Article 52124 of sci.geo.satellite-nav:
From: jhwelch@spamless.ecs.umass.edu
Newsgroups: sci.geo.satellite-nav
Subject: Garmin 12xl on United
Date: Fri,  5 Dec 97 10:58:28 GMT
Organization: Engineering Computer Services
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For the holiday I flew x-country last week on United and took my
Garmin 12XL along.  For the 3 legs that I had a window seat on
I either sent the 12xl up to the cockpit to have it "okayed"
or else asked the flight attendant when boarding.  On an
Airbus 320 I was directed in to the cockpit and got to eye
all the fancy displays while the co-pilot looked my unit up
in a very thick reference book.  In all 3 cases I was given
the go-ahead to use it 10 minutes after takeoff and above 10,000 feet.

The crews of the two 727s I was in both made an announcement upon
descent to turn all equipment off.  

While heading west and sitting on the south side of the plane
I was getting a few sats through my window plus one very
low on the horizon from the other side of the plane!

Later on in the trip the sat geometry changed and I was in 2d
mode.  I set my altitude to 31,000 so I could see when I was
back in 3d mode.  Then something surprizing happened.  The display
dropped to 29,999 feet, then to 29,998.  This happened 3 times
and the last time it dropped to 29,997 and then started beeping
asking for a new/current altitude to be input.  

On the flight home I again was in 2d mode for a shorter while 
and this time the altitude increased.  Is this a minor bug?

The other thing I noticed was the Nearest Waypoint list has
a cutoff at 200 (nautical in my case) miles.

A few of the flight attendants knew what a gps was and were joking
with me about being a backup to the pilot, etc.

My fellow seat-mates got a kick out of seeing how far we were 
from the airport and kept wanting to know how much longer we'd
be in the air.

-jonathan.