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:

The author experienced a flight plan failure due to a decommissioned VOR (Manteca/ECA) still present in his EFB's navigation database, despite being absent from updated charts.
This data discrepancy occurs because lower-cost EFB applications often source aggregated navigation data that can be slower to update with FAA changes compared to the highly certified and more expensive data used in panel-mount navigators.
To prevent future issues, the author now manually creates each flight route using current charts for every flight, validating fixes and re-familiarizing himself with the route instead of relying on stored routes.

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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.