FAA Ending Direct Subscriptions

chartbundle

chartbundle

Pattern Altitude
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chartbundle
Since I'm probably the last one to actually carry any paper I haven't seen this posted yet. I received a letter today from FAA AeroNav letting me know that once my current chart subscriptions expire I'll have to buy them from one of their Chart Agents. The interesting thing is it's not obvious if this includes the electronic products I use to run my website or not.
 
Yeah, my recent flight to the East Coast was the first one where I couldn't get charts at need from the airport. Gotta love the FAA, make something required and then make it so you can't get it easily. Already bought the damn iPad thingie (Mrs. Steingar has been jonesing for one for a long time), I'll program it with the software soon enough.
 
All the FBOs at my main field used to carry charts. As sales dwindled and the FAA changed the rules for vendors they all went together and consolidated under one FBO's subscription and each got their stock from them. I've heard that even they are going to drop their subscription soon, so no paper charts may be available at our field in the near future.

You may want to hang on to a few paper charts for historical purposes.
 
Cockpit distraction is a factor in many accidents. By making sure that pilots no longer have access to things like charts, then the potential for distraction is reduced.
 
Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe said:
Cockpit distraction is a factor in many accidents. By making sure that pilots no longer have access to things like charts, then the potential for distraction is reduced.
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A chart is way less distracting that some damn i-thingie. Charts don't break, and charts are readable in direct sunlight.
 
Wait until the FAA needs to figure out how to fund things without that piece of revenue. You think the guys like Seattle Avionics and others will get them for the cost of a CD? I wouldn't be surprised to see an increase in the electronic subscription costs as the FAA looks to make up revenue loss.
 
steingar said:
A chart is way less distracting that some damn i-thingie. Charts don't break, and charts are readable in direct sunlight.
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Yeah, and a Sears catalog in the outhouse worked just fine. Yada, yada, yada.
 
Marauder said:
Wait until the FAA needs to figure out how to fund things without that piece of revenue. You think the guys like Seattle Avionics and others will get them for the cost of a CD? I wouldn't be surprised to see an increase in the electronic subscription costs as the FAA looks to make up revenue loss.
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It is all part of the privatization movement. Sometimes it is a good thing, sometimes it is not.
 
The problem is the FAA does not receive money from the sale of charts. It's cheaper for them to not produce them no matter what the price to the end user is. The money to produce the charts is a line item of their budget and the money received from the sale goes to the general fund.
 
If charting services are truly a function of public safety than it shouldn't matter whether or not the FAA recovers the outlay. If not there should be no mandate for them in the cockpit.
 
Not long ago, the FAA raised the level of chart sales that a third-party vendor had to have in order to qualify as a chart sales agent. It seems to me that ending direct sales of charts AND reducing the number of chart retailers is anti-safety!
 
steingar said:
Yeah, my recent flight to the East Coast was the first one where I couldn't get charts at need from the airport. Gotta love the FAA, make something required and then make it so you can't get it easily. Already bought the damn iPad thingie (Mrs. Steingar has been jonesing for one for a long time), I'll program it with the software soon enough.
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Care to point out when a chart is required in GA (other than in the DC SFRA, NY Hudson or the LA SFRA).
 
KSCessnaDriver said:
Care to point out when a chart is required in GA (other than in the DC SFRA, NY Hudson or the LA SFRA).
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The DC SFRA was where I was going smart guy. But if something happens and you don't have one I have it on good authority that the FAA will frown in a most official manner.
 
steingar said:
A chart is way less distracting that some damn i-thingie. Charts don't break, and charts are readable in direct sunlight.
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disagree, ipads don't get sucked out a crack in the canopy and when you spill coffee on them it just runs off rather than making the ink smeared and unreadable. After 20 years with paper and 3 years paperless, so far I'd give the reliability edge to electronic.
 
JHW said:
disagree, ipads don't get sucked out a crack in the canopy and when you spill coffee on them it just runs off rather than making the ink smeared and unreadable. After 20 years with paper and 3 years paperless, so far I'd give the reliability edge to electronic.
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All the paper mills that are closing is evidence that printed information is going the way of the vacuum tube.
 
Clip4 said:
All the paper mills that are closing is evidence that printed information is going the way of the vacuum tube.
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I was going to post how that isn't a bad thing, since paper mills aren't the best thing for the environment. But the chemistry used to make those iThings is an unmitigated environmental disaster, plus one has the pollution used to make the electricity that powers them.
 
steingar said:
I was going to post how that isn't a bad thing, since paper mills aren't the best thing for the environment. But the chemistry used to make those iThings is an unmitigated environmental disaster, plus one has the pollution used to make the electricity that powers them.
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:dunno:
 
Clip4 said:
All the paper mills that are closing is evidence that printed information is going the way of the vacuum tube.
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Does that mean that the only people making paper will be the Russians? :D
 
It never made much sense for the FAA to be in the retail chart business.

I just moved to the ipad thingie for charts. Works like a charm, until it told me 'temp too high' and shut off, leaving me to fly the departure from memory.
 
JHW said:
disagree, ipads don't get sucked out a crack in the canopy and when you spill coffee on them it just runs off rather than making the ink smeared and unreadable. After 20 years with paper and 3 years paperless, so far I'd give the reliability edge to electronic.
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Some of us do not fly pos airplanes in which this occurs.
 
wsuffa said:
Until your ipad battery runs out....
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Its actually better now. Ipad, iphone, wife's iphone. I now have 3 copies of every chart in the country with me. We used to carry just a few paper charts and only 1 of each at that with no backup.
 
