About NavCard GPS

Jim Knowlton has been flying since 1987. Over nearly four decades in the cockpit, he earned his instrument, multi-engine, and commercial ratings, and in 1996 added his CFI certificate — making him a Commercial, single and multi-engine, instrument-rated Certified Flight Instructor. His logbook spans everything from Cessna 172 training flights to Part 135 charter work as Captain and co-pilot, to corporate Part 91 operations in some of the most capable piston and turbine aircraft in general aviation.

The bulk of his hours are in Piper Navajos, with additional time in the Pilatus PC-12, Mitsubishi MU-2, and Citation II. He has owned a Piper Aztec, a Cessna 210, and two Cessna 337 Skymasters — the second of which is what started all of this.

He is not a software developer who built an aviation product. He is a pilot who built a software product. That distinction matters in everything from how the system is designed to how the instructions are written.

The idea for NavCard GPS was born the day Jim took delivery of a used Cessna P337T — a pressurized Skymaster with full glass and a pair of GNS 530W and 430W WAAS units. The avionics were excellent. The data cards were not there. And when he went looking for them, he found the same frustrating reality that tens of thousands of GNS owners deal with every 28 days: the only real option was to mail the cards away, wait, pay more than the data is worth, and hope nothing went wrong in transit.

"I didn't feel good sending the cards in the mail at that cost and the replacement hassle," Jim says. "There had to be a better way."

For most pilots, that thought ends at the ramp. For Jim, it became a project.

The first three months were spent answering the hard questions: Was the technology feasible? Could a browser-based tool communicate with a PCMCIA card reader over USB? Could the FAA NASR data be formatted correctly and written reliably to a card that a GNS unit would accept? Jim worked through the design, built the architecture, and tested the system until the answer to every question was yes.

The next three months were spent on the hardware side — defining card specifications, issuing RFPs to well-known and trusted manufacturers, running prototype tests, a small batch production run, and finally placing the production order for the new, state-of-the-art NavCard GPS data cards. These are not refurbished OEM cards. They are new cards, built to current manufacturing standards, with a 60-day warranty on every order.