Whether or not
Two pilots, two opinions
ForeFlight Forever
By Jill W. Tallman
In the 1990s, Madison Avenue wanted to know if you were a Mac or a PC. I’ve been a Mac person since Macs were little gray boxes, and that’s why I like ForeFlight. It appeals to my right-brain, visual nature in the same intuitive way that Macs do. You almost—almost—don’t even have to read the ForeFlight manual to get a quick and workable familiarity with this incredibly versatile flight planning program. Jump in, start pinching and zooming, and you’ll pick it up almost immediately.
This is a weather column, so I’ll stick to the weather functionality. And ForeFlight has loads—as much or as little as you want. What’s the weather like at your home airport? Tap it, choose METAR from the bottom menu, and now you know. If you’re like me, you’re usually tempted to check the forecast while you’re at it, and ForeFlight gives you a choice of two: terminal area forecast and model output statistics (MOS). MOS relates such factors as near-surface air temperature, visibility, and wind direction to one or more predictors, and it produces sometimes startlingly accurate forecasts for up to three days out, which helps VFR pilots know what they’re going to be dealing with beyond “partly cloudy” or “chance of thunderstorms.”
Once it’s time to brief a trip, ForeFlight does that. Create a flight plan, choose Brief, and the program takes you step by step through all the charts, showing your route of flight superimposed on each. Take as much time as you need to study everything. You don’t have to interpret what the flight briefer is saying versus what you’re seeing. ForeFlight’s weather comes from the National Weather Service, and when you brief a trip it’s time-stamped and ForeFlight keeps a record for 120 days, in case you need to show the FAA that you complied with the requirements of FAR 91.103.
I’ve never had an issue pairing ForeFlight with any Garmin product. ForeFlight running on an iPad received weather and traffic advisories from a Garmin 345 ADS-B without issues and brought a dazzling new level of functionality to my flying. So don’t waste energy worrying that Garmin and ForeFlight will not talk to each other—the companies are smarter than that.
And I’m not at all worried about Boeing’s recent acquisition of ForeFlight. In fact, I think it’s nice that the little guys are showing commercial aviation what all the fuss is about.
A Garmin guy
By Dave Hirschman
I sounds like heresy, but it’s true and I’ll say it out loud: I like Garmin Pilot better than ForeFlight. The mere presence of the familiar symbols on the Garmin Pilot homepage give me joy. I know what they mean, and they inspire confidence and calm.
When Garmin Pilot appears on an iPhone, it looks and acts just like the aera 660 in my airplane, or the 796 in my flight bag, or, for that matter, the Garmin Touchscreen Controller in a corporate jet. It’s a trusted traveling companion that can answer virtually any aviation question I come up with from preflight planning to landing—and I don’t have to hunt for it because the information is all right where it’s supposed to be.
Another Garmin Pilot advantage is that the app is best buds with other Garmin equipment, most notably the Garmin ADS-B receiver (a GDL 39) in my airplane. Those two start gabbing the instant the avionics master switch goes on, and together they provide immediate weather, traffic, and terrain information in easy-to-understand color graphics.
Even Garmin’s weather map simply makes sense. A blue circle on Garmin Pilot, for example, means an airport has VFR conditions—like blue sky. On ForeFlight, however, blue means marginal VFR, and green is VFR. That’s easy enough to interpret, but it takes a half-second to think through, and I’m lazy. I want to know at a glance.
I used to feel guilty about my Garmin preference because ForeFlight has done so much good for general aviation by radically reducing costs. If not for ForeFlight, we’d still be paying $1,000 a year or more for nationwide IFR subscriptions to paper charts that we’d have to lug around in heavy flight bags. Remember them? Now, we get better information on an iPad at about one-tenth the cost, and ForeFlight did that almost single-handedly. I also admire the way ForeFlight has stayed ahead of every challenger from Jeppesen on down the line.
Boeing’s recent purchase of ForeFlight, however, relieves any pangs of conscience I felt about favoring Garmin. There’s no scrappy, entrepreneurial, little-guy startup to support anymore. Both apps are owned by big publicly traded corporations. And Boeing’s purchase is sure to test ForeFlight’s allegiance to the general aviation market because everyone knows their real growth opportunity is in more lucrative corporate, airline, and military markets—and ForeFlight’s duty now is to Boeing shareholders, not GA pilots.
My strong preference for Garmin Pilot, however, begins and ends with its familiar, reliable, and powerful interface. It’s earned my trust, and I’m sticking with it.
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