Check Your Data

At the airport, Ill pull the airplane out of the hangar, preflight, and hop in. Once inside I get the ATIS and clearance before starting the engines. That morning Tower was still closed-Im a morning person-so in good VMC, I planned to launch VFR and pick up my clearance in the air from Center. With the engines running, I uploaded the flight plan from Pilot. Thats where the first sign of trouble popped up; my Garmin GTN 650 didnt like the flight plan from my Garmin Pilot EFB. It was fine last time. What the…

Frank Bowlin

Saturday, December 28, 2019 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

A pilot encountered flight plan issues when a decommissioned VOR (Manteca/ECA) remained in his EFB's navigation data, causing a mismatch with current charts and ATC.
The discrepancy stemmed from lower-cost EFB databases using aggregated data sources that are not as rigorously updated and validated as certified navigation data, allowing obsolete fixes to persist.
As a lesson learned, the author now manually creates and validates each flight route using current charts instead of relying on stored routes, emphasizing the importance for pilots to cross-reference their navigation data due to accelerating VOR decommissioning.

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One of the routes I fly frequently is from my home base in Santa Fe, NM, to the San Francisco Bay Area. Now, the Bay Area isn’t known to be particularly inexpensive for anything, but if you shop around you can find not-completely-unreasonable fuel prices. Most times when I’m going that way, my destination is Bryon, CA, C83, because it consistently has the lowest fuel prices in the area.

In fact, my trips to the Bay Area are frequent and consistent enough that I’ve got a stored route: KSAF-PUMPS-KITTN-KATTS-ECA-C83. And, that’s where the trouble began on my latest trip.