‘Touch Planning’ And ‘Bring Your Own Procedures’ For Pilots, 'Enterprise' For Flight Departments

ForeFlight is at AirVenture showing off the new ‘Touch Planning’ and ‘Bring Your Own Procedures’ capabilities in ForeFlight Mobile HD for iPad, the best-selling preflight intelligence and flight support app for pilots.

ForeFlight says the new touch planning capabilities in the Mobile HD 3.6 allow pilots to tap out flight plans by touching different points on a sectional or IFR en-route chart, move waypoints with their finger tips, and quickly bend routes around weather, military operations areas, and restricted airspace.

“The touch planning capabilities in ForeFlight Mobile HD exemplify how pilots will interact with flight planning software now and into the future,” said Tyson Weihs, Co-Founder of ForeFlight. “Planning via gestures and by touch is more natural than planning by keyboard entry.

The company says with its Mobile HD’s Touch Planning, building complex cross-country or intercontinental flight plans takes only seconds.” “The first time you change an active flight plan, in flight, by interacting with the route directly and using only finger gestures, you will laugh out loud. It’s that impressive,” said Jason Miller, Co-Founder of ForeFlight.

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ForeFlight Mobile HD 3.6 also introduces a new feature called Bring Your Own Procedures (BYOP), which allows pilots to load their own digital terminal procedures or supplements directly into ForeFlight Mobile HD. “Pilots around the world have asked for the ability to load digital procedures from local sources directly into ForeFlight”, said Miller. “Others, including as military and helicopter pilots, have desired the ability to load supplemental terminal procedures unique to their operations. BYOP delivers this capability. For example, operators in Alaska have already loaded special procedures such as power line transitions and special heliport procedures into ForeFlight Mobile HD.”

For flight departments, ForeFlight is introducing Enterprise, a new offering for flight departments the company says adopts the Apple iPad as an electronic flight bag. ForeFlight Enterprise simplifies distribution of flight operations documents, compliance, chart updates, terminal procedure updates, and preflight weather intelligence gathering. It also supports secure deployment within the enterprise.

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“ForeFlight Enterprise delivers a range of capabilities to the iPad that help improve the productivity of flight operations,” said Weihs. “This new offering includes unified billing, an online document system that manages the distribution of documents to aircraft and pilots, compliance tools for tracking preflight briefings and pilot activities, and the ability to securely deploy the application to company owned iPad devices via enterprise deployment tools. Future versions will connect dispatch teams to iPad-equipped pilots, allowing flight department planners to push flight-specific documents like manifests and handler documents automatically to crews, interact via push messaging capabilities,  and automatically receive arrival alerts from landed aircraft.”

For smaller flight operations departments that don’t require the additional enterprise capability but desire to utilize ForeFlight on five or more devices, ForeFlight has also introduced the ability to purchase multi-device licenses of the standard ForeFlight Mobile HD. These licenses, which
are available at group discount rates, simplify the device management and billing for small flight departments.

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“Every day more flight operations departments adopt the iPad for use as an electronic flight bag. These customers need more flexible purchase options, expanded integration capabilities, and the ability to easily add and remove devices from service,” said Jason Miller.

FMI: www.foreflight.com