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iPhone Aviation Apps: Some Serious, Some Silly

We can imagine only three reactions to the phrase, "there's an app for that." One, utter puzzlement because youre clueless about apps, two, you recoil in disgust against the overblown preciousness of Apples iPhone or, last, "yeah, Ive seen it." Apps are, of course, modest little single-purpose programs that run on Apples iPhone smart phone or iPod Touch MP3 players. At last count, there were more 140,000 apps and at least 195 of them are aviation applications of some kind. In this report, we'll take a minimal survey of a handful of these but, more to the point, we'll examine the basic Zen of apps. Are they just gimmicks or are they really useful? (Its a little of each, in our view.) Worth noting is that other smart phones like the Android-based products and the Blackberries also have aviation apps. we'll get to those later.

Paul Bertorelli
Verified

We can imagine only three reactions to the phrase, “there’s an app for that.” One, utter puzzlement because youre clueless about apps, two, you recoil in disgust against the overblown preciousness of Apples iPhone or, last, “yeah, Ive seen it.”

Apps are, of course, modest little single-purpose programs that run on Apples iPhone smart phone or iPod Touch MP3 players. At last count, there were more 140,000 apps and at least 195

of them are aviation applications of some kind.

In this report, we’ll take a minimal survey of a handful of these but, more to the point, we’ll examine the basic Zen of apps. Are they just gimmicks or are they really useful? (Its a little of each, in our view.) Worth noting is that other smart phones like the Android-based products and the Blackberries also have aviation apps. we’ll get to those later.

Phone or Not?

Unique to the iPhone is that Apple is a computer company that pioneered the mass market MP3 player. As a result, Apple sells both the iPhone and the iPod Touch, which is essentially the same hardware but without the phone. We tried all of the apps on the Touch, but this limits where some of them can be used.

The magic of many of these apps is that they download data in real time-such as weather reports, flight tracking data, NOTAMs, chart information and so on. The iPhone can usually do this from wherever a cell signal is available, but the Touch is limited to use with Wi-Fi networks-no Wi-Fi, no real-time data.

If you have an iPhone, the apps are there for the buying. If your cell provider doesnt do iPhones-hear the howl from millions of Verizon subscribers-you can buy a third gen Touch for under $300 and if you want a good MP3 player, plus the apps, we see this as a good value.

Taxonomy

Apps break down into six general categories: flight planners, weather getters, utility programs, logbooks, reference tools and games. Some apps do several of thses functions. Reference tools include everything from FAR/AIM compendiums to test prep programs. Apps range in price from free to as much as $99 for specialized programs such as an Eclipse 500 utility. Of the 195 aviation apps in Apples App Store, some are specialized weather getters dedicated to a single city. Others are of questionable aviation application: The Texas Transportation code? we’ll pass on that one, at $4.99. Here are some highlights.

Weather

This is presumably one of the more practical app categories, since checking weather on the fly is a plus. At the free end of the scale-we like free-or for under $5 are apps like AeroWeather, World Aviation Weather and U.S. Nexrad Radar. AeroWeather lets you specify a list of stations for which the app will retrieve current METARS; NexRad grabs current radar imagery from 150 sites and lets you take a peek at the big convective picture. Another variant, MyRadar Pro, does the same thing for $1.99. World Aviation Weather also grabs METARs for specified stations and also gives domestic weather reports. It will actually cache data for viewing in flight or out of cell/Wi-Fi range.

The better weather programs cost more and may require a subscription. Garmins MyCast, at $9.99, is an example. It will grab most of the popular weather products-including NEXRAD-and overlay this information on a proposed route. It also allows you to file a flight plan, all from your phone, via DUATs. The data sub is $9.99 a month.

Another popular suite of apps comes from ForeFlight, which offers charts, airport directories, flight planning and weather. As with MyCast, you key in the departure, destination and route and it collects all the relevant weather, plus NOTAMs in a crisp, logical format. This is an app with a purpose. Downside? Its a pain in the butt to key in the data with the iPhones cheesy little virtual keyboard.

Utilities

Although every modern GPS navigator has E6B and unknown wind functions, evidently app developers think phones need to do this, too. Admittedly, they do it well, since theyre fast-as-blazes at calculations.

We liked myE6B which, for $7.99, does all the usual E6B functions, plus hydroplaning calculations. It also has a built-in

Paul Bertorelli

Paul Bertorelli is Aviation Consumer’s Editor at Large. In addition to his valued contributions to Aviation Consumer, his in-depth video productions on sister publication AVweb cover a wide variety of topics that greatly contribute to safety, operation and aircraft ownership. When Paul isn’t writing or filming, he’s out flying his J3 Cub.