Calculators for night flying

[Baffo]

In an ideal world, for the purposes of night flying, a simple battery operated backlit calculator would be perfect. Anyone got anything like that, without being the likes of a Psion organiser?

[Dr. Red]

With a little time and patience you can remove the silver backing from your favourite calculator's screen and just replace it with a backlight screen. Just ask at a specialty electronics store.

There can be difficulties with this, though. The rate of battery drain is high, and we all know how batteries like to fail at crucial times.

It can be very difficult to read the display in certain conditions.

Most ready-made backlit devices will be quite large, expensive and probably have functions you don't need.

But then is it really too hard to switch on the cabin light??

Cheers,
Red

[Buzzoff]

Ah, progress! The very first calculator available at High St. prices in the UK was made by Sinclair Electronics (remember the C5? and the Spectrum - 48K and mine had a full word-processor!) This calculator's display was LED-based and was thus perfect for night-flying. Mine lasted for years.

[Self Loading Freight]

Ugh! Fitting a backlight to a calculator sounds like no fun at all -- those LCDs are pretty fragile.

You can get Palm PDAs with good backlights for not very much these days, and they have a calcuator -- advantage being that the 'keys' are on the touch sensitive screen so are illuminated along with everything else. And there's also quite a lot of aviation software for the things.

Otherwise the cheapest option is probably one of those Sharp $30 (ish) organisers, which are pretty crummy but do have backlights.

R

[Loc-out]

Why do you need a calculator, on the flight deck?

Speaking for myself, I find a little mental arithmetic may help stop me going completely brain dead.

[This message has been edited by Loc-out (edited 19 October 2000).]

[Baffo]

Couldn't agree more about the need for some mental arithmetic to stop ending up brain-dead. But then have you tried doing a new loadsheet from scratch (because of completely wrong pax figures brought out to you by the flight despatcher) with one minute to go until your slot time expires? Now that stops you going brain dead....!

[Buzzoff]

Well, funny that but I invariably do the loadsheet in my head - but I always do the Fuelling litres to kilos with a calculator - I don't want to screw up the SG calculation, which I'm sure I would if I tried to do it mentally. I remember the Air Canada 767 and think - "there but the grace of God" etc....

[A320 SFO]

use the map light supplied with your expensive toy or by a cheap torch!!

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Low Energy..Low Profile

[AVPIN]

BUZZOFF

Sinclair Scientific calculator! - BAD memories

Reverse Polish notation ??!!
Battery life about 5 minutes
More spare batteries than pencils on desk for final exams... AND a slide rule to verify the answer !!


Not that old really !!