Innovate or die is the game in integrated navigation applications, and this week Seattle Avionics’ FlyQ made a big push forward with the release of Version 4, a suite of upgrades the company has been working on for more than a year.
The enhancements include the addition of four major features—a visual logbook, visual postflight analysis, a private network tool, and enhanced training tools. Most intriguing of the new features are the visual logbook and postflight analysis. These features essentially take a pilot logbook, scrapbook, and flight planning and tracking tool and integrate them into one experience.
These features tie in with Floq, FlyQ’s networking function. Users can create or join a private network of students, other pilots, instructors, or anyone else they want to share flights with. Members of the community can share and review each other’s flights, make comments and ask questions, and share photos. Instructors can also endorse their students remotely through the community and review flights in detail in a postflight analysis. Users concerned with privacy have a range of options to protect their data.
As navigation applications go far beyond the basics of getting from points A to B, postflight analysis is becoming a more important and requested feature. Integration is a key to making the features useful and fun. “Every pilot I’ve ever met loves to discuss their flights, keep track of them, and analyze them, yet these postflight activities get little or no attention with other apps,” said Steve Podradchik, Seattle Avionics CEO. Podradchik and the FlyQ team are working to change that and make sharing and reliving your flights almost as much fun as flying them.
FlyQ is available from the Apple App Store. Subscriptions start at $69.99 a year.