JHW said:
Its actually better now. Ipad, iphone, wife's iphone. I now have 3 copies of every chart in the country with me. We used to carry just a few paper charts and only 1 of each at that with no backup.
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When using paper for charts, what emergency situations might require you to have a backup (excluding those conditions in which having a chart is no longer near the top of your priority list)... having your chart fly out the window?:yikes:
 
C182P said:
When using paper for charts, what emergency situations might require you to have a backup (excluding those conditions in which having a chart is no longer near the top of your priority list)... having your chart fly out the window?:yikes:
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If you are an old fart like me, breaking your reading glasses. I don't need them with the Ithingy.
 
JasonM said:
I don't know if you guys already knew this or not, but if you had one of those large format printers (link) that could print to scale, you can print your own latest charts for free.

http://avn.faa.gov/index.asp?xml=aeronav/applications/VFR/chartlist_sect
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The FAA is/was planning to quit providing the ability to download charts for free on the internet. IMO the safety ramifications of that would greatly outdo the effect of them eliminating direct sales of paper charts.
 
The funding of charts is not an issue if they go to electronic downloads. By law the FAA cannot charge more than the cost of production which is about 2.5 million a year (not counting the cost of printing). Divide it by the 500,000 pilots and it comes to $5.00 a pilot. And that's for everything -- sectional, TAC, WAC, high and low IFR, plates, Airport diagrams.

Those who use electric charts (and don't need the paper ones) should not be required to pay more than $5.00 a year for that privilege, on top of whatever the service provider (Garmin, ForeFlight, etc.) charges.
 
I just moved to the ipad thingie for charts. Works like a charm, until it told me 'temp too high' and shut off, leaving me to fly the departure from memory.
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THAT has never happened with a paper chart :).
 
tinerj said:
The funding of charts is not an issue if they go to electronic downloads. By law the FAA cannot charge more than the cost of production which is about 2.5 million a year (not counting the cost of printing). Divide it by the 500,000 pilots and it comes to $5.00 a pilot. And that's for everything -- sectional, TAC, WAC, high and low IFR, plates, Airport diagrams.

Those who use electric charts (and don't need the paper ones) should not be required to pay more than $5.00 a year for that privilege, on top of whatever the service provider (Garmin, ForeFlight, etc.) charges.
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The server farm to host the downloads is part of the costs. Ain't free.

Computers make *everything* cheaper and more efficient, don't ya know? ;)

(People smart enough to create computer systems that actually do work harder than a filing cabinet aren't cheap either.)
 
denverpilot said:
The server farm to host the downloads is part of the costs. Ain't free.
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Having a bit of difficulty tracking on that statement. The electronic charts are not downloaded to every pilot from the FAA. Instead, they are only download to the service providers (Garmin, ForeFlight etc.), which is a small number compared to the number of pilots.

In any case, the idea that we as electronic users of charts are going to have to pay large amounts to fund the FAA making the base charts is not true. (At one time, the FAA claimed every individual user of electronic charts would have to pay $100 a year. That's still cheap, but way more than would actually be required.)

Bye-Bye paper charts.
 
tinerj said:
Having a bit of difficulty tracking on that statement. The electronic charts are not downloaded to every pilot from the FAA. Instead, they are only download to the service providers (Garmin, ForeFlight etc.), which is a small number compared to the number of pilots.
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Oh really? Government charts are always supposed to be distributed through a subscription-based service provider in a proprietary format?
 
Based on what I receive(3 VFR DVDs, 1 IFR enroute, 1 Approach Plate and a A/FD file) and calling it 5GB each DVD, most are smaller than that, and obviously contain a ton of redundant data on the VFR ones, that's 30GB per cycle. That's $3.60/cycle at Amazon's over-inflated base S3 transfer prices. So, $33.80 year worst case for 13 cycles.
 
You know any government agency that thinks S3 meets their public server security audit requirements?
 
denverpilot said:
You know any government agency that thinks S3 meets their public server security audit requirements?
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It is unclassified data for public dissemination, you can have it mailed to you in china via the postal service if you care. What security ?
 
Doesn't Rand McNally still print them? :dunno:


-VanDy
 
weilke said:
It is unclassified data for public dissemination, you can have it mailed to you in china via the postal service if you care. What security ?
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The audits usually have nothing to do with what's stored on the server. They confirm the server isn't vulnerable to being used as a hop-off attack vector.

Looks like Amazon has met at least some of the minimum standards. I know for a fact you can't do all of the NIST recommendations to an S3 server.
 
denverpilot said:
Oh really? Government charts are always supposed to be distributed through a subscription-based service provider in a proprietary format?
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Still another head-scratchier? Are you being facetious? or stating a fact?

Charts are put in a proprietary format by the service provider, not by the FAA. All the FAA has to do is provide a single electronic format. It's up to the service provider to put it so it runs with their software.
 
C182P said:
When using paper for charts, what emergency situations might require you to have a backup (excluding those conditions in which having a chart is no longer near the top of your priority list)... having your chart fly out the window?:yikes:
Click to expand...
Yep. Had a chart get sucked out a cracked open canopy or through a leaky door seal more than once.
 
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