Chet, Prop, and Tailwheel recently participated in Urban Photo Safari, a very cool photo contest in Kansas City. The contest is open to anyone. The only pre-requisite is that they be able to point and shoot a digital camera. The goal is to take as many digital pictures as possible within four hours. At the end the designated time, participants vote on the best photo.  In addition to getting cool photos, your favorite Garmin experts took their their GPS-of-choice to track where they'd been. Keep reading to see how this applies to making you a better pilot (it really does), and come back tomorrow to get Chet's take on the day.

Prop and I used the GPSMAP 396 for the contest. Once it was in automotive mode Prop and I were off to become the next Ansel Adams. While we did not use the 396 to find any locations we used it to see where we had gone.  This came in handy after Prop erased all of his pictures half way through the contest. This was one case where menu was not Prop’s friend.  The two of us were able to look at the 396 to see how close we were to places already photographed and attempt to photograph these locations for a second time. Afterwards Prop and I were able to place the track that was created on the computer using MapSource City Navigator,  MotionBased and Google Earth.

Are asking how this can relate to aviation?  Easy, with the track log showing on one of the previously mentioned software you can view that turn about a point that you have been practicing.   Did you fly all those patterns the same way? With the track log you can see exactly how you flew the pattern each time.  What about a cross country flight? Did you fly over all of your visual checkpoints?  With the track log and a sectional you can see how close you were. As an added bonus you can have sectional charts over laid on top of Google Earth.