If you have any intention of making any kind of cross country flight you will need to make a plan of the flight, you could draw it on a map and measure and compute the bearings and distances or you could make the whole thing an absolute breeze by using some flight planning software. With NavBox ProPlan you simply set a start point, set an end point, and then drag your track line either to places you want to go to, or away from places you don't. This can be immediately exported into your Garmin GPS as a route and you can print out a meaningful PLOG. You are even able to enter the performance and fuel figures for you aircraft, and the relevant weather conditions and the plan will update to show amended headings and fuel consumption figures.
We used this to plan out our Thruster Sausage Cob tour routes and we feel that it saved us hours of work.
Since the method of obtaining NOTAMS was redesigned some while ago an increasing number of pilots are flying without checking them. THIS IS NOT GOOD IDEA. This is where The NOTAM PRO software will help you. The latest NOTAMS are obtained with a click of the mouse and then the data is read by the program and transferred onto a map of the UK as red dots. Clicking on any of the dots will take you to the relevant area of the NOTAM data so that you can read all about it. If a NOTAM warns of a danger area then the program can also draw lines around the edge of that area for you. You can overlay town and / or airfield names on the map with a couple of clicks on icons to make it even easier to see which dangers will affect you. This program is so cheap (less than £30, a tiny fraction of the fine you may expect if you wander thru a zone that has had its exclusion limits NOTAM'ed) and is so vital to the safety of all aviators that it should be mandatory to own and use a copy. A demo version of this software is available by clicking the image above, try it, then buy it.
Reviews by Leigh Caudwell
If you have any software that could be used by a microlight pilot and that I have not reviewed, send me a copy!
