Flying with the iPad Apps

[speedbird591]

Clever as it is, its not much different than using the default Cessna panel for all your aircraft. Horses for courses I guess but looks a bit like flying in arcade mode.

Relax, Ben. Nobody's going to make you buy an iPad

If it makes you feel any better, I'm not using the panel to fly the aircraft and I've no intention of doing so. I'm using it in cruise so that I can go full screen and look at the scenery and just monitor the instruments without having to keep cycling the views. Of course, you'd need scenery that was more interesting to look at than a panel to make it worthwhile...

What I'm mainly using the iPad for while flying is the live map, followed by reading the paper, writing emails and checking on CBFS for new ways to wind you up

Ian

[TSR2]

lol, yep, I can see how the moving map would be useful on a second screen and the instruments are a nice bit of eye candy

[speedbird591]

And factor in that I didn't buy the iPad for FS anyway. I've had iPads for a year without them being of any use in FS. So this suite of apps for a total of £16 was well worth a punt even if they turned out to be useless. Which they haven't!

It's still early days so I expect I'll either settle into different ways of using them or find some as-yet-undiscovered, infuriating bug and stop using them

Ian

[PaulC]

Although I'm not the owner of an iPad yet (are you listening Mrs C!) I have the radio frequency app on my phone. It is instantaneous.
It was free so you can test whether you like it. Although I only have the phone, so I couldn't practically have a full set of instruments, I like what I see.

If I had an iPad I would probably use it for supplementary panels and still fly from the VC.

Paul

[DaveB]

Did you know that in his spare time, Ian sells sand to Arabs

ATB
DaveB

[speedbird591]

Did you know that in his spare time, Ian sells sand to Arabs

Did you want some, Dave? I've got it on special offer if you're quick

[DaveB]

I'm good for sand but I'll take about 5sq mtrs of turf off you if you have some

To get back on track (not wanting to drag THIS thread into oblivion).. while I certainly wouldn't buy an iPad to use as an FS addon, if you already have one, it makes sense to utilize it as much as you can and if folk keep knocking these apps up, the more the merrier

ATB
DaveB

[speedbird591]

I thought I'd better add the last one to the collection. It's a full suite of radios including autopilot, adf, transponder and dmes. They're not all visible on all screens but you can toggle between a choice of 4 layouts using the number button top right. The dials, knobs and sliders are slick and smooth and, like the other apps, it changes the aircraft setting immediately. I'll just be swiping between this one, the map and the panel I reckon. Right, I'm going off line for a couple of hours to do some serious flying



Ian

[Paul K]

That radio stack is just gorgeous !

As for the Ipad instruments being modern, no matter what you are flying, I think I could suspend disbelief quite easily. If I can imagine default scenery is the real world down there, I don't think I'd have any problem with a bank of modern instruments while flying a Catalina. Tiger Moth maybe, but with most of the other aircraft, it wouldn't bother me too much

Understand the Itunes connector now...same as my Ipod Nano. By the way Ian, how much memory does your Ipad have ? I see they start at 16Gb now.

[speedbird591]

Hi, Paul. Gorgeous is just the word. It works as good as it looks and I'm very happy with it indeed. It saves a lot of fiddling. Today I did a flight in the Cessna from Bella Coola to Bella Bella which is about 25 mins through the mountains and fjords. I set up a simple GPS flightplan in P3D and saved it. When I switched on the map on the iPad and pressed the flightplan button it immediately displayed all my saved flightplans in P3D for selection. It already knew where I was! I set the autopilot just after take-off and adjusted heading, alt and vs through the iPad. It's easier to adjust the settings in the iPad, particularly the AP which is a bit small on the VC on my laptop and I usually have to zoom in to read the buttons! The panel app wasn't so useful on this leg as I was fairly busy in the VC but it comes into its own on longer flights. The map was the best thing as I could see exactly where I was and set the Nav to GPS until I needed to do some manual flying at the end.

The real test was when I did a circuit at Ketchikan in the 707 which is a real handful, especially with the AP down on the centre console. The climb out was great and I set the climb speed and heading easily. I took it up to 10,000 ft and did a wide circuit to get a feel. Again, the map was probably the most useful app as it was cloudy and difficult to know where I was. It was easy to control the descent and setting a course to intercept the ILS but that's where I found the first problem, which I'd anticipated. Selecting NAV and APR on the iPad AP doesn't move the mode selector on the 707 AP to LOC and GS so that still has to be done in the VC. But so far that's the only 'complaint'. The 707 AP disengages when you switch off the iPad AP OK. The cockpit app came into it's own when intercepting the ILS as the instruments are so much better than the standard 707 ones.

My iPad is the 3rd Gen model with 32Gb memory, wifi and cellular. I've got loads of books, about 30 albums of music, 200 odd photos, 54 apps and a huge amount of manuals in PDF format and I still have about half the memory unused. I think it's video that takes up most space but you can always swap things around to make space. You can store stuff in the cloud or on your PC when you're not using it. 64 Gb is probably over the top.

Ian