toto

+1 for Wash Wax ALL Blue for everything except the belly, red for the belly

I’m pretty sure that Craig can lock the thread if desired - might be a middle ground option.

Some of this is also just supply and demand. There’s nothing about a certified BATD that couldn’t be made and sold profitably at $2k if you had a market for it. But with a tiny market, there’s no incentive to go into that business if you can’t make serious per-unit profit. Same thing with engines - the market is so tiny that the incentive to innovate isn’t there. We wouldn’t be stressed about 100LL if a new UL engine was $10k, and manufacturers would be lining up to sell them at $10k if they could move 10,000 units a year. We’re a niche market, with niche economics.

I was really just curious whether any MSers have personal experience with this. I’m often surprised at the breadth of experience on this board.

Out of curiosity, has anyone been through the LOA application process for a BATD? I have no idea whether this is insanely complicated and painful, or relatively straightforward.

What’s your recommendation for the best certified BATD? Seems Redbird and Gleim are on a very short list of $10k or under sims.

I’ve flown the Redbird quite a bit, but never the Gleim - is yours like this one, where the radios and instruments are all on a separate touchscreen monitor?

I’ve never seen a Gleim sim in person, but I think it uses a touch screen interface instead of physical controls? The physical controls seem better for developing muscle memory (better fidelity with the aircraft), but if you’re like me, the sim panel doesn’t look much like my real panel setup anyway. So it may be a non-issue. I started renting the flight school TD2 in 2020 for currency during the craziest of the Covid crazy days, and found that I really liked the experience.

I've been watching for a few years for a flight school to go out of business and get a cheap certified BATD at auction, but I haven't found one yet. I rent a TD2 from a local flight school for $25/hour and it's great. Between the two, I'd go with the Redbird every day of the week. Gleim makes fine test prep books, but Redbird has been in the sim business for a long time and I've had really positive experiences with their equipment. There was a competitor around for a while called FlyThisSim that had an LOA and it was about half the cost of the Redbird TD, but they were having trouble keeping up with orders and finally (I think) went out of business. Anyway - if I were going to drop $10k on a BATD, it would be a Redbird.

Wait, how do you get the Premium discount with a OnePak now? When I looked at the db pricing page it seemed to have gone away completely, so I bought a full GP copy at renewal time.

That thing just looks expensive Isn’t Best Tugs Mike Patey’s company?

They have the same ad for a Malibu and an RV-10. Strange way to market your new engine tech.

SmartCharts is miles ahead of Dynamic Procedures. As a non-FF user, I spent a little time with DP trying to see what it could do, and I couldn’t shake the fact that it was just augmenting the paper charts rather than fundamentally rethinking the data and workflows. I’m definitely sold on SmartCharts as a 21st century solution to a 20th century problem. The killer app for me with a similar panel to yours is the streaming EIS to Garmin Pilot. It’s fantastic to have the EIS data automatically included as part of my flight logs, and I don’t have to bother pulling SD cards etc. to get the engine data. Not to mention - it’s streamed to GP in real time, so you have a secondary EIS display if you need it.

It was a pleasant surprise when they added panel integration. After the acquisition, I was paranoid that they would drop FltPlanGO like a bad habit, but suddenly they had a new release with GTX support - and it became my favorite #2 EFB It’s obviously not their flagship product, but I’m guessing they keep it around for existing paying fltplan.com customers.

Definitely. FltPlan was Garmin’s entree into the corporate flight department, but I’m sure they had zero interest in the EFB.