Foreflight On The iPad from Live Tuesday

As Gary mentioned, we're going to talk about Foreflight on the iPad or iPhone or any Apple product. I have it on my iPad that way because of the screen is bigger and you can see it and then you can either mount it in your airplane or helicopter or you can, you can secure it like a knee board to your leg to whatever is easiest for you. Simple iPad that I have here, just simply go to the app store, type in foreflight, you can get it from there and then once it's downloaded to your screen, then there is a yearly subscription to it, I think. Gary, you have the basic one and you said it was like what, a hundred bucks a year, you think?

I think it's 75 bucks a year for the basic.

And then I have the pro, which means that the aircraft will georeference you onto your plates, onto your taxi diagrams. And I think mine is 150 a year maybe or something like that. I purchased the subscription because of doing instrument training. That way I could have the plates, the instrument procedure charts and all that. So I have already downloaded. It's on my iPad. The icon comes up. If you can see it up there in the upper right corner. All I'm going to do is touch on it and it opens up. Now when you first open it up, I just happened to download all this last night on this new iPad. You have to do some things to it to get it ready. You have to download just some basic stuff and then once you go into the settings, you can download your area, the exact sectionals that you want and some other things. But here we are. I have the sectional for the Chicago area. So I have pulled up the sectional. We are currently at Plymouth Charlie six five. And we're having some issues with the GPS connecting in here because of the metal building and us being inside. But as you currently, as you saw just a few minutes ago or just a few seconds ago, you saw the blue dot, maybe that'll come back. Gary, did you want to say some things before we.

Well, this is an awesome way for students, student pilots to study sectionals because you know, you have the. Show them how you can zoom it to look at things a little closer.

So just like any other Apple product, you can use your fingers to zoom in. There's our dot again, zooming out like using two fingers. So before we lose our gps, just real quick, I have this. I have in the settings you can go to certain rings and as you can see on mine, I've got a 5 nautical mile ring, a 10 nautical mile ring. And a 25. So. And those, you will always stay in the center of those rings when you're traveling. So it's kind of nice. I can, when I'm flying, if I'm out here in the middle of nowhere, using those rings, I can kind of approximate how far I am. Like, if I was over here, I could have. Using those rings, I could approximate how far I am from Warsaw. So that's how I got them set up. And those rings are different settings. I think there's actually like a 10, 20 and 30 mile ring. And I don't even know, to be honest with you, what's in there, because I always use that. Like I said, you will always be in the center of those rings. And again, as you can see, we lost it again.

So the rings follow the blue dot, which is you, the aircraft.

And you can actually change that blue dot. And when you start moving, there's settings in there where you can be an airplane, you can be a helicopter, you can be a jet, you can be whatever you want. So if I would start moving, you would see a helicopter on there, moving. Have they added drone? You know, I don't know if they added drone or not, but I did see tilt rotor in there the other day.

Well, this would be a good app for whether you're. I mean, we're both remote pilots and helicopter pilots. Yep. I could see this app being helpful for either student.

Well, and see, and there's just a quick glance of right there. You can see that, you know, that we're less than 25 nautical miles from South Bend. And that look how easy that is. That you can judge. And if you really wanted to get close, there's 10, you could probably maybe guess that's 15. So we're probably 17 miles to the south, maybe 18. And then you can actually a little trick on the sectional two is if you take your two fingers, rest them on the sectional, you can actually bring up a distance measuring. And all you just do is keep, keep your fingers there, spread your fingers apart, and you can get a rough estimate. So as you can see, what do we guess? I guess 17 or 18. And look, it's 20, roughly about 20 nautical miles to the south. And then to clear that, you just touch the screen again. There you go.

This is a good study aid. I mean, you could, you could zoom in here and look at the information about the C65 Plymouth Airport. You can know right away if you're flying in here at night that this is a lighted Runway. The asterisk would mean that it's pilot activated by clicking the mic on your radio. We could tell that we got fuel here because of these little tick marks on the outside of that circle. Pretty helpful.

And what's nice about these sectionals, if you go to. We're going to. I'm going to digress from the sectional. If I go to airports. At the bottom there you got a row of topics down there I can type in just by hitting the finger. Charlie 65 search. And it pulls up everything about Plymouth airport as soon as. There it goes. But what I was going to get to is over here you can actually hit the AFD button and this replaces your af. But now it's called. What's it called now?

The supplemental chart supplement.

