Jay Honeck wrote:
You don't have to go back that far. Heck, everything has changed in
flying just since I earned my ticket 12 years ago.

When I first started flying, flight planning was laboriously done with
a sectional chart and a pencil. I would carefully plot my course,
figure out VOR frequencies, plan waypoints where I could triangulate my
position with multiple navaids, and make note of visual checkpoints. It
could take 20 minutes to plan a 1-hour flight. It could take DAYS to
plan a multi-day, truly "cross-country" trip.

Now, unless we're going somewhere far, far away, we hop in the plane,
punch in "Direct to" on our dual GPS's, and we've got more information
at our fingertips about where we are (and where we're going) than we
could possibly use. Every radio frequency, the runway diagrams, the
approaches, the restaurants on (and off) the field, where to spend the
night, phone numbers, the controlling airspace -- even the LIVE weather
-- is all there, for easy viewing. It's absolutely miraculous.

Hell, I've got nearly that with my LORAN... Flight from Houston to
Oshkosh consists of going to Airnav to get a couple of fuel stops and
checking the weather on Intellicast and the Unisys weather sites the day
of the flight... Mainly the Unisys weather site though since it shows
VFR / MVFR / IMC shaded areas and ceilings across the country... If
there is any weather to avoid, I choose one of the Airnav routes that
hopefully will allow me to avoid it...

Personally, I'm not so sure that having a GPS that does *everything* for
you is the best design... I prefer it to just be a source of coordinate
information and there to be another device that handles the database and
such... I guess I like a bit more distributed approach to the system...
Let's say that there are providers and displayers of information... One
could have GPS and LORAN both act as a provider and the moving map could
be the displayer... Of course, using this logic, perhaps the database
for the moving map should also be a provider subsystem so that other
subsystems could use it to lookup information...