How you can use an Apple a day
Being a Macintosh user, I have watched from the sidelines as one tantalizing aviation program after another has sprung from fertile minds. Owing to a computer universe strongly tilted in favor of DOS systems (IBM-compatibles), developers have, for the good reasons of marketing and profitability, concentrated on products for DOS machines. Thus, Mac programs move to the back burner, if they ever get to the development stove top at all.
Well, finally, aviators with Macintoshes can enjoy much the same programs as their DOS friends. Chief among these relatively new Mac programs are MentorPlus's FliteStar flight planning software and Azure Soft's Elite flight simulator. Both of these programs take full advantage of the Macintosh's inherent graphics capabilities and are extremely sophisticated.
Aurora, Oregon-based MentorPlus began with the FliteStar for IBM in 1990, and while a number of companies have been hinting at Macintosh flight planning software, the firm has been the first (and so far only) to deliver. The Mac version debuted late last year.
High-resolution graphics make the Macintosh go, and FliteStar takes full advantage of them. What's more, FliteStar has so many features and variations that to describe them here would be the height of cumbersome prose — so the basics then.
You can start planning your flight in a number of ways: asking for a routing from departure to destination via a direct route, great circle (depicted by latitude/longitude for loran/GPS users or by distance/bearing to a VOR for RNAV types), Victor airway, jet airway, or point to point. Initiating a plan this way is simple, and the machine will spit out waypoints and figure distance, time, fuel burn — the whole enchilada, so to speak — based upon a detailed performance model of your airplane. A number of models comes with the database, but creating one is a quick affair.
The route is depicted on a detailed map, which can show airports, navaids, intersections, state lines, rivers, major cities, airways, and restricted airspace — the database is Jeppesen's NavData package. Preferences in what is shown can be preset for a number of screen ranges. The beauty of this kind of depiction is that you can plan a trip direct to the destination and then check the map to see if the course will punch through a military operations area or restricted area; rerouting to avoid the roadblocks is as easy as using the mouse to "rubber band" the route to a new waypoint. It's all very simple, very intuitive, and fast.
Once the route is determined, the fun begins. Using winds-aloft information from DUAT, FliteStar will figure the winds for your altitude and route location and plug them into the equation. With those numbers crunched, you can ask the program to pick the best flight altitude for the winds. In doing so, FliteStar will give you a menu of altitudes, total trip time, fuel used, and cost of the flight (if you have the costing information plugged in). This is a marvelously handy feature for operators of turbocharged airplanes who can't always decide if going high is worth the trouble. One glitch: FliteSoft can't tell the temperatures from the winds-aloft numbers, so you'll have to jot them down and plug them in yourself.
Weight-and-balance information on your airplane stored in the system will help you figure fuel and passenger loadings and is a fine tool for the many "what ifs" encountered in flight planning. The information is displayed in graphic form.
When you have done the digit manipulation, FliteStar can print out an FAA-style flight plan form, a flight log (which can be cut and pasted to word processing programs for further manipulation, if you like), a flight-cost breakdown sheet, or an ICAO international flight plan form.
The features previously mentioned are just the tip of the FliteStar's iceberg, and once familiar with the program, it's possible to really make it sing. Its level of sophistication can be breathtaking at first but soon becomes second nature.
Of course, that sophistication takes computing power. I first used the program on a Macintosh SE, basically a slow, second-generation machine. Then, my relationship with FliteStar was genuinely love/hate. All the features worked as planned, but completion of some of the more involved calculations (like finding a Victor airway route between two distant airports) was painfully slow. Be forewarned: If you have an older Mac, get a thorough demo on a machine of the same speed. You might find the program too sophisticated for your computer. On faster machines, the program works very nicely and consumes 8.4 megabytes of hard disk space. Prices vary, depending upon the database options; North American coverage runs $295, European coverage runs $495, and a worldwide database boosts the price to $895.
As a follow-on to both Mac and DOS versions of FliteStar, MentorPlus recently introduced a PC-based moving-map display, called FliteMap. Using an IBM-compatible laptop or palmtop or a Macintosh PowerBook, the map connects to a loran or GPS receiver for position information. Though we haven't had any cockpit time with the FliteMap, if the graphics are as good and as simple to use as those on FliteStar, this could be a hummer of a product. As with FliteStar, prices are determined by the extent of the database, ranging from $395 for North American coverage to $995 for worldwide coverage.
Flight planning and flight simulation are among the two hottest software markets, and for Macintoshes, there are two sim programs of note. AzureSoft's Elite, which was reviewed in the December 1990 issue of Pilot, and T-34 Microsystems' Cross Country are at two ends of the spectrum. Elite is a highly developed, tremendously realistic program, one that will leave you feeling as though you had really flown that approach. The program itself has undergone numerous small changes but is largely the same as the version tested in 1990. It keeps its superlative graphics and colorful display, along with a small window showing the view out the windshield. (But because you'll be using the Elite for instrument practice, you won't see much of anything out there, will you?)
What's changed most is the Elite's pricing structure. A new version, basically a simplified program designed to run on older DOS machines and called the Elite/Basic, costs $349 with one airspace database of the purchaser's choice. What was once the low-end version is now the Elite/Advanced, which emulates a Cessna 172-type airplane and runs on 386 or 486 DOS machines or the Macintosh II family; it runs $499. One step up is the Elite/High Performance, which is like the Advanced except it emulates a single-engine retractable and has an HSI and RMI display; price is $699.
T-34 Microsystems' Cross Country flight simulator is somewhat more modest but a welcome program for those who must slog along with older, slower Macs. Basically an instrument procedures trainer, the Cross Country's panel display and performance are that of the Cessna 172 and seem fairly realistic. Although strictly black and white, the graphics make surprisingly good use of the 9-inch screen standard in one-piece Macintoshes. All the instruments are legible, and steering inputs made through the mouse are tolerable if not ideal. A few of the interfaces, like the method of tuning radios and setting the OBS knobs, are less than perfect, but there's really only so much you can do with the small Mac screen.
What sets the Cross Country apart are two things: It has recorded dialogue embedded to offer a bit more realism to approaches, and it comes with a well-thought-out training syllabus. The program's makers obviously don't think the Cross Country will be for fun alone.
Good fun for weather-watchers would be a sophisticated graphics interface with the existing services. Jeppesen has provided just that for Macintosh users in the Jepp/Link software. The software is free, and the connect charges to Jepp/Link vary, according to the type of telephone access, local network or the 800 number. In any case, the decoding software for Jepp/Link allows Mac drivers to download all the textual weather, plus a healthy collection of radar, surface, and forecast maps. On a color machine, these maps are, as the old phrase goes, worth a thousand words.
Time will tell if the investment made by these and other software developers will pay off for the Macintosh. But one thing's for certain: I and other Mac users don't have to stand around being tantalized by programs that won't run on our machines.
AzureSoft, 1250 Aviation Avenue, San Jose, California 95110; 800/282- 6675.
Jeppesen Sanderson Corporation, 55 Inverness Drive, East, Englewood, Colorado 80112; 800/621-JEPP.
MentorPlus Software, 22775 Airport Road, N.E., Aurora, Oregon 97002; 800/628-4640.
T-34 Microsystems, Incorporated, 1325 San Marco Boulevard, Suite 600, Jacksonville, Florida 32207; 904/396-2785.
Related Articles
