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Thought ADS-B was just hype til a King Air out of Tulsa squawked and we tracked him on the iPad
Kept telling the new guys it was a waste of a few grand until we needed live traffic on a ramp with no radar coverage. Now I want to know what else I wrote off too fast, anyone got a piece of gear that won them over?
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jordans1824d ago
The "live traffic on a ramp with no radar coverage" part is what got me. People forget that most of the country doesn't have radar down to the ground, so there are big gaps where you're basically blind unless you have something in the cockpit. We picked up a cheap portable ADS-B receiver for the same reason and it paid for itself the first time it showed us a guy on a straight-in we never would have seen on the radio. The thing nobody tells you is that the traffic picture changes how you fly, not just what you see. Once you get used to knowing who's out there, going back to just calling on the radio feels like flying with one eye shut. That King Air story is a good reminder that the gear you think is overkill is usually the gear you end up leaning on.
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