575 Ghz.

Both also share the same software so a bug in one will also occur in the other.

You guys are pulling my leg, right?

[David MacRay]

Fair enough I was ignorant of the letters and numbers you mention that make Apple products insufficient for navigation. I certainly trust you that they are significant.

Last time I navigated, same as every time before then, I looked at a VNC and compared it to what I saw outside the plane I was flying.

I’m not kidding about the fact that I can’t muster any energy to get emotional about pilots doing stupid illegal things. Including but not limited to whatever the guy in the video that started this discussion was doing with his iPad.

If I ever personally use something electronic to navigate with, I promise to stick with something certified for that purpose, even though it will be more expensive than a smartphone or tablet.

Though I might someday bring my Garmin hand held non aviation moving map GPS unit on a trip to cheat and give out ETAs.

I feel validated about the fact that until relatively recently I was still concerned about the fact electronic devices can fail… so as long as I can, I will bring a paper chart onboard. Maybe I will draw something when they just refuse to print such things if I go flying then.

Everyone is entitled to make fun of me for being weird/old. I’ll make fun of people like the guy in the original post, that suddenly couldn’t understand where the controller wanted him to go, after his chart was unavailable. “Uh, I don’t know where that is. My iPad died.”

[Colonel]

It is far too easy to become dependent upon technology which works most of the time. I am a horrible pessimist - which may very well explain why I am still alive vs all my friends who have died in airplanes - and I expect all the toys to fail me at any time.

The kids here - younger than my offspring - simply cannot believe that I have no nav in the panel, and no portable devices. I don’t even have a heading indicator or artificial horizon.

After the marine layer burns off, I use my eyeballs in the 100 mile vis and a high school knowledge of geography to navigate. The Pacific Ocean is to the west, and the coast runs north/south.

Various toy zealots have screeched for decades that if you don’t have toys, you’re not a safe pilot. A good example is VHF comm. We are told you must have it, and it will keep you safe at an uncontrolled airport. Bullshit. It is designed for failure. When you most need it, all you will hear is a heterodyning squeal on a busy sunny weekend and quite possibly a stuck mike and an ensuing cockpit conversation over the ICS.

Then we are told that for safety, we all need ADS-B and iPads in the cockpit to look for traffic in the pattern. No need to look outside any more, we are told.

More naive bullshit. Watsonville happened.

[Squaretail]

and I expect all the toys to fail me at any time.

I mean there's also the flip side of this where over zealous instructor types have some sort of bizarre fantasy failure they like to drill down on. While I have seen gps units fail, its a far cry from the bad ol' days where you could barely trust that old ADF or VOR unit was going to keep you within error even when it was working. The most likely cause of the GPS unit failing is a electrical failure, in which case you got a whole shit load of problems to sort out, but I always like how some will stack on top of that how some bizarre EMP event has also knocked out every other device you have.

I mean I get your point, I'm about as big of a tech resistant luddite as there is, but with tech people need to use it as appropriate. After all if someone is still out there flying IFR without a decent GPS, they should have their head looked at. I think the thing that drives me crazy is how many pilots don't learn to use what's in the panel and instead rely on what ever apple product or facsimile that obstructs the view to said panel instead. Garmin makes an intuitive product.

[TundraTire]

The most common IPad failure we see is overheating, from sitting in the window all day.

[Colonel]

Electronics does not like heat. Consider those plastic green static sunshades you slap on the inside of the window.

Also get some air moving across it. Hardware loves that. And latent heat of evaporation.

When I was at cisco, we tried to sell customers on liquid cooling the core routers. This was 25 years ago, and they said No Bueno. Too bad, the thermal capacity of any fluid is enormous. We had a problem that we had so many fans, the noise was unacceptable. Forget about the MTBF, some poor mouse running across the floor is going to get sucked up into the rack.

Funny how stuff remains the same. My kid has a liquid to air intercooler on his 6L V-12 twin turbo AMG SL65.

[Colonel]

Food for thought: it’s public knowledge now that the latest phone has 19 billion gates. It was a back-breaking, insane amount of work. Spent a year of my life on it.

I’m ridiculously proud of how good it is. But please don’t bet your life on consumer electronics. The complexity of the hardware and software would simply blow your mind.

Any first year engineer knows that complexity and reliability do not come easily, together.

[David MacRay]

Well I figure an ipad is probably great for giving me a pretty good idea of my position, speed, ETA and where the destination airfield is. That’s theoretical though, I have never had one with me.

A nice Garmin product might be even better.

I just enjoy looking outside at stuff. That’s a big reason I like flying. I also like paper charts, they’re fun for me.

[Colonel]

I love paper charts too, until they blow out of an open cockpit, never to be seen again.

My Dad lost a headset that way, leaning out the side of a Harvard.

Me, flight planning a trans-continental flight of biplanes. Yes, those are cans of AvBlend.