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 discrepancies when a decommissioned VOR was present in their EFB's navigation data but not on current charts or recognized by ATC.
This problem highlights that navigation data quality varies significantly between low-cost EFB applications (which use less rigorously updated, aggregated sources) and expensive, certified panel-mount databases.
To avoid future issues, the author has stopped using stored routes and now manually creates and validates each flight plan with current charts, recognizing the increased risk due to ongoing 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.