Garmin Pilot App Reviews

Everythings great. Except it doesnt know which direction in pointing. What a gyp. Paid for the year too. If you can help me, please do.

8.1 and the current updates made it go one more step forward ! Good job Garmin.

I am totally happy with this app that provides advanced capabilities for a pilot to plan, schedule and navigate a flight.

I have been a fan of ForeFlight for many years. But recently, I started playing with Garmin Pilot and I have to say, I am now a convert. It is the perfect complement to my ProLine 21 avionics suite on my King Air and the rendering of the data is much easier to process than having a regular north up chart. Overall, the application is better for in flight use by an enormous margin. I also love the synthetic vision screen.

Having been recently forced to use and purchase foreflight by a flight school. I have to bump my rating of Garmin Pilot up a star. This is a very hard review to write because in many ways I love this app, but in other ways it falls flat on its face, especially in the phone version. The more I use the app the lower my rating of it gets. Unfortunately the iPhone app is basically a crippled version of the iPad app despite the fact that now the 6+ is available and the current iPhones are more powerful than most iPads on the market. There are even some flaws in the iPhone app that the developers dont know about until you point them out. Its like they honestly dont understand how badly theyve hindered users who dont want to fly with a big bulky iPad. Having said all that, foreflight on an iPhone is just utter crap. Its a map and a line. If garmin pilot could have split screen synvis for the iPad (at minimum, for the love of god fix the iPhone app!!!) I think it would be far superior to both versions of foreflight. No, Im not being picky about gadgetry, I just think it lays out the information you want very clearly as opposed to the navigation split screen. Also some ability to customer the navigation instruments would be nice. Honestly though one of the biggest issues is the price. Not all pilots are rich, in fact some of us are pilots and can barely afford to fly as it is. And making things like safe taxi and terrain alerts a paid option is borderline criminal IMHO. Why not make the decision between foreflight and pilot even easier by making Garmin Pilot affordable?! Its not like the company needs the revenue from this app that badly. Despite my complaints, and the obscene price for the useful premium subscriptions, Pilot is an amazing safety tool albeit I think with its limitations it aids IFR flyers far more than VFR pilots. Many of the features and menus are incredibly cumbersome to use and are not very intuitive at all. Garmin needs a major design of this app or to just make simple things like having dual screens up on the iPhone just like the iPad so you can see a map and CDI at the same time! They also need to make sure that a paid service containing charts has all of the information found on paper charts, which it currently does NOT and can leave you in a very bad position. Until this app can actually replace paper charts entirely I dont think its worth the money they charge to use it.

The profile view is superb! The only issue I could find is the contrast with the little airplane icon with the background. Hard to see that little blue airplane against the blue sky background. The airplane needs to be yellow, pink, green or something to distinguish it from the blue sky background. X-Plane integration is great, finally! Updates to trip planning well done. The airspace altitude values, finally and well done. Seems very stable so far in flight. Widgets are getting better! Needs flight record mode then dump to Google Earth. Would like to have approaches drawn on map when selected. Weather needs a major overhaul. Nearest button should display the nearest location in real time. Would like split view of map and synthetic vision.

Since adding the profile view, the app takes on more the preverbal “Glass Cockpit”. Now traffic can be seen in the flight corridor , wind barbs - great wx idea at a glance and the airspace and METARs are excellent! Plenty of information for flight planning in route and change of plans in route. Integration with the GDL84/FS210 is seamless. I found a few small bugs that have been reported but nothing to keep it on the ground. I don’t leave the ground without it. What I would like to see: - Profile view aircraft needs to be a different color - blends in too much with background, or change the background color. Very little contrast in bright sunlight. - Split screen for Synthetic Vision and Map Display - Traffic (or nearby conflicting traffic) on approach plates - Approach plate information displayed somewhere on the map, either as a line or the IAF and FAFs - AOPA weather maps - AOPA has the best prognostic weather section of any website. Great for flight planning. - Kudo’s and accolades to Russ K. and team - excellent job and thanks for listening to us and not giving up.