I was recently offered an internship position with the government as a part of my university’s internship program. In a nut shell, I take a year off of school between my third and fourth year to work. I get real world work experience, a decent wage (being a government position) and a new reference to put on my resume. It’s not a bad deal at all, and I get a year off school to work on my commercial license too.. 
Due to my recently secured position with the Canadian government, I felt I could indulge myself in a new tech purchase. I’d owned an iPod Touch for a year and had always loved using it for anything I could when it came to flying: log book (LogTen Mobile), METAR/TAFs (AeroWeather), E6B Calculations (PilotWiz) and of course my own app for checking crosswinds (xWind)
The one thing the iPod Touch lacked was a GPS chip. So, on June 19, when the new iPhone 3GS came out, I went to my local Fido store and splurged on a new 16Gb black iPhone. I promptly did some research on the best GPS apps and came across Fullpower’s MotionX app. You can click on the link and read a bit about it, but I’ll give you the quick summary of features here: waypoint creation, multiple navigation modes, altitude and groundspeed readout, ETA readout, choice of OpenStreetMap or Google Maps, compass, music integration, and the ability to record your routes and export them in a few formats. With all of these features, I was skeptical as to how well they would all work for a $3 app. So, on a recent flight to Toronto City Center (CYTZ), I put this app through its paces. Turns out it does a pretty darn good job.
I turned on the the stopwatch feature within MotionX when I was done my run-up and let it start recording my position, speed, and altitude at every step along my flight. I departed runway 33 and made my turn eastbound following the 074ยบ radial outbound to towards Toronto. Once clear of the London class D, I called Toronto Centre for flight following and told them I was just looking for a sightseeing tour of downtown Toronto, at which point I would turn around and come home. I needed 2.1 more hours of night PIC time for my night rating so it seemed like a sensible route.
The great thing about MotionX is that you can export your saved routes in GPX format which is supported by many open source plug-ins and applications. I managed to find one called XML Google Maps for WordPress which allows me to show you my route and also my altitude and speed profiles. If you look below, you’ll see my route in blue departing runway 33 to the north, then turning east and heading to Toronto. The blue waypoint markers are laid out every 10NM along the route for reference. Toronto Centre cleared me to intercept the shoreline around Oakville and call City Center tower to enter their airspace. I knew there was a NOTAM out for YTZ that had an airspace closure around Humber Bay due to July 4 fireworks. I don’t really know why we had fireworks for an American holiday, but it was still a pretty cool to see from the air!
If you follow my route to the west side of Humber Bay, you’ll see that I circle a few times while watching the fireworks and then head back west along the shoreline. I climbed back up to 4500′ and headed home. One of the cool things about the GPX file that I exported was the altitude and speed profiles that the XML Google Maps plugin allowed me to generate. You’ll notice that at the beginning of the flight, my flight plan called for a 5500′ cruising altitude eastbound (conforming with cruising altitude orders of course). Toronto Center stepped me down to 2000′ when I was circling watching the fireworks to keep me under any Toronto Pearson IFR traffic coming and going from our nations busiest airport. You can then see my climb, and subsequently the number of miles it took to climb 2500′ back to cruising at 4500′: about 10NM.
Last but not least, the speed profile. Now you might notice a little spike in the middle of the profile that reaches about 400 knots. This is obviously an error within the app and I noticed that the speed was the least reliable performance measure during the flight. It fluctuates a lot but you can still average out the speeds and find that I was cruising at about 120-130 knots groundspeed eastbound and a bit slower westbound. Nonetheless, its a pretty cool graph.
Well after all was said and done, I was extremely happy with my $3 purchase. This little app is a great tool for flying and any other activity you can think of. I recently took it to Halifax on vacation and used it a lot to find my way around downtown. It has the option of caching the map tiles (up to 250Mb of data) so that even if you lose your data connection or don’t have a data plan, you can still use the app. Just make sure to cache the maps you’re going to use before you head out into the world.
In terms of my flying, I need 0.4 more hours of hood time or sim time to complete my night rating. I really do love flying at night and have gotten used to the differences. It’s smoother and can be a lot prettier at night with all of the small towns and city lights you see along your route. Toronto was a beaming glow of orange in the distance that I could see from at least 50 NM away. Not bad at 4500′!
Does anyone out there use their iPhone while they fly? More specifically, do you use any GPS apps that you find particularly useful? Let me know in the comments. I’m eager to try new things out.
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