thegoblin

FAA To Charge Companies For Online Charts, No Access For Individuals

"The days of inexpensive navigation and chart apps for your mobile devices appear to be numbered with the FAA's announcement that it will begin charging for downloads that were previously free starting April 5, 2012. A story in the December issue of our sister publication Aviation Consumer says the Aeronautical Navigational Products Directorate (Aeronav), which currently makes the latest charts and other navigational products available online for free, says it has to recover the costs associated with developing and hosting the products. That means charging fees to companies for those downloads and no longer allowing individuals access them at all."

Sad news for GA pilots like myself.

Zapata

If you can afford to fly GA for yourself, you can afford a nominal fee for downloading charts. Enough said. Nothing more to be said here. Please close the thread.

FlyJSH

Okay. Then maybe we need to start charging landing fees... and ATC fees. Then maybe one day we can be just like all the countries that send their pilots here to learn. Heck, why not charge $10 per landing and $15 per instrument approach? Then we can send our GA pilots and hopeful commercial pilots overseas to get their training.

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To think, I went from 135 to 121 for job security.

floydbird

Pilots pay for VFR charts, why should IFR charts be treated differently?

tortue

But pay who? The FAA or AccuWeather (thanks santorum)? The more middle men you put between an authoritative source of data (FAA) and the end user, the higher the chance that you have mistakes and out of date charts.