For every manufacturer and iPad app, if you change equipment often.
It’s a trap for inexperienced users of all of them.
A chart, your eyeballs are going to see the item (in north up or track up) coming towards your aircraft and have a chance of it registering in your brain.
When software makes it disappear there’s literally no way for your brain to know you’re missing something.
Maybe you missed it waaaaay back in pre-flight planning. Oh, there’s big towers north of the airport, and your forecast was to land to the north not land to the south... but now you’ve picked up the AWOS and they’re landing south.
I’ve seen someone do exactly the above. I was looking at a depiction of a real chart on my iPad, the console and their iPad showed absolutely nothing.
*Eventually* their subscription to terrain warnings would have kicked in, but they were flying fat dumb and happy right at the 1000’+ tower on my real sectional, and had zero clue they were on a course to center punch the thing.
VFR Charts are information dense and have decades of design behind what’s shown and what’s not.
Vector stuff? A twenty-something who’s never flown an airplane put rules in the code, maybe without any oversight or a document to work from. If they had a document, their company may not share it with pilots. Or they might share it and the majority of pilots won’t read it.
How many Foreflight questions have you seen here over the years that were easily answered and in the table of contents of the user guide? Lots. Lots and lots.
Pilots don’t read avionics or iPad software user manuals as a general rule. We have a bunch of nerds here who do, but in the general pilot population? Nope.
Many are simply better off displaying a real chart in whatever orientation they want than operating whiz bang vector stuff that they think they understand but didn’t even read up on what is displayed at each zoom level.
The other one I’ve seen: Pilots screw heavily with default settings in rental aircraft GPS units. Not just north/track but they go “customize” the crap out of the thing and leave it that way for the next pilots. I’ve only ever seen ONE pilot print out the defaults and make it part of their preflight to check every one of them.
The rental GPS fleet really needs a “factory defaults” button or a “fleet defaults” where the operator can set, document, communicate to everyone, and have a known one button way back to their baseline settings. And it should be lockable with a code.
The GPS companies haven’t quite gotten there yet in their heads that airplanes are flown multiple people. They haven’t even done “personal setting profiles” yet for multiple owner aircraft.
They’ll get there eventually. Or not. But it’s a standard UI problem on shared equipment in far more than just aviation. Even the copy machine has “clear all settings” and has for over a decade.
