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Photo: by Robert Goyer

As my envious friends are aware, I’ve had an Apple iPad in my hot little hands for the past two weeks. They are right to be envious. To put it in a nutshell, it rocks. It’s a great music device, a fabulous web browser, a wonderful e-book and magazine reader, and a big bright and colorful photo slideshow viewer. I carry it around with me all the time now.

From an aviation point of view, the iPad is an interesting device: Interesting as in really great and interesting as in a bit troubling.

The good is easy to see. It’s big, bright, fast and plenty powerful, with a great touch screen and a long, long battery life, and because it’s all solid state, you don’t have to worry about a fragile hard drive. The very first thing I thought when I saw an iPad was:  Approach chart reader. It was a good thought. It excels at that, I’ve learned.

 But it’s a lot more than a mere e-chart viewer. The 3G model, as you might know, has a GPS in it, a good one, too. Apple says that the non-3G model has “A-GPS,” but it doesn’t have GPS at all. It triangulates its position based on wifi, or some darn thing. Go up in the air and it has no idea where it is. As I point out in an upcoming story, the 3G model is the one you want if you’re a pilot.

The apps available already—and it’s only been out a few months—are amazing. One, called WingX Pro7, has digital moving maps with geo-referenced approach charts and integrated weather and DUATS integration. Plan, fly and record your flight all in one place. In this case there’s nothing the iPad is doing that any number of non-certified portable GPSes don’t already do. It’s a different platform is all.

The thing that the iPad isn’t is an attitude indicator. Neither is any handheld device. For use in an emergency, well, I’d take my chances with the wet compass before I’d trust an iPhone--that’s where I stand. Thank goodness there are lots of better choices between those extremes.

To tell you how far this app thing has gone, Wing X Pro 7 is used as the primary navigator in the panel of the iCub, an LSA. Is that a good idea? I guess . . . . The iPad seems well enough made, LSAs don’t need certified avionics, the MFD doesn’t do anything flight critical. So why not?

The problem is that there’s no vetting of companies who produce apps. I know the kind of quality that Garmin, Honeywell, Aspen and Avidyne produce. And I know the FAA is enforces its standards on certified avionics manufacturers. It makes avionics expensive, true, but it ensures that they meet the very highest standards. Which is as it should be. It's a matter of life and death, after all, and not a game. So when Honeywell makes a portable device, I have a pretty good idea of its quality, even though it isn't certified, as their avionics are.

On the other hand, anyone can develop an app in their spare bedroom, hang out their virtual shingle and start doing business, sounding every bit like an avionics companies, which they’re aren’t.

This Wild West of app development gives us pilots a lot of choices, true, but the flip side is, there are bound to be some real bad choices in the mix. The main phone lines at some of the companies I called to get more info on apps I reviewed were answered by the president and CEO of the company. The cost of admission to this industry is shockingly low. Which doesn’t necessarily imply anything. Some of the best apps I’ve been testing are produced by very modest operations. Some of the worst ones I’ve tried are too.

The important thing to remember is, the FAA has got it right on this one. These devices are solely advisory in nature and do no harm. When we use them, we should all strive to keep that in mind.

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Check out my story on 10 cool aviation apps for the iPad in an upcoming issure of Flying. Spoiler alert . . .  the iPad is a surprisingly good flashlight.