A missed opportunity
The change from jepps to 'whatever' is a missed opportunity for a real improvement in readablity, accessable information, and safety.
To me it is sad that what we had worked, and now we are having to compromise to make what is new work safely.
On my arrival last night with the LIDO STAR, if I hadn't KNOWN for sure that there were crossing restrictions at certain fixes I could have easily missed the restrictions. If LIDO is so in love with colors put the fixes with altitude restrictions in a different color and have the text box with the altitudes in the same color.
Sadly, I actually looked forward to seeing and using these new charts, but in practice, I'm seriously disapponted. So I've been trying to figure out what the 'burr under my saddle' is about these charts, and I think I have figured part of it out. With the moving map, with constraints, you look at a pictoral view of your arrival with fixes with the assigned altitude restrictions. With Jepps, you looked at a similar pictoral view of the arrival with matching fixes with the assigned altitudes. You could 'almost' overlay one over the other.
With LIDO you have the 'pretty' background colors, the arrival is almost a secondary feature and the altitude restrictions are pushed off to the side in a box.
Again, we are flying transport catagory aircraft in a radar environment where the greatest 'threat' is ATC not giving you enough time to get down to make a restriction. Domesticly there is virtually no threat of flying into terrain unless you are deviating from the assigned route and altitudes.
If you are in an emergency situation and if so are you going to be looking at the pretty colors to figure out what altitudes they corrospond to?? NO, you will be getting vectors to the closest runway.
Oh Well, they are here, we'll make them work, just adds one more item to the list of potential mistakes. ONe more hole in the layers of 'swiss cheese'
The charts should support us not us support the charts.
This was a real opportunity to make a really neat new system with all the good items from Jepps, NOS etc put together. But it didn't happen.
As for the EFB, I can't wait to have the sun shining in your eyes, the laptop screen not readable, and having a 'microsoft moment' while ATC swaps the runways in IFR conditions at the last minute..... A real 'cluster' in the making
I haven't seen what an EFB will do for an AFC airport diagram with frequencies needed, so I'm betting we will still have to carry around a fair amount of paper for years to come. I just don't care for the LIDO charts with so many blank pages that you can't tell if they are supposed to be blank or not, at least Jepps stated 'intentional left blank' on their pages.
B6Guy
BTW I get my Jepps via US Mail, not FedEx. Jepps in the A380???:laugh:
