ForeFlight Adds New 3D Flight-Planning Tools

ForeFlight has added 3D flight planning tools for top-tier subscribers to its mobile flight-planning app that allow a pilot to see a digitized map of any airport and virtually fly any route before a flight or afterward as a debrief tool.

ForeFlight CEO Tyson Weihs offered Flying a demonstration of the technology at the company’s EAA AirVenture booth, explaining that the update combines aerial imagery with Jeppesen-sourced high-resolution terrain for every continent, letting users explore airports and plan or relive flights with ease.

When using the 3D tools, a pilot can fly a pre-planned route virtually before a flight or review the actual route after a flight.

The capability is available to subscribers to the Performance Plus version of the ForeFlight Mobile app, which is priced at $299 per year. This tier of subscription also includes predepature clearances and digital ATIS, detailed aircraft performance profiles, optimized autorouting, and takeoff and landing performance data for many piston aircraft.

ForeFlight recently became a sister company of Jeppesen after its purchase by Boeing, which has led to closer collaborations between the flight-planning specialists. Weihs said ForeFlight has been releasing new technology in the ForeFlight Mobile app at a faster pace than before the Boeing buyout and plans to continue to rapidly innovate and refine it.

The takeoff and landing data tools, he said, have recently been altered to conform to new FAA guidance for piston aircraft that calls for longer runway lengths than those listed in pilot operating handbooks, an acknowledgment, Weihs said, that as piston aircraft age they lose performance. The FAA guidance, he said, calls for slightly more than one and half times the runway length as the POH lists to compensate for age-related performance decreases.