Displaying approach plates

I?ll readily admit I'm old school. But, I?ve been flying glass for a long time both in my RV, while I was at the airlines and still in some mighty fancy corporate planes with way more stuff than anybody should be legal to play with.
I use Foreflight with all the bells and whistles and today?s situational awareness has never been better.
However, I use all this stuff that can display georeferenced plates and I think, big deal. Why?
During my ?professional and still in the corporate world, we look at the plate, brief the plate, set up the cockpit for the approach and put the plate away. Georeferenced plates are gee whiz but to me add zero to my already vast amount of SA on all the other displays in the cockpit.
So I?m wondering, what?s the advantage of watching the little blue plane crawl across the plate if you?re actually shooting an approach right down to minimums.
For me, all the important stuff is right in front of me and I have everything I NEED to see and know already set up.
What am I missing here?

IMO, nothing. I feel the same. Efis shows me the path between waypoints and it is not hard to mentally relate those waypoints to the chart. For this reason, i have the basic FF plan. I suppose ther may be more advantages with a VOR approach,but haven’t flown one since training. I managed to do them successfully withot a geo referenced plate. It forces more discipline in mentally knowing where you are. It is important to be able to draw a mental picture

Jerry, you’re old. Me too. I don’t mean calendar years, but rather, how long ago you learned to fly. If you got your ifr rating before GPS, you picked up a 6th sense. You roughly knew where you were at all times. You knew if a new vector made sense, or was totally wrong (and warranted a query of ATC). You had a good sense of what ATC was going to say before they said it. But pilots who got their instrument rating post-gps never really developed those instincts. I could ask you, at any phase of an approach, ‘Where are we?’ and you’d put your finger on the approach plate at the approximately correct position. Ask a newer guy, and he’ll look at his moving map. Take that away, and he’ll quickly become disoriented. If ATC calls for a left 90 deg turn, and I say ‘Shouldn’t that have been right turn?’, he won’t know the answer without a moving map. Turn off the moving map and ask for a random hold at some fix, and watch him squirm trying to figure it out. GPS is a great modern technology; but it came at some cost, namely, an inherent sense of position awareness was lost.
PS I have geo-referenced plates, but only because WingX gives them to me for free (cfi). Before the free offer, I did not pay for geo-referencing. Like you, I didn’t see the need.

For me, as an IFR noob, it's just a sanity check .. additional situational awareness .. reassurance that says "you're where you thought you were"

Seeing the little blue plane over the plate just increases the resolution of the image already in my head .. especially with holds and missed approaches.

Edit: What BobTurner said is true, and I'm guilty .. we use the tools that make our lives easier which has the unintended consequence of not being proficient without them.

I Agree

I agree. Having the chart overlaid on the EFIS is just clutter.

For normal ops, I would have to agree, not much point there except for gee-whiz.

It is a little comforting to me though to think that in an emergency if I lose the navigator and have to fly an approach on my own without it, I can at least maintain an approximate localizer and fly step-down altitudes based on just the non-certified GPS receiver and geo-referenced plates. Yeah sure ATC can give you surveillance approaches at some airports - but mostly not available.

Practice approaches with just G5 and Ipad are very doable especially with GeoRef plates. I'm a sissy though, this old brain needs all the help it can get. No bragging rights here!

To me, the benefit of georeferenced plates on the panel is getting your location shown while taxiing.

SPX said:

To me, the benefit of georeferenced plates on the panel is getting your location shown while taxiing.

Click to expand...

That's all I use it for.