Originally Posted by
Senior Skipper
For all practical purposes, the AIRAC from a few months ago will be fine in your GPS, but you're still not legal. How expensive is it to keep the database up to date for a year or so? I've always wondered what the cost would be. How do places like flight schools handle this cost, do they just order 1 card per month, and swap it between planes for checkrides?
Well at a certain local area flight school that shall remain nameless the maintenance of the airplane's GPS databases are...the responsibility of the owner, and are optional (not a part of the leaseback agreement).
Besides: if you buy an instrument equipped airplane and don't maintain it as such, you're asking for trouble, and not necessarily just of the legal kind.
I'm not a fan of this practice, in case it wasn't abundantly clear. ;)
The management knows, and is putting a little pressure on the owners to get their acts together and maintain the databases. It's an annoyance 90% of the time, but that 10% of the time that you need the approach, you're hosed.