Ours was among the first cockpits to adopt the superb Avidyne EX500 MultiFunction Display, and our configuration (which has now been upgraded several times) has always included Cmax -- Avidyne's variant of Jeppesen-format airport charts (Arrivals, Approaches, and Departures).

The EX500 could do it all pretty well, but with mapping, airborne radar, traffic, and charts on the MFD, I always felt that I had a bit too much information on one screen. There was too much toggling back and forth, and that busy-work always seemed to occur when I needed to be concentrating on more important tasks.

When we moved to the King Air, we had more panel real estate and a center console that had room to store a tablet, so we installed the Avidyne with charts but we did not hook up our airborne radar to the MFD. The nose radar kept its own screen...so we ultimately had Traffic, Charts and Mapping on the EX600 (and, because we retained the non-WAAS 530/430 navigators, we can put WSI weather on them too.)

So, the EX600 gets us halfway to a "Paperless Cockpit"...and for a year we rarely pulled out an airport chart; we used the EX500/600 screen for almost all airport charts (Exceptions being the very complex arrivals/departures at major airports) and we still carried all Jepp binders and had them readily available. The HI/LO-Enroutes are still nearby and handy. For a while, we owned a nice Motion 1700 tablet and we ran Jepp's FlightDeck software on it. This gave us a fully independent and/or battery power source with an identical chart format. I found the device quite useful but a bit heavy and awkward to use. It was really designed to provide geo-referenced charts and to offer complex flight-planning and navigation tools (good ones, too) but all I really wanted was a device that would replace about a dozen Jepp 2" binders.

Then my pal Ken Dono at Columbia Aircraft called to tell me that the SolidFX tablet had been announced. He had been testing it for his neighbors who developed it and he said "This is IT!" He was so right. I tried and bought the tablet...which is a really sweet KISS ("Keep it Simple, Stupid") device. On the image to the left, a Nassau approach, we have written the ATIS info right on the chart...just like a pencil would, but erasing it later is much easier.

(All FXView images are of Release 1.2.9 which was made public on Feb 25, 2010)

Shown below, the FXView chart reader is zoomed into a detail of the same chart. We got to this view simply by circling the area shown and it zoomed in less than a second. One stylus tap backs us out to view a full size chart again. Again: one second. Slick.

I like things that work this way; I like to run a quiet cockpit with no clutter, no temporary cables, and no complex clunky "cobbled-up systems." The battery life is great; I have turned on the FX10 in the morning and used it all day without recharging. Battery life depends a bit on how many screen changes we make, of course. The chart subscription rates are a bargain, especially so if an aviator already uses NavSuite or JeppView MFD.

Now, having used the SolidFX tablet for six months or so, I find that the display roles are reversed: the FX10 tablet has become my primary chart display. It's light and so easy to use, easy to organize, so very reliable ... and so it's the first thing I reach for when Approach Control gives us a runway change.

That's exactly like I used my paper charts. Now, the Avidyne EX 600 backs up the tablet.