After a month-long annual inspection, the final pieces of the puzzle has finally arrived for the Christavia. The first was a set of rocker cover gaskets to fix an annoying leak I’ve developed over the past year (a MUCH less expensive oil leak than Pat Cunningham’s).

The second piece was a new battery for the venerable Garmin 296. Now when I say battery, I’m not referring to the main power battery in the unit, but rather the “clock battery” soldered to the main board. Most devices use a battery to protect volatile memory in the unit and to keep the on-board “clock” ticking. When they fail, various symptoms may present themselves. In the case of the Garmin 296/396/496 units, the first thing you’ll notice is an extended time required to lock in on the satellites. In my case it went from about 30 seconds to more than 5 minutes.

This, in itself, was not that big a deal. However, the next symptom was that the unit would come up with the wrong date and time… 20 YEARS wrong! Unfortunately, this would not always be noticeable as often the time of day was within an hour of the correct time.

This brings us to the final symptom… the flight timer. When it was in the wrong-date mode, the automatic flight timer would not start up. Of course, I usually didn’t notice until several minutes into the flight when I went to note my take-off time and realized that the GPS didn’t know the flight had started! I guess it figured we were boring along on the ground at 90 kts!

Fortunately, this could all be solved with a “reboot”. Unfortunately, as the situation got worse, it frequently required more than one reboot to fix it. I finally got annoyed enough to bring it in to Northern Avionics and, for a nominal fee, they replaced the battery and my 296 is working like new. If you have one of these units and are having the same problem, it really is worth it to get it fixed.

While I was awaiting the return of the 296, I did a little flying using the AirNav Pro app I downloaded a few years ago. To be blunt, I found it lacking. It was OK as a backup, but not as a primary navigation tool. The old airspace structure for Edmonton was still being represented and YYC’s control zone was simply missing! It was time for something new.

Over the past few years, I have been looking at getting something to augment or replace the 296 but couldn’t quite decide. ForeFlight came out with Canadian mapping last year, but Garmin also promised a Canadian version of their popular Pilot app. Having had several Garmin products and having worked with the G500/600 and G1000 systems, I figured that this would be a good app for me.

However, with the 296 still in the shop, and no other Canadian specific app available, I opted for ForeFlight. Unfortunately, it is not a cheap app. Okay, to be precise, the app itself is free, but if you want the maps, then you need to subscribe. The annual Canadian subscription is $149.95. If you want US mapping, it’s another $74.95 for the basic subscription.

What you get with that is a digital copy of all the Canadian Visual Navigation Charts (VNC), Visual Terminal Area Charts (VTA), Low Altitude Enroute and High Level Enroute charts and Flight Supplement data. Terrain and obstacle databases are also included. The application and your subscribed charts can be downloaded to a number of devices for use at the same time as long as they are used by only one pilot. This allowed me to have a copy on both my iPad Mini and iPhone. To be honest, since I can replace all my paper maps and CFS subscription with the iPad and iPhone, it will likely save me the price of the ForeFlight subscription annually.

The app itself is pretty easy to figure out, especially if you’ve used other mapping devices or apps in the past. There are a few things to get used to like the powerful, but cryptic language used to program in your flight plans. Although not as intuitive as the old Garmin 296, it’s a lot faster to input multi-leg flights when you know the relatively simple syntax. In other words, you will need to read the manual.

In addition to the mapping information available in ForeFlight, it also provides near real-time weather information such as radar and satellite information that can be overlaid on the map. Of course, you will need internet access to get this data. However, there is the Stratus ADS-B device that can be used to extract weather and traffic from the ADS-B network. Unfortunately, this is primarily a US service and won’t do you a lot of good for local flying. It also gives your device better GPS sensitivity.

The new Stratus 2 device will also provide all the same data but adds in an attitude heading reference system AHRS which is displayed in a split-screen within the ForeFlight app as an artificial horizon. For those without an EFIS system or gyro horizon in the panel, this could provide an interesting option. Of course, it comes with a price tag of $899 USD.

I’ve only done one flight using the iPhone app, but what I saw certainly impressed me. One of the neat features is when you zoom in on a location that is covered by both a VNC and VTA. As you zoom in, the mapping will automatically change from VNC to VTA. Also, a single tap on the map will flip from VNC to VTA. The other feature I found quite useful is the distance rings. You can set them up to display at fixed distances around your location (ie. 5, 10 & 25 nm or 2, 4 and 10 nm) or you can set it up to automatically scale the rings based on the zoom factor. It makes it very easy to estimate your distance from a reference point without making any inputs which is great for relaying position reports.

As I play with the app more, I’ll be sure to update you guys. The next step is to get a Ram mount so I can mount the iPad on the instrument panel. I have space set aside for it already. One thing is for sure, I don’t plan on buying anymore paper maps!

Anyway, I hope to see you all at Wednesday’s meeting, the last until September. Although this may be our last meeting of the season, remember that there will be many flying events over the summer, many hosted by club members, the first being this weekend at Glenn Bishell’s field in Carstairs. 