By Paul Bertorelli

A Heavenly Wedding: Pilots and Paper

This month’s review of Garmin’s new GPSmap 696 once again raises a perennial conundrum. The bones of it are sketched in Joseph Matalon’s letter on the opposite page. Why, in an age of instant wireless communication where half of us have Blackberries surgically implanted in our skulls, do we persist in being so hopelessly wedded to paper in the cockpit? We say we want electronic charts, but many—probably most of us—haul around big bags full of paper charts, just in case. Charts that require constant revisions, or so we have convinced ourselves to believe. What’s going on here? You could argue that it’s belt-and-suspenders syndrome. The electronics are great, but what if they go dark? I’ll be stuck, right? Viewed through the prism of risk management, this is a silly argument. First of all, the likelihood of one of these systems failing to produce a chart at a moment when it really matters is slim to none. "Really matters" means you absolutely couldn’t survive without the paper chart.