Software

As with most things in life, the paper part of aviation training can be at best tedious and at worst onerous and just plain wrong. In a perfect world, all ground school instruction would be cheap, conducted by enthusiastic and qualified teachers at times and locations which don’t interfere with frenetic schedules and Santa Claus would be real.

In your dreams. Realizing this, scads of vendors have developed PC-based instructional software intended to provide a reasonable simulacrum of aviation nirvana. We don’t pretend we looked at all of them but what follows is tour-the-horizon view of some major players.

Simple Test Prep
At their most basic, this variety of ground…

Datalink this, datalink that, hardware, software, service providers, subscriptions, bit charges, message costs. Holy cow, is this beginning to sound sort of familiar?

Datalink is a generic term that has come to represent text and data services delivered into the cockpit. If you think of it as Internet in the sky, youve got the concept.

For a potential buyer, there are three distinct issues involved; the services provided, the link medium and the airborne hardware. Right now, the industry is in its infancy, funded by various groups with differing agendas, not the least of which is the government.

In other words, none of this stuff is resolved to the extent that you can make re…