Garmin Pilot Fuel Calcs

[the400kid]

I've been wanting to ask this question for a long time. My preferred EFB is Garmin Pilot and I find the fuel calculations are always off for my plane, a Mooney M20J. For the past 15 years I've been subscribing to Weathermeister and its fuel and total flight time calculations are incredibly accurate. On a series of flights last week, Weathermeister was accurate to within one gallon, whereas Garmin Pilot was off on average by about 4 gallons, which is a lot.

Can anybody speak to the accuracy of Garmin Pilot's fuel planning and how to improve it?

 

[tsts4]

I find GarminPilot generally, worst case, is within a couple of gal which is good enough for me.

 

[AA5Bman]

My experience with FF isn't much better. I actually had an interesting discussion ("discussion") with ChatGPT about this at one point. My basic question was if the assumptions are right, why is the fuel calculation always so wrong - it seems like simple straightforward math, you could even adjust for expect winds aloft and calculate fuel consumption on a fairly small segment length basis. IIRC, ChatGPT's answer was that that's not how fuel calculation works for things like ForeFlight, and that it uses other criteria like expected routings and stuff like that to estimate fuel, not the straight math.

 

[the400kid]

My experience with FF isn't much better. I actually had an interesting discussion ("discussion") with ChatGPT about this at one point. My basic question was if the assumptions are right, why is the fuel calculation always so wrong - it seems like simple straightforward math, you could even adjust for expect winds aloft and calculate fuel consumption on a fairly small segment length basis. IIRC, ChatGPT's answer was that that's not how fuel calculation works for things like ForeFlight, and that it uses other criteria like expected routings and stuff like that to estimate fuel, not the straight math.

At this point in the game, I wouldn't trust AI to calculate the batting average of Babe Ruth.

 

[eman1200]

The day I rely on an efb to tell me what my fuel is, is the day I fly a 172 and enjoy it.