ForeFlight

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

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.

Devices that provide wireless inflight data like GPS and weather to your iPad can sometimes disconnect, whether due to a dead battery, connection issues, or human error. Whatever the reason for the loss of signal, the Device Disconnect Alert allows you to quickly take steps to restore the connection or switch to an alternative data source.

ForeFlight Glide Advisor helps you to quickly assess your landing options in case you ever lose engine power in flight. Using terrain, GPS data, and your aircraft’s best glide speed and ratio, ForeFlight shapes a glide range ring around your ownship icon on the moving map display.

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.

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.

Jeppesen’s global enroute charts are now available in ForeFlight Mobile for all customers who have purchased or linked Jeppesen chart coverages. No matter what Jeppesen coverage you have, you can download the entire set of global VFR and IFR enroute charts, at no additional cost and with no setup or configuration required.

Jeppesen enroute charts are not available for the following iOS devices: iPad Mini 1, iPad 2, iPad 3, and iPhone 5 and below.