A pilot's forum question about whether Garmin Pilot publishes VFR arrival and departure routes for airports like Jackson Hole (KJAC), the way ForeFlight does under its Procedures tab, highlights a recurring friction point in electronic flight bag (EFB) usage: feature parity gaps between the two dominant EFB platforms. KJAC is a well-known example because its surrounding terrain—the Teton Range and the narrow Snake River valley—demands published VFR routing to keep traffic flows predictable and separated from IFR arrivals and departures at a high-density mountain airport. ForeFlight has built out a robust library of these locally-developed VFR route diagrams, often sourced from FBOs, flight schools, or airport operators, and displays them alongside instrument procedures. Garmin Pilot users searching for the same content within the app's procedures section may come up empty, not because the routes don't exist, but because Garmin's content pipeline for this category is less mature or organized differently within the app.
This matters operationally because VFR routes at challenging airports like Jackson Hole aren't merely convenience tools—they're often the de facto standard for how ATC and other pilots expect arrivals and departures to be flown, especially at non-towered-adjacent or seasonally congested mountain airstrips, or towered fields with complex terrain like KJAC. A pilot unfamiliar with the expected routing, or unable to easily locate it in their EFB of choice, risks flying a nonstandard track that surprises ATC, conflicts with other traffic, or drifts into terrain-challenged areas without the situational awareness locals take for granted. For Part 91 GA pilots flying into resort destinations, business jet crews repositioning into mountain airports, and even charter operators under Part 135, having immediate access to these unofficial-but-widely-used routes is a real safety and efficiency factor, particularly during peak ski season or summer tourist traffic when KJAC's ramp and airspace get busy.
The broader trend this reflects is the ongoing competition and divergence between ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot as the two EFBs continue to leapfrog each other on content and features. ForeFlight, backed by Boeing/Jeppesen's data relationships, has invested heavily in curated airport-specific content, including custom VFR route diagrams, hot spots, and airport-specific advisories. Garmin Pilot, while excelling in areas like weather radar integration, synthetic vision preview, and tight coupling with Garmin avionics (GTN, G1000NXi, GDU displays), has historically lagged in some of this bespoke procedural content. Pilots who fly with both platforms—or who switch between them based on aircraft equipage—need to be aware that the two apps are not interchangeable in terms of published content, and that gaps like this can create blind spots if a pilot assumes "if it's not in my EFB, it doesn't exist."
For operators and flight departments standardizing on a single EFB fleet-wide, this kind of gap is a useful reminder to cross-check specialty destinations against multiple sources during trip planning, particularly for airports with known local-flying quirks—Jackson Hole, Aspen, Telluride, Bar Harbor, and similar terrain-constrained fields all fall into this category. It also reinforces the value of consulting airport-specific resources beyond the EFB itself, such as FBO websites, local pilot guides, and NBAA or AOPA airport-specific safety briefings, when operating into airports where published charts don't tell the whole story. As EFB vendors continue to compete on content depth rather than just interface polish, expect continued back-and-forth commentary from working pilots on forums like r/flying about which app has which airport's routes, underscoring that no single EFB yet offers complete, uniform coverage of every locally significant VFR procedure in the National Airspace System.