By Mike Davenport, EAA 89102, Langley, British Columbia

Every magazine I pick up has one or more articles on the latest electronic gadget guaranteed to make flying easier, better, and dare I say, more complicated, not to mention expensive.

The genesis of this rant was when I went flying with a friend who by the nature of his day job is more aware than most of the latest ‘toys’ for his aircraft. His aircraft, like mine, is old school but not so for the extras that he has — the iPad with a GPS program, a backup portable GPS, and even a smart watch that tracks his flights and then there is the EFIS app on his iPhone. There was yet another little black box, this one a satellite-connected knee pad. It tracks, among other things, time up and time down and sends it to your smart phone so that you can later make your paper logbook entries. Hmmm, just like the paper on my knee pad. You remember knee pads, don’t you? A place to jot things like the ATIS, runway in use, winds, transponder code, radio frequencies, time up, time down, and there was no monthly fee and no battery.

While I do have (full disclosure) and use a little portable GPS that I love for flying in the lower mainland of British Columbia, which has some very complex airspace, for flight planning, I pull out the paper charts for that area, draw lines and calculate distances and guesstimate times en route, etc. Years back as a new pilot, I loaded my family in a rented Cherokee and flew from Vancouver to Toronto via Chicago through some of the busiest airspace on the continent with (hold your breath) just paper charts. It worked well. Yes, I had to buy all those charts but I only ever need to do that if I’m actually going on the trip, unlike the e-gadget where I must buy it all even if I never want to go there.