Official airspace for the UK, France and Brazil, trips that reach Oshkosh, and a Fly screen that gets you airborne faster.

This release takes the development branch to production. It brings official national data to the map and the briefing, the first two stages of expedition planning, and a round of refinements from pilots testing on their own devices.

🗺️ Official airspace and aerodrome data

• UK airspace from the official AIP: the UK map now draws on the official UK aeronautical data set, with 2,398 zones including ATZs and the FIR, UIR and oceanic boundaries (F1457).
• Who to call: tap an airspace zone and the callout shows its controlling unit and frequency (F1457).
• More on the map: VFR reporting points, navaids including DME and TACAN, ILS and holds, and aerodromes and sites including heliports, microlight and landing sites, with declared distances, lighting and fuel where they are published (F1457, F723).
• Every airspace layer, everywhere we cover: in the 21 European countries our trusted European source covers, route planning and airspace alerts now use every layer of airspace we hold, including gliding areas, CTAs and class airspace. Curved boundaries follow their true arcs (F1457).
• The best source wins: where sources overlap, official data takes priority and the other sources fill in any details it leaves out (F1457).
• France: the official French AIP is now live for airspace, points, navaids, aerodromes, frequencies and services (F1479).
• Brazil: official airspace, airways, points, navaids, aerodromes and frequencies, plus NOTAMs in both the Portuguese and English series, METAR and TAF, and every chart and AIP supplement in force. All of it refreshes each AIRAC cycle (F1481, F1482, F1483).
• Aerodrome data kept current: our community aerodrome data now refreshes every cycle (F845).
• Airspace at every zoom: airspace stays on the map as you zoom out. It also loads along your route and wherever you look, not just around the aircraft, and regions with no coverage are marked as no data instead of looking empty (F1355, F1356).

📄 Aerodrome documents and customs

• One tap to the source: for UK aerodromes and heliports, the aerodrome panel links straight to the official AIP pages and charts (F1458).
• Customs in your checks: a plan that crosses a border now has a customs item in its ordinary Checks, and the aerodrome panel shows the entry rules. France and Ireland now have their own sourced rules (F1458).
• Layout diagrams: aerodrome layout diagrams now fit the real aerodrome boundary (F923).

🌍 Expedition planning: the long way round

Expedition now plans multi-day trips as a sequence of legs with night stops, synced across devices and available offline. Our test case is a Piper Arrow flying from Blackbushe to Oshkosh in 16 legs via the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and Canada.

• Is each leg feasible: fuel on landing, range, and daylight by each country’s definition of night. Winds aloft come from the forecast at cruise level and are never treated as calm. Where we lack data for an input, the plan says so and never shows green (F1367).
• Vertical profile: each plan climbs from the runway in use and completes each level change before the segment that needs it, checked against airspace and terrain. It then descends to an arrival join: overhead, downwind, base or straight-in. Gliders plan each leg by the height available, not a climb rate (F1367).
• Long legs: legs longer than 300 NM can now be planned, and long legs follow the great circle (F1368, F1476).
• Regional rules: transition altitudes and cruising levels follow the region you are flying in (F1368).
• Remote flying: each leg gets a terrain safe altitude with an oxygen advisory, an over-water exposure check that holds at high latitude, and advisories for remote areas. Greenland, Denmark and the Faroes now count as remote for search and rescue notification (F1368, F1289, F142).
• Equipment in the flight plan: your aircraft’s oxygen, survival and radio equipment feeds Items 10 and 19 of the ICAO flight plan (F1368).
• Border actions: each crossing lists its paperwork, such as GAR, CANPASS and eAPIS, with deadlines and reminders (F1368).
• NOTAM coverage: the plan tells you where our NOTAM coverage stops, so you know where to check elsewhere (F1368).

🧭 Sharper planning numbers for every flight

• Planned date, not today: leg magnetic variation and the cruising level suggestion now use your planned departure date (F05, F639).
• Flight plan: the ICAO flight plan uses your plan’s date, route, endurance, departure and destination (F09).
• Wind: a plan with no stated wind uses the forecast for fuel, GAR and the flight plan, and a wind the forecast doesn’t give is shown as missing, not zero (F1367, F721).
• Low-level winds: winds aloft now include the 1000 hPa and 925 hPa levels, down where most of us fly (F1364).
• Sunrise and sunset: calculated for the moment you cross each point, for better accuracy on long legs (F29).

✈️ Fly gets you into the sky

• Two big buttons: idle Fly now offers Open map and Quick fly, then your next five plans, soonest first. Quick fly starts with one tap on a preset or hangar aircraft (F1445).
• No borrowed numbers: if you open the map without choosing an aircraft, readouts that depend on the aircraft stay blank. They never borrow another aircraft’s figures (F1445).
• A clear cockpit: in flight, the cockpit map is kept clear of planning controls (F1321).

📍 Planning on the map

• One selection rule: select a pin, NOTAM, aerodrome, route point or alternate and the route card steps aside so you can see it in full. Swipe down or pan the map to close it (F1425).
• Pins that feel right: a dropped pin lifts and follows your finger, with a gentle haptic. Route points can be renamed in place, and deleting one offers Undo (F1425).
• Bigger aerodrome targets: tap or hold anywhere inside an aerodrome’s ATZ to pick it. The pin callout offers Fly from, Fly via, Fly to and Set as alternate, and the map eases so the pin and callout both fit (F1426).
• Refinements from device testing: route editing, pin placement, Cancel and save naming, the planning layers sheet and NOTAMs on the planning map have all been polished (F1375, F1390, F1391, F1397, F1398).

🛩️ Traffic

• Each aircraft once: contacts without a confirmed identity now merge with their identified twin, so one aircraft shows as one target (F564).
• Honest freshness: traffic age is measured from when the aircraft was detected, not from when the report reached us (F1413, F477, F562).
• Alert banners: traffic alert banners show their proper titles (F997).

👥 Clubs

• Names on the roster: when you add a pilot from your club, members now show by first name and initial (F1480).
• Safeguarding young pilots: pilots under 18, or whose age we don’t know, are visible only to club owners, managers and instructors. They can always be added with their own code. New pilots are asked for a date of birth when they sign up (F1480).

🏷️ Plans named for how you fly

Our plans now have names that describe how you fly: Fly Safe, Fly Lite, Soaring, Touring, Pro and Club. What each plan includes, and what it costs, is unchanged (F1478).

🛠️ Under the hood: lighter on your phone

• Battery and background: instruments and sensors now run only as fast as something on screen or in the alerting needs them, and they rest when nothing does. Terrain alerting keeps running in the background on GPS alone. The app uses less battery in your pocket and keeps running reliably (F1448).
• Leaner monitoring: our in-app monitoring now writes far less to your phone’s storage and pauses while the app is in the background (F1447).
• Map engine: updated, with stability improvements on iOS (F1450).
• Height reference data: now served from our content network, and it retries gracefully when a download fails (F404).
• Base map: the world base map has been refreshed.
• Monitoring: we now track response times for each part of the service, the number of aircraft live in the system, open live connections, the freshness of NOTAM, AIRAC and METAR/TAF data, and the health of each traffic source. If something slows down, we know before you do (F1473, F1451, F576).

🔒 Security

• Dependencies: we’ve applied security updates to the web app’s dependencies, part of our continuing work to keep the platform current.

🔭 Coming next

• Nearly a thousand more UK strips and farm sites on the map (F1459).
• Fuel-stop suggestions for legs beyond your range, and wider data coverage for expedition legs (F1369).
• The planner fetching NOTAMs for your own route (F1406).
• A “+ Plan new flight” button and search on the Plans list (F1432).