Yeah, chart supplement now. And what you can do is pull this up and Gary just mentioned, okay, well you saw the hash marks or the tick marks around the airport. That means we got fuel. So then you can go in here, hit your afd, pull up Plymouth airport and you can see the services. So you can see right here, service fuel Hunter low lead jet A says here's what's nice. Fuel is self service available 24 hours. So you know if you come in at Plymouth at 2am you're able to get fuel on your own because you can do it yourself at any time. So just something foreflight offers here, you know that it replaces. There's so many things in this little tablet. Instead of carrying sectional charge or AFD, I've downloaded the FAR aim onto my iPad so I don't have to carry a Far AIM book anymore. So if I go back now I can just go back down to this. I can hit maps.

How often do they update that? Is it just like the paper version? Every 56 days?

Yep. And Faraim, it automatically sends you a thing to tell you to update it.

So very good.

Let me zoom back out here. What else you got on there, Gary?

Oh, you could point out a few things that you recognize on there. And again from studying a paper chart like Kenny went over a little bit ago or in a previous. So he was showing how you could have the legend and point out something and then if you don't know what it is, look it up on the legend. Can we use this as a study aid and do the same thing?

Yeah, I can if I go to my documents tab. So I have downloaded the VFR chart legend and it's in foreflight under documents. So if I was looking at the sectional on foreflight and I didn't understand what something was, I Have downloaded the legend and now everything's there, just like your paper chart. And you can zoom in and read and do whatever. Like right here is everything, just like on your paper chart, here's everything about that airport. Anyway, this is your legend and as you can see, here's everything about the airport and it'll tell you everything. So if you hit the bottom tab again, go back to maps. Here we are back on our sectional. You can zoom out and as long as you got things downloaded, you can pull up everything and you just got to give it time to update here. We're having little issues with the. There we go. If you look over in the Chicago area, alright, so on foreflight you can see this white box right here. That's for a terminal chart that you can actually purchase. But what foreflight does for you is you can actually zoom in. And as you zoom in, it would actually make it bigger for you. So if you can see, I'll scroll over a little bit, you can see the difference. So watch, watch right here. You see how they're looking the same right now. But once I hit that, now it's showing you how much closer it is. So it gives you just a more detail because this is the Chicago area, it just gives you more detail instead of just looking at the sectional. So that's one thing that's nice about foreflight is that it will do that for you. And if you come down and you can see what it's done is it's inserted the terminal chart and you can see that this is part of the terminal, but you can see the difference between this and this sectional, how much more detail. And then when you're out of that, you just zoom back out and it goes back to a regular sectional. Well, one thing I also wanted to show you, probably everybody's wondering how do I do a flight? So what will happen is you just go up here, hit the FPL button. That's for flight plan, hit that and say we're at Charlie 65, which is Plymouth, hit the space bar and say we want to go to South Bend, we'll hit ksbn. And then once it loads, you can see that it's drawn a magenta line for me. Now I've got my airplane, we'll hit navlog. Now I've got my airplane data in here. So what it's telling me you can see that from south or from Plymouth to south bend, it's 21 nautical miles. With using my airplane data, it's going to take me 13 minutes to get there, I'm going to burn 2.1 gallons of fuel. It's telling me that I got 2 knots of headwind. So, I mean, foreflight does all the calculations for you and that's why people are getting for the checkride. Some DPEs want you to figure it out and some DPEs realize that, hey, electronic flight bags are here to stay and we might as well start using them and showing people how to correctly do it. But you know, for your private rating, you're still going to have to pull out the paper chart. You're still going to have to draw your line. You're still going to have to figure out what your heading is going to be, your true course, what your fuel burn is going to be. But once you start flying around on your own, I mean, you can see that Foreflight takes this all out for you. So, and then if you wanted to edit, you know, you just hit the edit button and you come back. And now I can actually maybe we wanted to go to Warsaw after that asksw. And it will just hit your navlog back and now you can see that it's drawn. It does it in legs for you. So you can see that the magenta line is your first leg and then once you complete it, this will turn a different color and then this line will be highlighted. But now you can see. So South Bend to Warsaw, you can see the heading is going to be 146. This is going to be your total. So the total distance from Plymouth, South Bend, Warsaw is going to be 54 nautical miles. But under the leg you can see that it's 34 nautical miles from South Bend of Warsaw and that's what I'm going to burn and that's how long it's going to go. So under here is your total. So the total flight is going to be 54 nautical miles. It's going to take me 4.7 gallons of gas and it's going to take me 30 minutes to do the whole flight. I mean, it's, I mean, foreflights, it's.

Taking the weather in consideration, so it's taking care of your wind correction.

