ForeFlight

Detailed aircraft performance profiles are key to ForeFlight’s advanced flight planning capabilities and our highly-accurate flight time and fuel burn calculations. The first thing you should do after purchasing or upgrading to the Performance plan is set up your aircraft to use the built-in performance profiles. You only have to do it once, and it takes under one minute.

To see how you can set up a by-altitude performance profile if your aircraft type doesn't come with ForeFlight Performance Profiles, check out our Performance on the Web video.

Multi-pilot account administrators can manage and distribute company aircraft profiles to all the pilots on an account, allowing for easier aircraft management and reduced setup time for large accounts.

Shared aircraft appear in the Aircraft list for all pilots on the account, along with a tag showing the email address of the administrator who published the aircraft. Pilots can view the details of shared aircraft and use them for flight planning, but all details of the aircraft are locked from editing by the pilots, including the performance profiles.

If the account administrator makes any changes to a shared aircraft, a “Publish Changes” button will appear in the bottom-right, allowing them to instantly distribute the changes to every pilot on the account. Clicking “Unpublish” will revoke access to the aircraft for all users other than the administrator, and they will no longer be able to see or use the aircraft for flight planning.

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.

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 first two things you should do after installing ForeFlight are select the charts and data that you want to download and create aircraft profiles that you will use for flight planning.

IMPORTANT: ForeFlight uses your aircraft's ICAO filing codes to check routes you plan for EUROCONTROL validity, so if you don't add filing codes then most routes will be INVALID.

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 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.