BEagle
Your attitude to airfield plates on computor shows how little long distance flying you must do in a light aircraft, a set of UK and near europe Jepps (IFR) and the Jeppesen Botlang VFR manual runs to six books each of about 2KG plus the bag to carry it all and you have total used 14Kg of payload or to put it another way half an hours endurance or sixty miles range.
As access to the aircraft at larger airports can be limitted the whole kit plus personal bags needs to be transported to the hotel if you don't want to spend the first 2 hours of each flying day at the airport flight planning.
Enter the small laptop and printer at about 25% the weight of the books and able to connect to the web for the airfield plates, WX, computor plogs, flight plan forms in AFTN (to cut down on fax time) and soon to file flight plans direct.
Yes we do print paper approach plates for the destination and diversion airfields and have a paper plog, because the computor is updated by CD the amendments take 126 seconds to do, the header on the plate will tell you if the plate is not within the current amendment cycle so the chances of using a superseded plate are almost nill.
Flight planning can all be done in half an hour before breakfast at the hotel, the flight plan filed by fax. So no more rushing around airport offices trying to find Met and flight planning and then waiting an hour for the flight plan to get into the system.
Jeppesen tell me that the Botlang VFR plates are soon to be avalable on "Jepview"................... the sooner the better in my view!!
Last edited by A and C; 29th December 2006 at 16:58.