I had decided to spend £1000+ on a larger colour gamin unit. That was before I bought the GPS dongle for my laptop. Using Navbox to create a route, Memory Maps with the route from Navbox and the netbook I already had, I found that the PC could do just what I wanted the colour Gamin to do. Plot my position on the latest charts that were digitally stored in Memory Map when flying. I saved over £1000 and had brilliant results.

Now SkyDemon is here and it's much much better than Navbox and better value. Problem is InFlight doesn't work on a PC (though I bought that as well). I now use Skydemon to plan my flight - it's fantastic for that. But as I don't want to buy yet another PDA or GPS unit, I still have to resort to exporting the route and then importing to Memory Map. Worse as the export from the SkyDemon Plan doesn't seem to be readable from Memory Maps, I first export it to my Garmin unit, then import it from the Garmin to Memory Maps and off I go.

Now that tablets are on their way, with built in GPS, phone, a size manageble in a plane but bigger than a PDA, light and with good batteries surely it makes sense to put InFlight on a PC platform or as a poor substitute have SkyDemon Plan track using the GPS! Surely if you've got the software working on a cut down version of Windows it's not too much a step to run it on Windows XP, Vista or 7. It's a sensible move the only people who won't be happy would be Garmin!

Note I still fly with the Garmin as it gives me a few saftey feature (though I believe InFlight could replace those too).