Despite all the many cool services out there that can help a pilot plan a trip, I have been stubbornly loyal to plain ole duats. I tried other stuff like aopa tools and such, and they were good, but nothing lured me away from duats. On a recent trip from Georgia to South Dakota, foreflight proved so amazingly useful for flight planning and flying, that I think my duats days are nearing an end. (OK, I still will use it some.)
The route to SD had a lot of storms in the way. I wanted to stay VFR, and with Foreflight, I was able to view clouds, visibility, and celings across wide swaths of the continental US, and I could easily drag and drop a route through good weather. Then I just had to get in the plane and fly the route. It worked beautifully. If you have never seen how cool foreflight is before and during the flight, grab somebody's ipad and give it a shot.
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The one thing that was missing for me is that I still needed Airnav to get fuel prices and read opinions on the FBO. I have found this information to be infinitely useful when doing longer trips. This, to me, is as much a part of flight planning as visibility and ceilings. So I found myself going back and forth between foreflight and airnav to pick the optimal airports for weather and little guy friendly fbo's.
Well, Foreflight listens. Today I found, in my inbox, the announcement that they now can show fuel prices in the map view. This is now my favorite aviation gadget.
From the announcement:
Quote:
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This update is a big one and includes long-desired iPad and iPhone features like fuel prices, SIDs and STARs, airway support, direct-to, airport and FBO comments, turbo downloads, and a long list of user interface tweaks and performance improvements. We even added the eagerly-awaited Touch Planning for iPhone.
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Foreflight HD 3.7 has fuel planning!
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