IMPROVING THE FLIGHT TRAINING WITH GPS ENABLED TABLET PCS AT UNIVERSITY AVIATION STUDIES IN SPAIN

The introduction of the Tablet PCs in the consumers mass market and the digital distribution of software for them, has favoured the appearance of thousands of applications which try to answer to all kinds of necessities, providing these devices with functionalities never before imagined, even by their creators.
Aviation and aeronautics do not ignore this overwhelming amount of new technologies. The companies responsible for cartography, avionics, but also a great number of pilots individually, have taken advantage of the easiness of development of applications for these Tablet PCs not only to provide the smaller aircrafts with information systems only available in the big commercial aircrafts, but also with many applications to better manage and minimize the different information needed in a flight.
The aim of this paper is to study and analyze the benefits provided by these devices in an educational level to the ab-initio commercial pilot students of the “Centre d'Estudis Superiors de l'Aviació” (CESDA) of the Rovira i Virgili University, using some of the commercial applications available in their day by day flight training.
The methodology of this work consists of three main phases. In a first phase, we identify software functionalities that can improve the business-as-usual flight class, such as reducing paperwork, complement real-time navigation data or implement more flight data to analyse the flight mission, once finished. A second phase consists of selecting some of the commercial applications and using them with a reduced number of students. The rest of the students are still trained with the standard procedure, without any GPS enabled Tablet PC tool. To evaluate this new teaching methodology a satisfaction survey is administered to both populations of students at the end of the training period. In a third phase, survey results and used commercial applications are analysed. Practical constraints of the available applications are identified and the requirements for a new, complete software applications that would be perfectly suited for flight training at university level in Spain are stated.