ForeFlight

ForeFlight now offers an enhanced flight planning workflow thanks to improvements to aircraft, the Maps view flight plan editor, and the File & Brief view, which is now called “Flights”.

This video is for ForeFlight customers with subscription plans other than Performance Plus, including the original plans and the Basic Plus and Pro Plus plans. If you have the Performance Plus plan, or want to see what is different with that plan, check out our Performance video series.

You can now preview all route options visually on an interactive map with Route Advisor. Simply tap through the list to highlight each route on the map, then tap “Select Route” to add it to your flight plan. An interactive Route Preview map in the Flights view provides a quick visual reference of your route, showing the departure and destination airports overlaid on a simple basemap with radar.

There are also enhancements to the flight planning workflow in the Flights view: the airport fields at the top have smart search functionality to help you find the right airports, and the Add Next Flight button makes it faster and easier to plan multi-leg flights by carrying forward departure, aircraft details, payload, fuel policy, and more. You can also export your flight plan in the official ICAO format and print, email, share via AirDrop, or save a copy in ForeFlight Documents.

The last video in our Getting Started series for European subscribers shows how to plan a route on the Maps view, send it to Flights to retrieve a weather briefing and printable Navlog, and file the flight plan with EUROCONTROL. 

IMPORTANT: Remember that ForeFlight uses your aircraft's ICAO filing codes when checking for EUROCONTROL validation, so if you keep getting INVALID routes, check to make sure you entered the right ICAO codes for your aircraft.

The ForeFlight map engine has a significantly upgraded basemap, which now renders more quickly, smoothly, and with sharper depiction of features such as major roads, railways, national parks, and state and national boundaries. There’s also a new “Shaded Terrain” option, which uses grayscale shading to depict terrain, providing the same level of detail as the colored terrain option with less visual distraction.

In the Map Settings menu, choose from multiple presentations: Colored, Shaded, or None.

ForeFlight’s Alternate Advisor simplifies the process of choosing a good alternate airport by providing a list of suggestions to help you narrow your options. Alternate Advisor is available with all ForeFlight subscription plans.

ForeFlight now allows you to search for aircraft tail numbers, call signs, and flight numbers on the Maps view to see recently filed flight plans.

ForeFlight now allows you to apply a dark theme to the entire app. Go to More - Settings and tap App Theme at the top, then tap Dark. This darkens the background colors on most pages while maintaining highlight colors and prominent white text, so important information is easily visible.

Single Tap for airports, waypoints, navaids, and airways is a feature of Aeronautical Maps that allows you to quickly access information on the Maps view. With the Aeronautical layer selected, simply quick tap on any airport, waypoint, VOR, or airway to see details about it. Tap Add to Route to drop it into your route.

All ForeFlight customers can now access international departures, arrivals, and approaches using Procedure Advisor, expanding the scope of ForeFlight’s global planning capabilities.

These global flight planning features are further enhanced by adding Jeppesen’s industry-leading charts to your ForeFlight account. Check out our other videos on purchasing Jeppesen charts through ForeFlight and linking an existing Jeppesen account to learn more.

ForeFlight’s radar and satellite layers now use an interactive time slider tool that provides more control when viewing and animating weather timestamps.

ForeFlight’s weather capabilities now include five new layers for icing, turbulence, and surface analysis forecasts, available on Pro Plus, Performance Plus, and Business Performance plans. The Icing and Turbulence layers each have a US and global option, and the Surface Analysis layer provides a global view of isobars and associated pressure readings, and a more detailed view of pressure centers, fronts, troughs, and other features for North America. All five of the new layers are also available on ForeFlight’s web application.

To further streamline your planning workflow on Flights, you’ll find a quick access button to Pack directly below the Flight Log. Just like the ‘suitcase’ button on the Maps view, tap ‘Pack and it will analyze your route and package up all of the charts, data, NOTAM, and weather information (including Icing and Turbulence for Pro Plus and Performance Plus customers) you’ll need to access offline during your flight.

Trip Assistant is a fast, accurate way to plan trips from door-to-door, incorporating traffic and flight times to create a detailed itinerary. In just a few clicks, calculate what time to leave your home or office address to arrive at your destination on time. Trip Assistant can help any scheduler, executive assistant, or pilot more easily collaborate and prepare for upcoming flights.

FBO Fuel Orders allow you to notify the destination FBO of your estimated arrival time and fuel order request using a simple form that is transmitted right from the Flights tab. Fuel Orders are available for Performance Plus and Business Performance subscribers.

ForeFlight Mobile’s Weight & Balance feature allows you to quickly determine whether the aircraft is loaded within its envelope. ForeFlight Mobile’s smart setup interview asks questions about your aircraft and installed options to help you with configuration. Weight & Balance is a ForeFlight Mobile Pro feature.

The fuel planning section of the Flights view has a new layout that provides more flexibility in adjusting fuel policies to hit target values. Fuel and weight planning is available with ForeFlight Performance subscription plans.

Performance profiles in ForeFlight make it easy to set up aircraft performance data for different power settings, but you can also adjust performance data for a flight without using performance profiles. 

Just type space-separated values for cruise speed and/or fuel flow directly into the Flight Plan Editor at the end of the route string, using standard abbreviations to indicate units for speeds and fuel flow, such as KTS for knots, MPH for miles per hour, GPH for gallons per hour, and PPH for pounds per hour.

ForeFlight will use any values you add this way to calculate performance results instead of the performance profiles. The performance profile field on the left will show the new values in parentheses to indicate this temporary override. If you delete the new values in the Flight Plan Editor, ForeFlight will revert to using the values in the performance profile.

Being able to quickly specify different performance values right in the Maps view provides valuable flexibility when planning a flight.

Visit foreflight.com/map-shapes for additional information about this feature and to download sample KML files.

In addition to user waypoints and user map layers, ForeFlight now allows you to import User Charts that you can manage and display on the map.

The User Charts feature supports MBTiles, an open source file format developed by MapBox that allows for efficient compression and distribution of large charts. The feature does not yet support vector charts, which can also use the .mbtiles extension. A great tool for creating your own MBtiles is MapTiler, which is free to download and allows you to quickly georeference and export raster charts.

ForeFlight's Route Advisor now allows Performance subscribes to manually adjust the altitude range considered when generating the Recommended Route, allowing for more customization and personalized route suggestions. 

Learn more about the Recommended Route here: https://blog.foreflight.com/2018/03/15/foreflight-recommended-route-explained/