Southern Microlight Club of Victoria
Electronic Flight Bag for Iphone by Sean Scott
The pilot’s new best friend is not some new iteration of a Garmin GPS with moving map, or a satellite XM real-time weather storm scope, an automatic flight log, super chart, EZ flight planning tool, pocket checklist, or in-flight entertainment system. It’s actually all of them and more wrapped into one convenient and seemingly ubiquitous device… the iPhone. The joke that there is an app for that is turning more and more into a reality. As sport pilots, our need for need for innovative, compact, and cost effective flight data solutions is perhaps more critical than that of the general aviation pilot.
As an avid iPhone user with hundreds of apps and an addicted sport pilot, I have weeded through the wheat and chaff of flight related apps and have come up with the following must-have list of apps for your iPhone flying pleasure. I use each one of these apps to make my flight experience safer and more enjoyable. While there is no one, fully integrated app that does it all, some do try. I have found these do it all apps either come up short or have too many options and variables to make them easy to use. There are several expensive applications, and some with ongoing subscription costs that I avoid as overkill and unnecessarily costly. As sport pilots I do not need IFR or TAC charts, or time on duty calculations, or the ability to route a flight from New York to California. For other pilots, and for professionals these all are important considerations, but not for me and my trike. I prefer to make my own “suite” of applications from the best individual apps available. The following is a list of my favorites, all of which appear on one screen of my iPhone.
1. Charts by Foreflight ($9.99 ) – Charts is an elegant solution to carrying all the sectional charts in your pocket. Combined with simple flight planning and en route flight following it is a great way to plan your next flight. This is a program that I routinely use. Charts is by far the simplest and best solution I have found for charting on the iPhone. Its charts are seamlessly connected, it follows all the standard pinch and zoom functionality that you already know how to do. After setting it up with your plane’s specifics of fuel burn and air speed simple flight planning is a breeze. It will even tell you estimated time en route, heading and fuel used. Plugging in a route is a piece of cake, just type your starting airport and your destination and it will plot a purple line on the sectional. Tell the app to find your location and it will put a blue pin head where you are, and then as you progress in your flight it will update your location in real time and show your position in relation to the plotted course. It could not be easier. I have on more than one occasion used the iPhone to get me to my destination in place of my built in Enigma Stratomaster. Charts easily outperforms and is easier to use than its closest competitor, SkyCharts. SkyCharts while purporting to do the same thing as Charts with a few extra bells and whistles is not intuitive to use, and suffers from some significant interface problems that are a deal breaker for me. I still can’t find where to enter my plane’s performance data for instance. Nor how to access a purported capability to automatically email my location while en route. (I did finally find this, it is under the application preferences under system preferences. So it is there, just hard to find.) The one big advantage over Charts is the ability to cache map data so as to not have to rely on the existence of an active data connection. In more remote locations Charts would not be able to update the information and would effectively be unusable. In response to this limitation, the maker of Charts offers an integrated solution called Foreflight Mobile V3. This app does have the ability to cache charts as well as a slew of other helpful components, great radar, airport information, satellite imagery, flight plan submission, a real Swiss army knife of an app. The downside is an $80 a year subscription fee. More bang than I need for my buck as a sport pilot.
2. MotionX GPS ($2.99) – One cool app. I love this app. Great for recording your entire flight and then displaying it on a map. Finally you can get to see just how perfect your pattern really is. Great for trips or just flying out in the sticks. It easily interfaces with Twitter and Facebook to post your flights. You can email the flight tracks as well. Perhaps the coolest feature is the ability to open the track data in Google Earth and replay the entire flight with Google’s excellent satellite data. I use this app on nearly every flight. It gives me total distance, max and average speed and total flight time. It is also a convenient way to mark particular interesting spots for future return flights. For instance, about 30 minutes from my home airport I discovered a ranch with zebras, rhinos, gazelles and giraffes. I simply hit mark and now I can fly directly there when taking up friends for a flight to Africa! It has a good interface and an easy learning curve. While it does not have support for sectional charts it does have the ability to cache other type of maps for offline use.
