Top Gear
The latest aviation kit, impartially tested and evaluated
Garmin aera 760 From £1,500 | Manufacturer www.garmin.com
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hen I first read about the aera 760 I couldn’t quite figure out who’d be buying one, and by the time I got my hands on an actual unit I still hadn’t managed to answer the question. It seemed to me that it did less than an iPad, while costing more. Maybe a couple of weeks of flying with the aera would change my mind… The aera weighs in at over half a kilo (561gm), and is almost an inch thick (2.3cm), so physically it’s quite a chunky unit, despite being smaller overall than an iPad mini. Not only is its screen smaller, but the resolution’s lower too. And since you didn’t ask, no, it doesn’t do email or movies, but it does have Bluetooth, WiFi and pdf document storage (which I tested by loading a PDF of both the interception procedures (useful) and an issue of FLYER (very useful, but perhaps not in flight!). If you are at all familiar with the Garmin Pilot app, anything from the GTN series of panel mounts or this unit’s predecessor, the aera 660, the interface will be very familiar. If this is your first time with recent(ish) Garmin kit, the top level menu stuff that most of us would use most of the time is pretty intuitive, and it’s
64 | FLYER | September 2020
Left aera 760 showed its strengths best when yoke-mounted and integrated into the Garmin ecosystem Right Panel-mount the aera 760, and you’ll have access to a combination of information and features at a cost that’s significantly lower than installed avionics Far right The aera 760 can show additional information, like this dedicated traffic page in suitably equipped aircraft – FLYER Club member? Watch extra video content on the aera 760 screens in the FLYER Club online
only when deep diving into some of the more technical menus that you might want to reach for the manual or tech support. Most will do just fine after a spell of armchair flying to get the hang of things, but a canter though the user manual (which is also stored as a PDF on the unit) will give a fuller understanding. Out of the box the aera comes with Garmin’s base and terrain map, Jeppesen’s navigation data and Garmin’s ‘flitecharts’, which are essentially the charts provided by individual countries. The base map is a vector chart, drawn dynamically so you can pinch to zoom, change between portrait or landscape, or even do something really weird and look at your map in ‘North Up’ mode and you’ll still be able to read everything the right way up all of the time! If you haven’t yet managed to drag yourself away from the comfort blanket of digitised versions of paper charts, you can buy and install those produced by NATS (the ones most people still call the CAA half-mil) for $79 a year. While we’re talking about optional additional costs, if this is going to be your main way of navigating around the UK’s complex airspace, I strongly suggest a regular airspace database update, which’ll
set you back an additional $179.99 a year. If you want the full European mix of VFR and IFR digitised charts, then expect to spend almost $700, although you’ll be relieved to know that you can buy individual countries, which just makes it expensive – as supposed to plain silly.
Create waypoints
Planning a flight is done through a pretty simple text interface. If you’re routing between and over-known waypoints points then it’s all very easy, but if you want to rubber band your route around something, you’ll have to dip into the ‘Graphically Edit Flight Plan’ option in the menu, which enables you to grab legs of your route via the touch screen, and create waypoints at your new turning point. The loaded Jepp data comes with terminal procedure information, so when building your flight plan you can add instrument departures, arrivals and instrument approaches into your flight plan. You can also incorporate vertical navigation, which will set the unit up to give you descent or climb cues. All of this is overkill for a bit of local hand flying, but surprisingly useful for a flight that might incorporate an approach,
