The following screenshots briefly illustrate the different screens that SmartPlates offers and how simple keeping your plates current can be when you use technology the right way.

 Plate Pack Window | Plate Pack Wizard | Information | Printing | Customizing the Chart
Plate Pack Wizard

Manually creating a Plate Pack is easy but we include a helpful Wizard to build one even faster, especially when you're starting with a flight plan.

First, you decide if the Plate Pack is for one specific flight or just a general collection (like ones in your local practice area, ones near a place you'll be visiting soon, etc.).

If it's for a specific flight, you can begin by opening the flight plan with SmartPlan then add the Plate Pack to the flight plan (the first option below).  Or open a saved flight plan (the second option).  You can also create a simple flight plan by entering a series of airport, navaid and waypoint idents (the second choice).  For example, you could enter KSEA KSMF KSFO to rough-out a flight from Seattle to San Francisco with a refueling stop in Sacramento.
If you start with a flight plan, SmartPlates makes it a snap to select nearby airports as alternates.  It can either select all the airports near takeoff/landing/refueling stops (you decide how "near" is defined in NM) or even all the airports within a specified corridor along your whole flight.
Alternately, if the Plate Pack is general purpose, not related to one specific flight, you can select the airports you need by state or proximity to another airport.  Even click Show Chart and use your mouse to visually select airports from a Chart.
Now that your airports are selected, use the checkboxes to tell SmartPlates which types of procedures and diagrams you use.  No need to print NDB procedures if you'll never fly them!
After a quick review step, SmartPlates verifies that all the selected procedures and downloaded and, if they are, checks if they're still valid or need to be updated.  If any downloading is required, SmartPlates automatically begins the download (you can change this behavior).

By default, the plates are downloaded from the Seattle Avionics Web site where we've pre-processed them for faster download (about 5x faster than the original FAA files) so downloading is fast, even with a dial-up connection.  Alternately, you can also choose to download from the FAA's Web site.
And that's it.  When the downloads are done, click Finish and SmartPlates opens your completed Plate Pack in the Plate Pack window.

Plate Pack Window | Plate Pack Wizard | Information | Printing | Customizing the Chart