My New Year’s resolution was to stop being a flying dinosaur. The two key ways I plan to avoid the tar pits of extinction are to get a glass panel in ZS-FPI and to start using some of the clever electronic aids to flight planning.

Last year, when we left in a rush for the Botswana Safari, a friend e-mailed me neat flight plans produced on EasyPlan. I was amazed at how professional it all is. True and Magnetic headings were all worked out with ETAs at the key boundaries and key frequencies were neatly printed out. All the conceivable parameters such as bearings, headings, expected arrival times and fuel are available. It even produced a weight and balance for ZS-FPI and could have produced checklists. And for us map using die-hards – it does of course have a map with your route neatly marked, with all the latest airspace information.

EasyPlan covers the whole of Southern Africa. The maps make flight plotting as simple as just clicking on the map to enter start and end points. The position of en-route way points and boundaries such as FIRs or TMAs is automatically calculated. If you then enter or download the wind from WeatherSA, EasyPlan generates your flight plan and flight log. Usefully, EasyPlan maps are likely to be more up to date than paper maps as the airspaces are updated on a regular basis as part of a yearly subscription. The flight log can be printed out as a neat log that fits on a compact knee or clip board. EasyPlan will also produce a vertical flight plan showing ground clearance. The printout includes columns for you to fill in your revised ETA and ATA during the flight.

To make your pre-flight preparations even easier the Flight Plan produces a standard format flight plan that can be faxed directly to briefing.

For in-flight use, there is EasyCockpit, the GPS moving map version that operates on palm-sized computers (PDAs, phones or tablet PCs with a GPS receiver) running on Windows OS. With EasyPlan a GPS interface allows you to upload the route to a Garmin GPS.

And when the day’s flying is done it features an electronic log book in CAA approved format.

Some comments from other EasyPlan users;

“Easy Plan takes the schlepp out of flight planning, and is superb for scenario planning”:

“We live in exciting times with technology continually improving - I say embrace it! Makes my flying a whole lot more accurate, my planning more thorough and my radio work more precise.”

EasyPlan is distributed by the friendly Andrea Antel at Aviation Direct.

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Phone 011 465 2669

Web www.aviationdirect.co.za