Training and Safety Tip: Know your EFB
Familiarize before flight
An electronic flight bag has become an essential part of your aviation kit. Whatever planning tool you use to prepare for each flight, spend some ground time learning how to get the most out of that software.
I date myself when I tell you that I started my flying career with paper charts. True story: I spent almost two decades using paper charts before one of my instructors dragged me kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. He counseled me on purchasing a tablet computer and subscribing to ForeFlight, and then helped me make sense of it all with an in-depth crash course.
Today, seven years later, I think I have a pretty good command of the software, and I continue to learn more every day, by doing. As I progressed through my advanced ratings, I learned more about the myriad tools that can help us all fly more safely. That said, I am often still dumbfounded any time I discover a new-to-me, endlessly convenient, useful function. A well-designed EFB is a treasure trove of information and analysis that is beneficial to flight safety on so many levels.
It’s important, though, as you’re learning about the capabilities of your flight planning app, to test it from the safety and comfort of your living room on terra firma rather than on the fly in the air. You want to be fully engaged when you are pilot in command, and not have to flip through complicated menus, or figure out how to increase the opacity of the airspace on your screen when you’re on short final to a nontowered field. The kit is supposed to relieve your workload, not increase it.
Just as I strongly believe that it’s important for flight students today to gain experience on an aircraft with steam gauges before flying an all-glass cockpit, I think it’s vital that new pilots learn how to work with old-school planning tools like paper charts and handwritten flight plans before allowing that mini supercomputer strapped to your thigh to take over all of the thinking. It improves airmanship and builds character.
But that said, I’m not a monster, and I also believe these new technologies do increase aviation safety. So, once you have a good grasp of doing things the old-fashioned way, by all means transition to the EFB. Will you ever pick up every possible function available on your tablet and in your software? Probably not. But I encourage you to embrace the challenge and absorb as much as you can.