3. touchPlan (free) – A recent addition to my electronic flight bag (EFB) Redundant in some ways with Charts for flight planning, and deficient in some ways, for example it does not have fuel calculations, nor sectional overlay. But it does have one very nice feature, it integrates your flight plan with real-time winds aloft data to calculate estimated time en route and ground speed giving you the ability to easily see the best altitude to fly and a more realistic time en route and ETA.
4. LogTen Basic (free) – Keeping track of all those flights can be a hassle. There has got to be a better way than that black, paper, logbook. I have searched for the perfect sport pilot electronic logbook and it does not exist. The closest I have found is LogTen Basic. Most applications in this genre are geared for either the GA pilot or the professional airline pilot. All I want is a simple way to log my flights, enter start and stop times and add everything up, all with as little keyboard inputs as possible. The newest version now will time the flight for you. Still, you do need to press start and stop, darn thing won’t automatically connect to my hobbs. LogTen Basic is not without its problems. First, while it allows you to create a list of the planes that you commonly fly, it does not provided anyway that I can see of deleting one of those planes once entered. Additionally, it too suffers from data overkill for the normal sport pilot with unnecessary data fields. It would be nice to be able to remove these fields. Lastly, there is no way to get the data out of the program and onto paper for archival purposes. In order to get that functionality you have to upgrade to the paid version for $19.99.
5. Aeroweather (free) – Whether to fly is the common sport pilot question. Aeroweather is a great little app that helps answer that question by giving you the conditions at your favorite airports such as wind speed, direction, pressure, temperature, cloud cover, ceiling, and VFR/IFR conditions. It is fast, clear and a great way to get situational awareness regarding the weather conditions at multiple airports of your choosing. All you have to do is enter the airport identifier and then it will report all the pertinent data for each airport on one easy to read page. There are a multitude of flight weather apps out there. Some are much more robust than Aeroweather, but this app proves the point that sometimes less is more. For more traditional weather data I use the following product from Garmin.
6. MyCast Onelook ($.99) – Again there are a lot of flight related weather apps out there. Including subscription versions. One of my favorite weather apps that includes a nice moving radar, present conditions and forecasts is MyCast Onelook. While not flight specific it gives me the info I need in a clear and concise manner, and the price does not break the bank. In one place I can see temperature trends as well as predicted wind speed and direction over multiple days. Fabulous for seeing if the weekend will be a flight delight or a no-fly zone. The flight specific version called Pilot MyCast is a very nice and full-featured program with all kinds of pilot-centric features such as DUATS flight plans, winds aloft, TFRs and more. The downside is the $9.99 cost AND the $9.99 per month subscription fee. For the type of flying I do the extra features are not worth the expense and the much cheaper OneLook seems to do just as good a job for my basic needs. If you routinely do lots of cross countries or fly every day, than Pilot MyCast might be your ticket.
7. Checklist Lite – I am still working to like this program. I think it has more to do with my reluctance to fully embrace checklists than with the program. The fact of the matter is though that checklists make you a better pilot, and a safer pilot. I just have to get over my own self and just do it. This app allows you to set up a super easy to use checklist system with a query and response format that is easy and simple to use. There should be no excuse any more. The darn checklist is right there in your pocket. Its easy to use, and when your done you can treat yourself to a your favorite song from itunes.
8. Winds Aloft (free) – Technically not an app but a great web site that will tell you the winds aloft for your particular area for various altitudes. It’s a great cross-check for the touchPlan app. First go to usairnet.com. Then navigate to the city closest to you and will you get a great graphical picture of the winds aloft for your area. I make a bookmark and save it as an icon to my home screen for quick access.
9. iWeathr (free) – Again not an app, but a radar/weather web app Nothing fancy here just a great weather radar, simple uncluttered, fast loading and full screen.
10. ASOS/AWOS (free) – Another web page that works great on the iphone. Faa.gov/air_traffic/weather/asos/ will bring up a map of the United States. Click on your state and get a list of all the ASOS stations with links, and best of all, phone numbers. Click on the phone number for the location you want automated weather information for and the iPhone will dial it for you. Can’t be easier than that. Again save it as an icon to your home screen and you are on click away from the ASOS data of your choice.
