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Home  Products Pilot Reports Dennis F. - Mooney
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Dennis F. - Mooney |
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Pilot Reports
My flight was to Asheville AVL from Toronto on Friday afternoon and back today, Anyone in the north east or central US knows it has been quite a week end weather wise. Mist, haze, convective segmets and isolated CBs and major rain/wind storms all over the weather forecast was doable as on my route it was all PROB for the CB's , never the less there was a lot of cumulus build up and heat haze. I would have been uncomfortable doing the flight both ways without this system.
My goal for the system was really for WX avoidance and less for GPS flight planning ( I have a UPS GX65 in the panel). Bottom line AWESOME!! I went with the NAVAir/WxWorx system as I want constant updates (every 10 minutes or less) so worth the $50 monthly charge. While the GPS programming is less than friendly to me (a non PDA user) it works well enough and the WX over the ground overlay with selective Ground or Aviation features depending on distance scale is pretty good. BUT the weather is great - if you cannot afford radar on board or a built in system. Updates never failed , TAFs and METARs on demand but most important that NEXRAD radar with aged lightning strikes.
Combine it with my storm scope and you have a great system for avoiding but note NOT, IMHO, storm penetrating because of the latency. It gives great comfort seeing where the storms were and the intensity, or if is it just cumulus or something more sinister. Coming into Ashville there was a CB right on the field, we could watch as radar vectored us around onto downwind and then final as the storm moved north. - pretty neat we thought.
On our return there was a huge storm north of our destination and a couple of isolated cells south, Approach let us self vector around the southern cells and all we got was a little wet. Coming in to land although IMC we could clearly see the real active weather was still over 50 miles north and so no worries
Bottom line it is IMHO a great system for the price, a few bugs to be sure but AIRGATOR is very proactive on fixes. It also gave the co pilot - spouse great comfort watching us miss the storms as she could watch our progress very well even if we were IMC. Last it fits into the mooney without too many wires as AIRGATOR has a "all in one" harness.
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Testimonials
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I have flown since 1985 and am quitting owing to medical
reasons. I have 6300 plus hours in singles with commercial and intrument
ratings. I have averaged 250 to 400 hours per year especially in the last decade
since I am an author and a lecturer specializing in the fine arts (I was once
the director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.) In fact since 9/11 I
always flew my 182 RG Cessna or my 206 Turbo TKS-equipped to every lecture or
book promotion. For 7 years my wife and I flew to Anguilla for the New Year's
holidays. Last September I flew the 206 from New York to San Francisco and back
(22.5 out and 17.8 back) and had a wonderful time.
I have owned
Airgator equipment virtually since the company started, progressing from an
iPaq to a Navpad. Before that I used another firm's primitive low-earth
satelite system. Without the Airgator superior programs I would never have been
able to avoid dozens of hours of hazardous weather. The beauty of the system is
that it enforces prudence in the air. Many times I saw weather that kept me
happily in a motel room for a night or two. In the air I was able to amend my
clearances repeatedly for safe passages or a confident stop and wait for better
conditions. On the way to San Francisco last September I was able to calculate
from the Airgator data that it would be very unwise to try to get to a field
near Salt Lake from Rapid City and so I made a safe landing at Casper WY. No
other systems I know of would have given me that complex data in minutes.
My 206 had
both the Airgator and the Bendix weather systems. Although Bendix was very
good, Airgator was far more reliable and far more informative. I recently took
my Airgator equipment with me on a Cessna 182 to the Bahamas and was pleased
(yet not surprised) when the Garmin 1000 weather system built into the 182
failed and the Airgator continued so my pilot friend and I could safely
navigate around a pair of seriously threatening t-storm systems.
Since my 206
is allowed to penetrate icing I found the accurate cloud tops and layers vital
for safe navigation through a multiple of cloud layers.
In my opinion
there is no better situation-awareness system than the new 3D horizonatal and
vertical position on the NOAA approach plates.
Bottom line:
Airgator programs makes one a more prudent and professional pilot.
What more can
one say?
Thomas Hoving
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