The new remote control app for Infinite Flight!
After years of work, IF Remote is finally here!
@likeablegeek, @FlyGirl and I are very proud to announce the release of our new app! In this post, we want to introduce IF Remote to the Infinite Flight Community and let you know what it can do!
What is IF Remote?
IF Remote is an all-in-one remote control app for Infinite Flight, allowing you to monitor and control certain aspects of your flight wherever you are in the world! With our app’s map, you can see your full flight plan and progress along it, including the names of waypoints along the way to give you a better idea of your position in the flight and plan ahead. Alongside a progress bar, you can see your flight’s ETE enroute, ETE to the next waypoint, and altitude targets for the next waypoint, with some datapoints showing your aircraft’s current state, including heading, altitude, speed and load. Below this, you have a custom autopilot control panel that allows you to activate, deactivate and change the target values for different autopilot parameters, allowing you to manage all phases of flight from your climb out of the departure airport to your final turn onto final from the app!
For the ability to keep up to date at a glance, a custom live activity that works on both the lock screen and in the dynamic island is available, with a flight progress bar and key aircraft and flight state data including current speed, altitude and heading, and estimated time enroute and of arrival!
How can I get the app?
To get the app, please proceed to the Apple App Store on your iPad and iPhone here!
To get started using IF Remote and to learn about its features, please refer to the Quick Start Guide! This can be found on our YouTube channel here:
Alternatively, you can read our guide in the below section:
Quick Start Guide
IF Remote’s core purpose is to let you keep in touch with your IF flights at those critical moments when you have to step away from you IF device – to go to school, to run to the store or anything else.
With IF Remote you can start relaying data from IF via the cloud to a phone or other mobile device you take with you that reads the data from the cloud and lets you:
- Track the progress of your flight and the state of your aircraft,
- Monitor your auto-pilot settings,
- Make adjustments to your auto-pilot settings,
- and more …
The simplest example of this is you are flying on an iPad and want to monitor/manage that flight on your iPhone when away from the iPad. This quick start guide will walk you through getting started with IF Remote in this way.
Getting Your Flight Up and Running on Your iPad with IF Remote
There’s typically three steps to getting your flight running with IF Remote on your iPad:
- Launch IF Remote, sign in and put IF Remote in “slide over” mode on the iPad
- Slide IF Remote to the side of the screen until you are ready to start monitoring
- Launch Infinite Flight, set up your flight and take off as normal. Fly as normal until you are ready to start your remote monitor.
- Slide IF Remote back out on top of Infinite Flight and start a relay session
Once this is all done you are relaying your fight data to the cloud ready for remote monitoring and control. Just leave the iPad running this way (preferably plugged into power) and IF and IF Remote in the foreground.
Monitoring Your Flight from Your iPhone
Once you have the IF Remote relay up and running as described above you are ready to monitor your flight remotely. All you need to do is:
- Launch IF Remote on your iPhone and sign in
- Start a remote monitoring session
That’s it. At this point you should see the IF Remote monitoring screen which includes a flight map, a progress bar with details of your flight against your flight plan, the state of your aircraft (speed, heading, altitude, fuel and load), and an autopilot control panel.
With the free app – and without subscribing to our pro features – you can now monitor the state of your flight. The flight data should update automatically roughly every minute. With the pro version there will be new data every 10 to 30 seconds.
Using IF Remote Pro Features
If you choose to subscribe to IF Remote Pro then you have lots of additional features:
- You can launch a live activity and monitor your flight progress from the lock screen of your iPhone
- You can enable remote controls and remotely adjust your autopilot settings
- Coming Soon: You can enable auto step climb and have IF Remote guide your aircraft up to your final altitude according to your flight plan
Launching a Live Activity
Launching a live activity is easy – just tap the “Live Activity” button at the top of the monitoring screen to enable it. If you then lock your iPhone you will see a live activity with flight progress data. This data will update roughly every two minutes.
Be aware that iOS imposes a range of controls on the frequency of updates for live activities dependent on the state of your device (network, battery, etc) and your usage. At times updates will be ignored or queued to be delivered later all together. IF Remote cannot control when or why this happens. We just do our best to send updates to your phone every two minutes when you are using a live activity – but on iOS on your phone ultimately controls when you see those updates.
Also be aware that iOS limits a live activity from updating for a maximum of eight hours. If you keep IF Remote’s live activity running more than eight hours it will stop receiving data and you will need to stop it and start a new live activity from the IF Remote app.
Controlling your Autopilot Settings
By default, the remote control function will be disabled when you start monitoring a flight. This is to prevent you from inadvertently changing a setting which causes issues in your flight or potential IF violations if you are flying in the Expert or Training server.
To make changes to your autopilot settings first enable remote controls – just tap the “Remote Controls” button at the top of the monitoring screen to enable it.
Once enabled you can toggle AP altitude, heading, speed, vertical speed, LNAV, VNAV and approach off and on by tapping the relevant button.
If you want to change your target AP altitude, heading, speed, or vertical speed then just press and hold the button for that setting for roughly one second and a small popup will appear allowing you to select a new value.
Be aware that there may be a slight delay in your change being received by Infinite Flight and the state updating. IF Remote is not intended to be a real-time flying tool but rather to allow you to make planned, intentional changes which don’t require real-time responsiveness from Infinite Flight.
Who are you?
The three of us are the team at Canadian Seagull Studios, a small, UK-based 3-person family company that focusses on making peripheral apps and services for flight simulators, especially Infinite Flight. Some of you may remember @likeablegeek and myself as the people behind the now-deprecated PanelNinja – which we could not continue due to a mix of family deaths, illnesses and life changes.
After years of preparing and brainstorming what app we would like to pursue next, IF Remote is ready and we are very proud to have reached this point! Development of IF Remote, it’s upcoming post-release features and other apps still in development are our full-time job now, and we will work daily to continue improving these apps as much as possible, with all the feedback we can get from the Infinite Flight Community!
If you want to keep on top of news about our projects, keep checking this thread, follow our Instagram and look out for posts from any of us at Canadian Seagulls on the IFC. You can also join our Discord server to learn more about the app and to get support!
Separate to who we are, we would like to take a brief moment here to thank @Cameron and @Saf for their contributions as valuable advisors in this project, and whom without IF Remote may not have come to fruition!
And finally…
After much waiting and testing, a feature that was promised has been added to IF Remote as part of v1.1 in the App Store. For those of you interested, that feature is Auto Step Climb - a feature which will autonomously bring your plane to it’s initial cruise and manage step climbs up to the final altitude before you can switch on VNAV and manage your descent before returning to the flight deck to land your plane!
We enjoyed creating this feature, and we hope you enjoy Auto Step Climb, so if you use it, please feel free to tell us your thoughts on this thread! To get started using Auto Step Climb once you’ve go our Pro subscription, consider checking out this quick tutorial:
