SkyTimer offers beautifully design app for tracking fuel burn

In a market dominated by do-it-all apps like ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot, it’s a pleasant surprise to find a simple app that aims to do just one or two things, but do them very well. So it is with SkyTimer, an easy-to-use app that makes logging trips and tracking fuel burn as easy as tapping a button.

The bread and butter for SkyTimer is tracking fuel management. First set up an aircraft profile, then visit the Preflight tab to select an aircraft and start a flight. The app will track total time, time out, time off, and time on each fuel tank. Using the fuel burn you entered when creating an aircraft profile, SkyTimer offers updated endurance estimates, fuel load in each tank, and total fuel burn. It’s simple, but it’s well designed—easy to read in flight and visually clean.

There are a variety of thoughtful features here, including a Smart Balance feature that will calculate how long to burn fuel out of one tank if the airplane is starting with an unbalanced fuel load. SkyTimer will also provide helpful alerts, for example when  you need to switch tanks or when a predetermined endurance is remaining.

Speaking of alerts, the app works on Apple Watch in addition to iPhone. Unlike some other aviation apps, which offer watch apps almost as throwaway marketing gimmicks, SkyTimer has a full-featured Apple Watch app that works with or without your iPhone nearby. This makes it easy to start and stop timing, as well as receive contextual alerts—and the tap on your wrist is much easier to notice in a noisy cockpit. With built-in iCloud sync, all your devices stay up to date.

You can also use SkyTimer to log overall flight time, helpful for a flying club or partnership (multiple aircraft profiles are supported). Even if you use ForeFlight or Garmin Pilot for your pilot log, this is a great option for tracking aircraft time. At the end of each flight, you’ll have a record of time flown, current Hobbs time, and fuel on board (no more asking “how much fuel was left when we landed?”). It uses your phone’s GPS and a built-in aviation database to detect departure, arrival, and stops, so there’s not much to do other than start a flight. The Smart Track feature can even log landings automatically based on groundspeed.

SkyTimer is free to download and start tracking block and flight times (iPhone and Apple Watch). To unlock all features and really make the most of the app, you’ll want to sign up for a SkyTimer Plus subscription, which is a very reasonable $9.99/year.