Yes, you should definitely get Navbox PRO and the updates. This program is cheap at twice the price.
If you use a flight planning program to generate the plog (and that is the #1 reason one would use one) you want it to contain the latest waypoints.
Waypoints can be VORs or NDBs (which don't move), or airways intersections (yes you can use those for VFR flight planning; very useful too) and these can disappear; the non-ICAO ones that are used to form STARs/SIDs do get changed around fairly regularly.
Of course you can also use airfields or villages/towns as waypoints but these are close to useless for putting into a real (ICAO) flight plan.
While (VFR context) you will use the printed chart as the primary reference for terrain/obstacles and controlled airspace, it's worth having the current controlled airspace data in the flight planing program, and it will then print correctly on any map sections which you print out from it. This provides a useful second check to your flight planning. CAA charts come out once a year, but your "Navbox chart" will be new every month. As well as the plog, I always print out (from Navbox) a map of the route. It's primitive but it does the job fine, for UK-style VFR/IFR (below CAS) type of flying.
Navbox is also a very good reference, as current as any publication you will find, for airfield contact details; phone/fax numbers, runway types, fuel availability, etc. It isn't 100% accurate in this respect but that is because the info comes from the national AIP for the country in question, and many airfields can't be bothered to supply the right info. Navbox has a man who spends much of his life wading through the AIPs and inserting any changes into the Navbox database; this is what you pay for in the monthly updates. You can't get this for free; well not for the entire area covered.
Navbox could be improved substantially in various little areas but for now it's the best for Europe.
The alternative is Jeppesen Flitestar VFR but not only is it substantially more expensive but also it doesn't even remotely begin to compare on the usability front. I use it for IFR/airways, which is a different planning process.
Another option is a program called PocketFMS which appears to have a dedicated following. It is a group effort, I believe, but without a formal update mechanism. I think this "group effort" thing is a great way to do it because, with imaginative use of public domain data, one can get a much better product without getting done for a breach of copyright. I have not chosen it personally because I want a "properly updated" (which to me means somebody is getting paid for it, so they have an incentive to do it) flight planning program. The data in all these programs will only ever be as good as the people that load it in, and the people that fly to the said areas and moan about mistakes, and GA activity in much of Europe is negligible, so any errors aren't likely to get discovered. I guess PocketFMS is going to be fine in practice for the UK and immediate neighbours though.
Last edited by IO540; 27th Oct 2006 at 08:32.