Electronic flight bag?

Question

tell me more about your experiences about using Electronic Flight Bags.

are there any features you would want added?

any complains? about ease of use, costs, etc

anything to praise?

Answer 1

*****are there any features you would want added?****

XM weather.

Answer 2

I had one and no longer do. It had XM weather. The biggest drawback to me was its size in a smallish cabin like mine (C-172). It was handy having everything in one place like approaches, charts, weather and all. But realistically, I don't fly all over the country, just CA, OR, NV, and AZ most of the time.

I find it much more convenient to have a Garmin 496 with XM weather, a good online flight planner on which I can either print all the charts I want and/or just download them on my little Sony laptop, or occasionally, just resort back to paper (how quaint!)

The other complaints I had with mine (Motion Computing LS800) were that the display was never quite bright enough (the Sony is actually much easier to read) and that it was glitchy. Had a lot of problems. Would sometime not read the weather receiver and sometimes it would shut itself off in mid-flight and needed to be completely rebooted. The other thing to remember about EFB's is the hard drive. If you are flying above 10K unpressurized, its best to get a solid state HD as conventional HD's can glitch up over 10K feet.

If I had to do it over again and not have a good GPS, I would probably go with one of the models with synthetic vision built in; I have seen them and they are pretty amazing. Almost all of these start around $5K for complete packages with the computer, GPS, XM, etc.

Answer 3

i would like internet access and movies. it is definitely not as easy to use as having the jepp charts in front of me but i'm sure it saves the company lots of money.