hortly after GPS made its inaugural real-world appearance in the mid-1990s, a pal showed me the first chart plotter I’d ever seen. After a lifetime of paper-chart navigation it took me a while to fathom the concept of the electronic chart, but although at that stage the plotters on offer were worse than useless, only a fully paid-up luddite would have said there was no future in the idea. Things moved on rapidly, and soon we had embryonic plotters that worked and were a genuine aid to safe navigation. The quality of software and speed varied between manufacturers, but they all improved and the best have morphed into ‘Multi-function devices’ (MFDs) that link to further data
