Beagle
I agree with you; I was just picking up a point made by the person I was responding to.
SS
I never treat handhelds in any comtempt, don't be ridiculous. Some handhelds are brilliant, and because you can load a flight plan into them from a laptop, in some ways much better than IFR approved panel mounts.
I just think the £100 camping-shop handhelds, which need manual waypoint entry using lat/long coordinates, have two big problems:
1) they introduce sufficient scope for gross errors in data entry
2) they don't give you the situational awareness of a decent moving map unit
Your 737 scenario isn't relevant to typical GA. Usually, a 737 is lined up on the runway, up goes the power, climb straight ahead for a bit, then get radar vectors (forget the SID), more radar vectors, climb at 2000fpm+ straight through all the icing layers (and with a TAS high enough to make airframe icing barely relevant), more radar vectors, then DCTs (under radar control) all the way to destination, vectors through descent (forget the STAR), vectors onto the ILS, coupled autopilot landing. CAS is a complete and total non issue, as are danger areas, en route notams, weather except in terminal areas and high level en route. I've flown European airways myself and even at FL150 it is sufficiently different to what we are talking about here to be irrelevant to the debate. And BRNAV GPS is mandatory