It can. Yep, yep. And then, I mean, we're not going to get into all that today, but I was telling Gary the other day that Foreflight, I probably use 10% of its capability. It's much smarter than I am. It does everything for you. I just use it for my charts and I can get weather on here and I can check instrument approach procedures and you can check, I mean you can do all kinds of stuff on here. I mean the best thing to do is if you're really interested, purchase it or I think they offer a 30 day free trial on it and get it and try it out. But yeah, you can do so much. And I can insert taxi diagrams on here. I can insert instrument procedure plates, I can insert. I mean you can do. I can get. If you don't want a sectional, you know, we'll just say maybe I'm flying an IFR flight so I can actually turn the sectional and two IFR or streets. Yeah, there's a map view where you can actually do.

Here's something I'd like to point out. My iPad being in the windshield of the helicopter is actually blacked out on me. So, you know, once you get past your checkride, and maybe you're out of the habit of figuring your heading each and every time you're just using your iPad, maybe you do or do not have GPS in the radio of the helicopter. If you do, you should also be using that. But ultimately pay attention to this wind corrected heading that it's giving you here and at least have that information so you can continue with your compass, which we know all helicopters have to have a compass.

But yeah, this thing, it's awesome. You know, I would just advise that, you know, obviously you don't want to buy it. And then your first flight, you're out there trying to fly and you're playing with it, trying to figure things out. You want to spend time on the ground looking at it. And there's something else I was going to say, but I lost my.

As a bonus in this video, point out a couple things you think might stump a new student learning as far as identifying symbols.

Let's see here. What would be this number, these two numbers?

Well, we've got height obstruction here. It's a tower and we know that it's at 1162ft MSL and we know that's 333ft AGL.

Exactly. That's what's nice about this. It'll tell you, you know, especially in the South Bend area, we've got this cluster right here. They call it the antenna farm. And if you can see, I mean we got towers that are almost 1100ft tall. Well, helicopters, what are we flying around 500 above the ground? 800 sometimes. So obviously the top of those towers are above what we're flying.

What are these blue lines with the heading written in it and the arrow?

Those are Victor Airways. Those are actually going to be what airliners are flying and I think they're coming off. Let me see. It should be coming reference a compass rose or a VOR. So here's your VOR right here. And that's your 060 degrees.

Now, is this the VOR or is this the nav box for the VOR?

Well, here's your nav box, but here's.

The actual VOR it's showing through it.

That's the Goshen VOR. And here's Goshen Airport over here.

So here's the compass rose.

Yep. Zoom down a little bit.

Okay, I can see it better now. So we've got our vor, got the compass rose. And then the information about the VOR is inside of this box.

You would tune in on your nav. You would tune in that 113.7 and then you'd have to listen for the Morse code identifier.

Now remind me what the r means after 122. 1r.

Hang on 1 second. Let me clear that out for you so we can see things better. Where are you looking?

Right above the nav box. You've got 122.1 R. What does the R mean?

That you're going to receive on there. So I can't talk on it. Meaning you're going to listen to the Ghoshi Vor on 113.7. And then what you're going to do is you're going to contact Terre Haute Flight Watch and you're going to. You can tune in to. You're going to listen or you're going to talk to them and you're going to receive on that. Sometimes I don't know if. See, there's another box and it's flight service. Sometimes you have to Correct. Yeah, well, it's flight service and Flight Watch. Do we. Is Flight Watch.

I believe they did away with Flight Watch.

Did they? Yeah. Notice I don't use them very often. Oh, but like up here. So up in the South Bend rco, you can see there's different. There's different channels up here. There's no R. So if you don't know what some of this stuff is, what's nice about it is you just go to that, the legend, and it'll tell you exactly. So let's see if I can give you an example here. If we go back to our documents and right here it talks about communication boxes. So it'll tell you. Frequencies above this thin line box are remoted to a nav aid site. Other flight service stations frequencies providing Valve code communication may be available as determined by altitude and terrain. So this would be the, the flight service that you're talking to and that's who you're talking to.

And they just like you said, they clearly identify the R as being for receive only frequency. That's good stuff. I mean we could spend all day looking at different things and trying to recall our memory what they are.

And here's the main thing, what I tell students is when the examiner asks you something on the sectional or ask you about a rule or a regulation or whatever, don't sit there and say, I don't know. Tell them that, hey, I've heard that before, but I'm not quite sure. Let me find that for you. And that's when you pull out your chart, your legend, your helicopter flying handbook, the far aim. And you find that for them. You don't sit there and say I don't know because that's a big no no. So this is a prime example of like a sectional. If you don't know, you know what? Oh, I don't know what. Pick something out. If you don't know what this 812 means over here on the port, just go back, find your legends and just look and see what you need. So the 812 would be this 285. You just find out where it's at on here. It'll tell you as soon as you find it. Yep. Elevation and feet of what the airport is.

Oh, good stuff.

Anything else you want to cover? I mean, that's just a quick interview.

It.