Garmin Pilot

Very different from my Foreflight experience. Initial chart downloads was a hard fail due to UI issues. Uploading my Foreflight logbook to Garmin was absolutely horrible. Garmin has obviously not thought about trying to win over Foreflight users since transitioning is totally manual and an unbelievable pain in the &$@#. Currency tracking is a hard fail. I manually input ALOT of data and it went from showing me fully current to then rejecting everything… why??? Originally I wanted to use Garmin but the flight school I was at used only Foreflight. So, I used that for the first year. Garmin should be easier to transition to because of how many Garmin systems are being used or upgraded into by Pilatus and Cessna jets plus Cirrus. Unfortunately so far my 30 day trial period is turning out to be a total fail due to the horrible transition from Foreflight. I do like the slightly cheaper prices and 2-tier subscription rather than more expensive 3-tier with Foreflight. Lots of interesting features with Garmin and I’m hoping this will work as a Foreflight replacement but does not look good right now.

I recently upgraded my panel with 2 G500 TXIs, GTN750xi and 650XI and the one feature that I really wanted to use was the database concierge so I could wirelessly update my avionics. I even paid the extra US$1700 for the Flight stream 510 only to find out that I have to have a $200 per year Garmin pilot subscription in order to update them and that is on top of the $1200 a year I’m paying for the database updates…. Garmin, it is things like this is why you are losing so much market share to companies like Dynon, your endless greed sickens me and I can assure you I will never put another Garmin product in any of my aircraft again. Maybe if you got some actual developers and not just a bunch of random people you found off the street to update and maintain your Garmin Pilot app then I would consider switching but as it is now, Garmin pilot is clunky, slow, and not intuitive in any way shape or form to use. ForeFlight has you beat in just about every aspect. The only cool thing your app had was smart charts but ForeFlight has their own version now and it’s honestly just as good.

I used a competitive product for almost 15 years. Had no incentive to change to Garmin Pilot until Smart Charts. I tried Garmin Pilot during the 30 day free trial period and I was blown away: Smart Charts is so much better than Dynamic Procedures and, after using Garmin Pilot for a few weeks, I have found other great features like engine monitoring and data recording after each flight. If you experience an engine anomaly, you can play it back and determine potential causes. You need a Garmin EIS capability in your panel to do this, but wow, it is worth it. Other features like weight & balance are well integrated into flight planning and easy to use. I could go on and on, but my last observation is the financial bottom line - it is less expensive for a much better product.