So there you have it, ten programs for your iPhone to make your sport flying more enjoyable and safer. None will set you back more than a couple of Starbucks. Add them all together and you have a pretty complete EFB ready at your fingertips just a pocket away. I hope your flying will be more enjoyable with your new tools. Should you have an app I left out or one that performs better please let me know and share.
As an avid iPhone user with hundreds of apps and an addicted sport pilot, I have weeded through the wheat and chaff of flight related apps and have come up with the following must-have list of apps for your iPhone flying pleasure. I use each one of these apps to make my flight experience safer and more enjoyable. While there is no one, fully integrated app that does it all, some do try. I have found these do it all apps either come up short or have too many options and variables to make them easy to use. There are several expensive applications, and some with ongoing subscription costs that I avoid as overkill and unnecessarily costly. As sport pilots I do not need IFR or TAC charts, or time on duty calculations, or the ability to route a flight from New York to California. For other pilots, and for professionals these all are important considerations, but not for me and my trike. I prefer to make my own “suite” of applications from the best individual apps available. The following is a list of my favorites, all of which appear on one screen of my iPhone.
1. Charts by Foreflight ($9.99 ) – Charts is an elegant solution to carrying all the sectional charts in your pocket. Combined with simple flight planning and en route flight following it is a great way to plan your next flight. This is a program that I routinely use. Charts is by far the simplest and best solution I have found for charting on the iPhone. Its charts are seamlessly connected, it follows all the standard pinch and zoom functionality that you already know how to do. After setting it up with your plane’s specifics of fuel burn and air speed simple flight planning is a breeze. It will even tell you estimated time en route, heading and fuel used. Plugging in a route is a piece of cake, just type your starting airport and your destination and it will plot a purple line on the sectional. Tell the app to find your location and it will put a blue pin head where you are, and then as you progress in your flight it will update your location in real time and show your position in relation to the plotted course. It could not be easier. I have on more than one occasion used the iPhone to get me to my destination in place of my built in Enigma Stratomaster. Charts easily outperforms and is easier to use than its closest competitor, SkyCharts. SkyCharts while purporting to do the same thing as Charts with a few extra bells and whistles is not intuitive to use, and suffers from some significant interface problems that are a deal breaker for me. I still can’t find where to enter my plane’s performance data for instance. Nor how to access a purported capability to automatically email my location while en route. (I did finally find this, it is under the application preferences under system preferences. So it is there, just hard to find.) The one big advantage over Charts is the ability to cache map data so as to not have to rely on the existence of an active data connection. In more remote locations Charts would not be able to update the information and would effectively be unusable. In response to this limitation, the maker of Charts offers an integrated solution called Foreflight Mobile V3. This app does have the ability to cache charts as well as a slew of other helpful components, great radar, airport information, satellite imagery, flight plan submission, a real Swiss army knife of an app. The downside is an $80 a year subscription fee. More bang than I need for my buck as a sport pilot.
2. MotionX GPS ($2.99) – One cool app. I love this app. Great for recording your entire flight and then displaying it on a map. Finally you can get to see just how perfect your pattern really is. Great for trips or just flying out in the sticks. It easily interfaces with Twitter and Facebook to post your flights. You can email the flight tracks as well. Perhaps the coolest feature is the ability to open the track data in Google Earth and replay the entire flight with Google’s excellent satellite data. I use this app on nearly every flight. It gives me total distance, max and average speed and total flight time. It is also a convenient way to mark particular interesting spots for future return flights. For instance, about 30 minutes from my home airport I discovered a ranch with zebras, rhinos, gazelles and giraffes. I simply hit mark and now I can fly directly there when taking up friends for a flight to Africa! It has a good interface and an easy learning curve. While it does not have support for sectional charts it does have the ability to cache other type of maps for offline use.
3. touchPlan (free) – A recent addition to my electronic flight bag (EFB) Redundant in some ways with Charts for flight planning, and deficient in some ways, for example it does not have fuel calculations, nor sectional overlay. But it does have one very nice feature, it integrates your flight plan with real-time winds aloft data to calculate estimated time en route and ground speed giving you the ability to easily see the best altitude to fly and a more realistic time en route and ETA.
