Preflight IF is 4 years old - Suggestion Box

[Alexei]

Hey everyone. Hope you all are staying safe and healthy, and that the silver lining of the current conditions means you can get some extra flying done.

Was looking over some of the code in the Preflight IF app, and realised that some of this code is now over 4 years old - that’s how long this little utility has been up and running.

With that in mind, wanted to ask the community - are you finding this utility useful? Is there anything you’d like to see added? Is there anything that you want it to do better?

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, - it’s a small iOS utility that lets you view airport info (weather, available runways, crosswinds, that kind of stuff), add events and reminders, and view open ATC facilities, among other things.

If you have an iOS device and are interested, do check it out here:

‎Preflight IF

Otherwise, would love to hear some feedback from everyone, so I can make this tool better and more useful

Cheers!

[bensonb]

It’s a good app and has some valuable resources for flying in the sim, but I don’t find it overly useful.

Apart from the circuit, the diagrams are a bit random and should have an explanation as to what they actually show.

The airport lookup is a great idea and shows useful information, but it could be expanded upon. I’d suggest adding sid and star charts for airports where possible. This would be extremely useful for quickly pulling up arrival charts while flying.

It does sound basic, but a checklist function could also add to the usefulness of the app and maybe replace the reminders page which seems a bit useless.

[Alexei]

Thanks for the feedback!

Re: charts, the biggest problem is the licensing. I’ve played around with sourcing charts in the early days, and there’s no service that really provides them for an affordable cost given the context of the app. I completely agree, it would be amazing to have them, so we’ll just have to see if the resources become available.

The old version of the app had a checklist, but I removed it, since i felt it was of little value. For individual planes, IF Checklists kind of covers all use cases. If I was to do one, what kind of things would you expect to see there? Serious question - a good checklist in my opinion either just covers the basics really well, or covers lots of specific, tailored flows for different contexts of flight, and I’m at this point leaving towards the former.

[bensonb]

With the recent addition of newer aircraft and more complex systems, checklists can now be more in-depth than making sure beacon lights and the seatbelt sign are turned on.

Maybe you could incorporate the reminders feature into checklists? E.g when you reach a certain distance away from the destination, you are notified to begin a descent checklist/configuration. The app could then pull up weather, arrival information etc. for the inbound airport. I know Laura has done a lot of work on expanding the capabilities of the API, so I believe a feature like this is now doable.