What is the ‘this’ to which you refer, Baswell, that ‘will mostly be a thing of the past’? Are you referring to:
- entry to controlled airspace without a clearance?
That would be the one.
Last year at NATFLY some government employees that would know these things told me for the first time in years, VCAs went down. Now correlation does not equal causation, but what happened that year? Thousands of weekend warriors started flying with big aviation maps on their iPads.
It'll be interesting to see how the numbers are going now!
How will ATC, watching that blip tracking towards or skimming along the boundary of controlled or restricted airspace, know if the PIC:
- is ‘blessed’ with an iPad or not?
- understands what the iPad is telling her?
Maybe we should introduce a new squawk code: 1201 - VFR and know what they hell I am doing. ;-)
What about all the non transponder equipped aircraft you can't reliably pick up, especially altitude, skimming along the bottom of steps near all the major airports? Or on top of Romeos?
GPS is the major cause for most GA violations of CAS in Europe...I do not know the situation down under.
CASA claims people pressing "direct to" without consideration is a major problem here too. Doesn't surprise me with the average GPS you find in VFR aircraft. Tiny displays (if they have a map display at all) and ancient never updated databases.