PDA MID Systems for Soaring, intro

I have a confession.  I am an addict.  The exhilaration experienced as I guide an aircraft soaring through the air where my life is literally in my own hands is an addiction I must feed!  As a glider pilot I love mixing the world of flight with computers and software.  For the last 6 years I have been using various flight computers while soaring to assist in helping assure a safe flight.  I would like to discuss how PDAs have evolved in this area to become very powerful systems.  An area ripe for MIDs to move into and greatly improve!

Modern gliders are very sleek, built to soar for hours without an engine and every aspect of drag is considered.  There’s no motor to create power so the electrical instruments are battery based.  Thus, small hand held battery operated computers make sense.  This image shows me ready to go as I pre-flight my instruments.  If you notice just below my right hand you’ll see my flight computer ready and waiting.  Just close enough that if necessary I can touch the screen to change modes.  The projection from the top of the unit is the Compact Flash based GPS.

When soaring, most of the instruments require no power.  The altimeter is based on atmospheric pressure; the air speed is based on the pressure of air blowing into the pitot tube.  A 7ah SLA (Sealed Lead Acid) battery provides enough power for the electrical instruments to last long enough for at least a 5 hour flight with reserve.  The radio and flight computer are the biggest drains on the battery, the audio variometer uses some too.

Back in 2003 my first computer flight system was based on a Garmin eTrex Vista GPS attached to a Palm Pilot Professional running the open sourced Soaring Pilot software.  Soaring Pilot has an active user community in Yahoo Groups where you can obtain the Palm enabled software for free along with work class support as your setup your system.  As I continued to use more and more features of the software I upgraded to a more powerful Palm and bought a Palm IIIxe.  The picture shows the system in operation.

The mounting board has Velcro on the back and would attach to a knee board or onto Velcro in the cockpit depending on which glider I was flying.

In the last few years PDAs have come a long way, unfortunately not all of the changes were good for soaring.  I’ll cover some of the improvements and software next time.

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