4. LogTen Basic (free) – Keeping track of all those flights can be a hassle. There has got to be a better way than that black, paper, logbook. I have searched for the perfect sport pilot electronic logbook and it does not exist. The closest I have found is LogTen Basic. Most applications in this genre are geared for either the GA pilot or the professional airline pilot. All I want is a simple way to log my flights, enter start and stop times and add everything up, all with as little keyboard inputs as possible. The newest version now will time the flight for you. Still, you do need to press start and stop, darn thing won’t automatically connect to my hobbs. LogTen Basic is not without its problems. First, while it allows you to create a list of the planes that you commonly fly, it does not provided anyway that I can see of deleting one of those planes once entered. Additionally, it too suffers from data overkill for the normal sport pilot with unnecessary data fields. It would be nice to be able to remove these fields. Lastly, there is no way to get the data out of the program and onto paper for archival purposes. In order to get that functionality you have to upgrade to the paid version for $19.99.
5. Aeroweather (free) – Whether to fly is the common sport pilot question. Aeroweather is a great little app that helps answer that question by giving you the conditions at your favorite airports such as wind speed, direction, pressure, temperature, cloud cover, ceiling, and VFR/IFR conditions. It is fast, clear and a great way to get situational awareness regarding the weather conditions at multiple airports of your choosing. All you have to do is enter the airport identifier and then it will report all the pertinent data for each airport on one easy to read page. There are a multitude of flight weather apps out there. Some are much more robust than Aeroweather, but this app proves the point that sometimes less is more. For more traditional weather data I use the following product from Garmin.
6. MyCast Onelook ($.99) – Again there are a lot of flight related weather apps out there. Including subscription versions. One of my favorite weather apps that includes a nice moving radar, present conditions and forecasts is MyCast Onelook. While not flight specific it gives me the info I need in a clear and concise manner, and the price does not break the bank. In one place I can see temperature trends as well as predicted wind speed and direction over multiple days. Fabulous for seeing if the weekend will be a flight delight or a no-fly zone. The flight specific version called Pilot MyCast is a very nice and full-featured program with all kinds of pilot-centric features such as DUATS flight plans, winds aloft, TFRs and more. The downside is the $9.99 cost AND the $9.99 per month subscription fee. For the type of flying I do the extra features are not worth the expense and the much cheaper OneLook seems to do just as good a job for my basic needs. If you routinely do lots of cross countries or fly every day, than Pilot MyCast might be your ticket.
7. Checklist Lite – I am still working to like this program. I think it has more to do with my reluctance to fully embrace checklists than with the program. The fact of the matter is though that checklists make you a better pilot, and a safer pilot. I just have to get over my own self and just do it. This app allows you to set up a super easy to use checklist system with a query and response format that is easy and simple to use. There should be no excuse any more. The darn checklist is right there in your pocket. Its easy to use, and when your done you can treat yourself to a your favorite song from itunes.
8. Winds Aloft (free) – Technically not an app but a great web site that will tell you the winds aloft for your particular area for various altitudes. It’s a great cross-check for the touchPlan app. First go to usairnet.com. Then navigate to the city closest to you and will you get a great graphical picture of the winds aloft for your area. I make a bookmark and save it as an icon to my home screen for quick access.
9. iWeathr (free) – Again not an app, but a radar/weather web app Nothing fancy here just a great weather radar, simple uncluttered, fast loading and full screen.
10. ASOS/AWOS (free) – Another web page that works great on the iphone. Faa.gov/air_traffic/weather/asos/ will bring up a map of the United States. Click on your state and get a list of all the ASOS stations with links, and best of all, phone numbers. Click on the phone number for the location you want automated weather information for and the iPhone will dial it for you. Can’t be easier than that. Again save it as an icon to your home screen and you are on click away from the ASOS data of your choice.
So there you have it, ten programs for your iPhone to make your sport flying more enjoyable and safer. None will set you back more than a couple of Starbucks. Add them all together and you have a pretty complete EFB ready at your fingertips just a pocket away. I hope your flying will be more enjoyable with your new tools. Should you have an app I left out or one that performs better please let me know and share.