Five Top Apps: WingX is a Standout

Aviation tablet apps, of which there are dozens, have become like the proverbial streetcar. If you don’t see one you like, hang around; another will be along shortly. Or at least the one you’re considering will morph into something unrecognizable if you wait long enough. Pity the would-be buyer trying to sort through the clutter and claims. In this review, we’ll attempt to do just that with what we consider to be the five top apps for flight planning, navigation and chart handling: Bendix/King’s myWingman, AOPA’s FlyQ EFB, ForeFlight, Garmin’s Pilot and WingX. Yes, there are others, including Anywhere Map’s Freedom and Jeppesen’s Mobile FD, to name two. We’ll get to these in a future issue, but to keep the topic contained, we’ll examine only the apps we deem most popular based on sales and expressed reader interests. For our evaluation, we ran the apps on an iPad mini and although we’ve tried accessories such as Bluetooth ADS-B boxes, the only peripheral we used for this evaluation was Garmin’s GLO remote GPS receiver. Two of the apps are available for the Android OS, but we’ll save a review of those for a future report, too.