EFB offers second opinion

That’s why it’s particularly exciting to see a competitor come along that is trying to do things differently. AvNav is implementing new features and design elements that differentiate it from any EFB I’ve ever flown with before. With a flight instructor in the right seat as my eyes “outside,” I tested the app on a short flight from Frederick Municipal Airport in Maryland to Eastern West Virginia Regional Airport/Shepherd Field and back.

Flight planning

Everything you’d expect is there. When you first purchase the app (or start a free trial), a series of prompts will guide you through adding aircraft performance data to your profile. You can select that aircraft down the line to plan the flight. From there, everything is pretty standard. It’ll create a navlog, calculate fuel burn, time, everything you’d need to plan the flight. If AvNav had stopped there, I’d have been disappointed in the lack of innovation.

AvNav has an extra feature called the “ClearSky AI Flight Planner.” I think I’m in the majority of aviators who are hesitant to introduce any sort of artificial intelligence into aeronautical decision making, but I challenged it in various weather conditions over a couple of weeks, and it never strayed from the go/no-go decision I had made based on my own analysis of the weather. I would certainly avoid using it in place of a formalized weather briefing (which the app offers) or your own analysis of the charts, but it’s a good tool in the toolbox. If you run it and it comes up with a different analysis from yours, especially if it’s telling you no-go when you said go, it’s probably worth taking a look into why, and what it’s seeing that you’re not. In that sense, I rather enjoy the feature.

All the other bells and whistles—weight and balance, checklists, fuel prices, logbook, and 3D replay—are all accounted for.

The flight

To start, I did not have access to ADS-B In because I own a ForeFlight Sentry, which is not compatible with EFBs outside of ForeFlight. Obviously, that’s a personal problem (although many of us fly with this setup), and I tested the ADS-B features from WiFi to good success.

Everything was there as you’d expect. Finding certain information took me longer than usual, but that’s only because I was still learning the application, and there wasn’t a flight-critical piece of information I wasn’t able to find. My only major gripe is that the scratchpad feature is far too buried. For a flight from a towered airport to another towered airport in the span of 30 nautical miles, I had to write a lot and resorted to using my phone as a scratchpad. Again, if AvNav ended there, there would be nothing to differentiate it from any other EFB, but it didn’t.

AvNav has a base layer called the “AvNav Vector” chart. It is a 3D display of airspace and the sectional chart, showing tops of airspaces overlayed on a chart. This is a great visualization, especially for student pilots, showing how airspace and terrain interact. It struggled to differentiate the tops of Class B airspace (the reverse wedding cake looks more like a regular cake), but I believe that’s a kink that’ll be worked out easily. It’s also worth noting that older iPads may struggle a little bit with the heavy load that generating these images imposes, but my newer iPad had no issues.

By far the best feature I discovered in flight was the split screen. You have the ability to split-screen any two pages in the app, which is incredible. The ability to have the airport information page alongside your live position on the map is great, and, likewise, having an approach chart permanently pulled up next to your live position makes a lot of sense.

The big consideration

Should you make the switch? Well, it’s a very personal decision. First, I had to fight the initial hesitation because the app felt “clunky”—well of course it did. I’ve been a ForeFlight user for seven or so years, so any change from the status quo location of features is going to feel weird, but that’s not a fault of the app itself. I’m also locked into ForeFlight because of my Sentry. Because of that alone, the annual cost savings between my EFB and AvNav are not worth it in the sense of the purchase price of a new ADS-B In device, as well as the non-monetary cost of having to learn and be comfortable with a new EFB. AvNav currently advertises a “founders price” of $149.99 a year (discounted from its purportedly $229.99 regular price), which is more expensive than the $130 a year starter ForeFlight plan, but cheaper than the two advanced ForeFlight plans, which cost $260 or $390 a year. Combined with a new ADS-B In device that is compatible with multiple apps, like a Stratus, which start around $500, the switch doesn’t make sense for me.

However, if you don’t find yourself locked into an EFB, it makes a lot of sense to shop around. Not only AvNav, but in general. The decision on which app works best for you comes down to personal preference, and what features you commonly use. Every app is going to lay things out and display things differently, and depending on what pages you frequent, you might find one app weird and the other not so much. If you’re still not locked in to a specific EFB ecosystem, it’s definitely worth considering your options and AvNav should be one of them.