I feel like I joined a book club,” wrote one pilot, putting his thumb on the newly discovered golden goose of American business. “New features always come at an increased price. But don’t get the impression pilots think they’re necessarily worth the money. An astonishing 82 percent of ForeFlight users consider the app indispensable. Apps were born for contactless pancake breakfasts.ĭon’t get the impression that pilots don’t love apps. Coming soon: Use the app for a mobile order of the blueberry cakes flung into the backseat as you whiz by on the taxiway. Thus, it’s only the déclassé and disadvantaged app that can’t optimize for wind, temperature-corrected fuel burn, CG location to five decimal points, IFR preferred routes adjusted for JetBlue’s afternoon push out of JFK-if they still have pushes-while crunching your taxes as you fly a 49-mile trip to the pancake breakfast. It’s festooned with more flashing digital values than the Big Board when the job numbers tank. Consider the displays of a typical Garmin G1000. This mirrors a trend in high-end avionics. Apps can do anything and there’s sometimes no restraint in having them do everything, including things you didn’t know needed doing. Our survey-which was answered by more than 900 readers-revealed a clear distaste for what is commonly called feature bloat. Lowering the price never seems to be part of the business plan, standard supply and demand rules being perversely inverted in anything to do aviation. (“You forgot Avare you &^%$#(* morons!”) Let’s pause here while I flog myself and check the spelling of mea maxima culpa.Īpps have become so important to aviation that a question occurred to me: Have they really benefited operations and improved safety or are they just another gimmicky distraction? My question, so my answer: Definite yes to the first part, but a definite danger of yes to the second part.Īs developers struggle for growth and market share in a universe that’s not expanding much, the only way to gain ground appears to be to improve the product with more features, maybe better performance and improved operability or upscale it to the heavy iron, as ForeFlight is doing under the expert tutelage of mother Boeing. There are scores of these things and even if you distill them down to just the navigation and planning apps, you’re still left with at least a dozen and you’ll still miss a couple, as I did when I prepared a survey on apps a couple of months ago. Why? Because almost anyone can write and market an app and sometimes I think everyone has.
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