Story ID: 412
ForeFlight Grows Business Aviation Services
By: Matt Thurber
Caption: ForeFlight is demonstrating its Dispatch and ForeFlight Mobile software at the NBAA convention in Orlando.
Word Count: 432
ForeFlight (Booth 2157) continues to add features for business aviation pilots and operators to its Dispatch software and ForeFlight Mobile electronic flight bag app. This week at NBAA-BACE 2022, the company is highlighting its mobile app, flight planning, runway analysis, integration with Dispatch and Jeppesen charts, and trip-planning services.
While ForeFlight has been widely adopted by business aviation pilots, there is “a misconception we’ve been fighting,” said company content marketing manager Sam Taylor, that some pilots think ForeFlight isn’t useful for filing flight plans all over the world. “People love ForeFlight for the map and flight planning, but then they don’t fully explore the app’s capabilities. They don’t realize it takes just half a dozen taps to have the flight plan filed.”
Pilots who are used to a certain method of filing flight plans might be reluctant to change. “Once they have a workflow with a given filing provider, it can be difficult to switch,” Taylor acknowledged. “But we have seen a very big uptick in flight plan filing in the last three to four years. This is just one example of how ForeFlight is making these sorts of workflows faster and easier.”
Adding Dispatch to the mix enables flight schedulers and dispatchers to collaborate with pilots during the entire planning process. Dispatch also integrates with scheduling software and with trip-planning and handling companies.
“It gives operators complete flexibility,” he said. “You can upload itineraries or build an entire flight plan. It’s completely at the customer’s discretion how deeply the [handling provider] is involved.”
This avoids the typical scenario of creating a flight plan, emailing it back and forth to the handling provider up to a dozen times, then finally agreeing on the flight plan to be filed. With Dispatch, the handler can see exactly what the customer wants, and any changes are automatically updated on the flight crews’ iPads. “It’s a highly collaborative solution,” Taylor said.
ForeFlight’s runway analysis service is seeing a high rate of adoption now that more than 100 aircraft models are supported, covering about 80 percent of the business aviation fleet. The latest addition is a King Air, and ForeFlight is working on adding most King Air variants. Now ForeFlight’s runway analysis contains more than 10,000 RNAV engine-out procedures, many of which follow published departure procedures as closely as possible.
With ForeFlight’s upgraded weight and balance capability, which is integrated with flight planning, ForeFlight can calculate takeoff trim for a variety of business aircraft.