ForeFlight shows off new online flight planner
ForeFlight is known for producing aviation’s top app for iPad and iPhone, so the company is often considered to be exclusively focused on iOS software. At the 2015 Sun ‘n Fun Fly-in, they proved that to be an incomplete picture, with the introduction of ForeFlight Web, a powerful online flight planning tool.
ForeFlight Web is a new flight planning product from the popular app maker.
ForeFlight Web replicates much of the look and feel of the iOS app’s Maps page, making it useful and intuitive for preflight planning. You can view the map layers you’re used to from the app, including IFR and VFR charts, street maps and aerial imagery. Overlay that with weather radar, METARs, TFRs and satellite for a complete look at the weather. The desktop environment is a really great way to review complex weather systems, with easy panning and zooming. There’s also the familiar search box to help you find airports and plan routes.
When you’re done planning a flight, your route is automatically synced with your iPad, so you can plan your flight at home and be ready to go as soon as you get in the airplane. This will also be a very popular feature with fleet operators, since a dispatcher can plan the flight and then send important route information to each pilot’s iPad.
Seeing this new tool in action makes clear that ForeFlight’s aggressive expansion of its sync technology (with automatically synchronizes aircraft profiles, routes, favorites and more across devices) has bigger aims.
ForeFlight Web is in beta right now, and will initially be available to existing ForeFlight customers – so it’s not a finished product. But the company promises a “collaborative product development process” that quickly adds new features based on pilot feedback. Overall, we were impressed by its design, features and speed.
To sign up for the beta program, visit foreflight.com/web.
Flight planning on my laptop, and syncs right to the iPad app. Nice job, guys.
Now I wish FF would send data to my GTN750. Please tell me this is being worked on…..
I have a lot of flight planning experience using ARINC and GDC in a corporate flight department. Having a desktop or laptop version which links to ForeFlight Mobile will put ForeFlight firmly “in the game.” Am looking forward to exploring the interface!
I can’t wait to try this. I loved the old “FliteStar” program, it was initially written only for the Mac, (which was fine with me) but then Jeppesen had to buy them out and killed any compatibility with the Macintosh platform. ForeFlight has been a Godsend to me, but I did miss being able to plan my flights on a large screen computer. Now it appears we will have the best of both worlds! Thank you!
thanks for making this great flight tool more seamless. I can plan at home or work on a big screen. Check status and update on the iPhone and fly with the iPad.
I’m looking forward to this. Currently use LMFS on the web for planning and filing, then plug it in to FF. Seamless integration and transition across multiple platforms is a huge benefit of our technology. Agree with previous comment regarding downloading to panel GPS; it’d be nice to not burn fuel as I enter the flight plan.
hoe about re arranging the list of airports in airports so that the airports in the current flight plan are shown at the bottom of the list. Then the next Flt plan the former airports move up and give way for the next list
but in all cases the destination airport will always be on bottom…..
There are times when I plan a long trip as a private pilot, ie Oshkosh and will take several days or weeks to plan the routing, fuel stops, frequencies etc. Now I will have the ability to relax and plan everything on the computer vs the ipad and conveniently synch the two together, which is great.
I am fairly new at this, so my que: how do I tell my desktop and ipad to sync ? Does my ipad do auto updates, or do I instigate that, and how.