can you explain why you regard NAvbox better than PocketFMS? Besides the fact that PFMS runs on a PDA. It can be ran on a Tablet PC as well
Only because Navbox has a man working there who gets the AIPs each month, or when they come out, and stuffs any changes into the Navbox database.
From what I have seen of PocketFMS (I have not used it) it looks a very nice product, but the update process for it isn't rigorous (
AFAIK). It's probably fine in the UK, where there is a lot of GA activity but further out it isn't going to get tested as well. I have a bit of a bee under my bonnet about this subject, having played with several U.S. flight planning products which "supported Europe" and which turned out to be useless over here.
A lot depends on how one is using this stuff though.
Normally, in
VFR, you use the
printed chart as the primary terrain and CAS reference, and the flight planning program is used as little more than a fancy blog generator, with the option to print off a simple map showing the route. Even so, it is a huge timesaver.
Obviously it helps if the airports, navaids and intersections are in the right place, but they probably will be since everybody making flight planning software simply extracts the lat/long of these from one of the public aviation databases (the recently-closed U.S. DAFIF, Eurocontrol, etc) in as automated a manner as they can.
Similarly, terrain won't change so if you ripped off some contour chart 10 years ago, and did it right, it will still be just as good. Obstacles do change but you are using an up to date printed chart for the MSA, right?
The benefit of an accurate and rigorously updated flight planning program is that you can click on an airport, get the phone/fax numbers, avgas availability, PPR requirements, etc.
AFAIK every flight planning program, and also books like Pooleys, simply extract this out of the national AIPs. The UK AIP is pretty accurate but elsewhere in Europe this isn't necessarily the case, with duff phone numbers etc being common. This of course somewhat undermines my argument for Navbox, but I still find it accurate for the most part - as far as Greece.
The GPS moving map application is arguably a separate requirement. It would be great if the best flight planning app also did the best GPS moving map, but in practice this is hard to achieve since something compact enough to use in the cockpit is basically cr*p for ground based tasks. The nearest is probably a top-end Tablet PC but you probably want to plug a keyboard and a trackball/mouse into it when doing flight planning.
Personally, I separate the two tasks completely.
On the ground I use a compact but ordinary laptop for flight planning (which also has WIFI+GSM+GPRS so I can get weather on it, fax PPR etc) and it runs Navbox for VFR and Jepp Flitemap for IFR/airways. This is a really slick setup and very easy to do. I even carry a little printer, a Canon IP90 (and there are smaller ones), on long trips away.
In the air I use a panel mounted IFR GPS for primary nav and this can drive the autopilot etc. For UK OCAS messing about I run Memory Map on a 8" tablet PC and this shows all the CAS nicely. Anybody busting CAS with one of these has no excuse at all. I have also run MM on a HP4700 640x480 PDA but I need reading glasses to see it
On IFR flights I run Flitemap on the tablet as a monitoring device (it also shows the nearest airport, etc) but the hard drive on it fails at FL140...
Sorry for the long answer, which I hope is useful.