ForeFlight is demonstrating features of its mobile app’s new major releases this year at AirVenture and offering demos of the ForeFlight Voyager app for Apple’s Vision Pro “spatial computing” virtual reality headset. Visitors must sign up for the demos at the ForeFlight exhibit and must be 16 years or older.
AirVenture Job Fair attendees might be interested in open positions at ForeFlight, which will be hosting a joint booth with parent company Boeing. More than one-third of ForeFlight employees are pilots, according to Ryan McBride, head of community, and there are “a lot of ways pilots and aviation enthusiasts can help make ForeFlight a better product.”
Recent major ForeFlight flight-planning and electronic flight bag app releases include the Discover tab, which highlights user-generated content such as events and a new education section. Users can look for events anywhere in the U.S. (events outside the U.S. will be added later) and click on an event to get the details. Events are sourced from the calendars maintained by the AOPA and EAA. Anyone can submit events into those calendars and they should show up in ForeFlight 24 hours later. Events are presented as a list or geographically and can be filtered by date and type of event (whether it is a learning opportunity, something to discover like an airshow or fly-in, or a gathering—for example, an EAA chapter meeting or airport open house). Events are stored in ForeFlight on the iPad so users can view events offline.
“There’s a lot more to aviation than just the planning and the flying part,” said McBride. “There’s education, meeting up with others, and joining different communities. Our new Discover tab is the new home for user-generated content.”
The education section consolidates all the training videos that ForeFlight has published in an easy-to-find location. The videos are online so an internet connection is required. “We have big plans for moving forward lots of different types of content we want to include in this area,” he said.
June updates to ForeFlight include an artificial intelligence summary of comments by airport users and the inclusion of FAA letters to airmen (LTA) in the procedures section of airport information. These letters from controllers explain local procedures and policies, and ForeFlight’s inclusion of LTAs in the airport section makes them much easier to find.
Pilots flying to AirVenture will be able to view reported turbulence on their routes following the release of this feature in May. The sheer volume of aircraft flying to Oshkosh, many of which will be carrying Sentry ADS-B In devices, should increase the number of turbulence reports feeding into ForeFlight. It is unlikely, however, that they will get wake turbulence warnings from flying too close to other aircraft on the flight into Oshkosh because that feature works when a smaller aircraft is nearing a much larger aircraft.
ForeFlight sister company Jeppesen will highlight a simpler menu of nav data for Garmin and Avidyne avionics. Where there used to be more than 100 coverage choices, that has been winnowed to 14. Prices have also been lowered for the resulting larger coverage areas. U.S. coverage that used to cost $900, for example, is now reduced to $500. Existing subscribers don’t have to switch to the new coverages and can retain their current subscription plan.
The Voyager has been consistently updated since its release in February, and users can now view background information on any type of aircraft when wearing the Vision Pro headset, generated using artificial intelligence. Also relatively new is that two Vision Pro users can share their views over a FaceTime call. After the Vision Pro was released, ForeFlight integrated LiveATC airport audio while viewing any airport (where audio is available).