Some of the most interesting flight-sim projects don’t start with a business plan.
They start because somebody wants to solve their own problem.
That’s exactly what happened with a new flight-briefing app being developed by EasyJetSimPilot.
Gavin originally built the app for his own use. The idea was simple: bring together the information he wanted when briefing a flight and, importantly, help separate the things he actually needed to know from the enormous amount of information available.
It wasn’t originally intended for release but then people started spotting it during his livestreams and asking the obvious question: Where can I get that?
After further development and polishing, Gavin is now preparing to make the app available publicly.
Rather than us trying to explain what he’s built, we’ll let him do it.
In the real world, pilots brief their flights – the departure, the journey and the arrival. This isn’t just looking at charts, it’s asking the question: “What is different today?”
To brief a flight thoroughly there is a lot of information a pilot needs, and usually it’s all found in different places.
I’m lazy, and so I wanted an all-in-one app to create a flight briefing for me – sifting through lots of information and pulling out the key bits and “gotchas” that pilots need to know.
For example, JFK can have 300+ NOTAMs. Sure, pilots SHOULD read them all, but 90% are either not currently active or they’re about a small crane 10 miles away at 30ft high.
Therefore, being lazy, I wanted to strip away all the non-essential information and highlight JUST the important stuff.
Gavin’s app is designed to build that initial picture of the flight before moving onto the charts.
Once you’ve built that picture, it’s time to move onto the charts.
The interesting thing is that none of this was originally intended to become a commercial product.
After spending more time developing and polishing the app, Gavin has decided to release it.
The planned price is £5 as a one-off payment, plus any applicable local taxes charged through the Play Store. Gavin says the charge is intended to help cover the data costs associated with running the app.
At the time of writing, the app is going through the required Play Store testing process ahead of its planned release – how exciting!
We’re getting our first look at Gavin’s app before its public release, so rather than trying to review something that isn’t actually available yet, we’re going to leave it there for now.
Once Gavin confirms the release details, we’ll update this feature with everything you need to know about getting hold of it.
And once it’s out in the wild, we’ll come back to it properly.
How well does it work with an actual flight? How much time does it save? What has Gavin learned from developing his first release? And, perhaps most interestingly, what happens when something built for one simmer suddenly has a lot more people using it?
Watch this space.
About EasyJetSimPilot
EasyJetSimPilot is part of the team behind AvGeekHangar and has spent years producing flight-simulation content, tutorials and livestreams for the community.
This time, rather than showing us how to use somebody else’s software, he’s built some of his own.
We’ll update this page with confirmed release information as soon as it’s available.
