iFR Cockpit
Pilots fly through bad weather on instruments. Modern pilots fly on glass — an LCD panel like the famous G1000, with attitude, speed, altitude and heading laid out in one place. iFR Cockpit puts one in your pocket, ready for the times you too find it hard to keep straight and level.
Amaze your pilot friends, or use it for attitude reference when all you can see is the phone in front of you. iFR (iPhone Flight Rating) not required.
Rebuilt from nothing, seventeen years on
The first version shipped in 2008 and showed its age: the horizon was a linear guess at the accelerometer, drawn sideways. Version 2.0 is a complete rewrite. It looks the way it always has. Everything behind it is new.
A horizon that stays honest in a turn
An accelerometer cannot tell gravity from centrifugal force. Every phone attitude indicator has to solve that, and most simply don’t — roll into a coordinated turn and the horizon creeps back towards level while you are still banked.
Here the attitude is carried on the gyroscope, and the acceleration of the turn is worked back out of the reading using your GPS velocity. Bank, and the horizon shows the bank you are actually flying. Accelerate away down the runway, and the nose stays where you put it.
Instruments that agree with each other
- Altitude from the barometer with your own altimeter setting — inches or hectopascals, standard pressure in one tap, or matched to the field elevation.
- Vertical speed blended from inertial acceleration and pressure, so the needle answers in a fraction of a second instead of trailing a once-a-second reading.
- Ground speed carried on the accelerometer between satellite fixes, so the tape slides rather than stepping once a second.
- Heading on a slaved directional gyro, with the magnetometer trimming it rather than driving it.
- Pitch ladder, bank scale, slip indicator, trend vectors, heading and altitude bugs, optional G load.
Nothing to set up
Down is where gravity points. Hold the device upright and the horizon is level. If your cradle holds it at an angle, fly straight and level and press TRIM once. Landscape or portrait, iPhone or iPad, all four orientations.
Try it on the ground
Demo Flight flies a circuit from the runway — take-off roll, climb out, a steep turn, and back down to land. It is a real flight model rather than an animation, so the instruments agree with each other: roll into the steep turn and watch the load factor rise and the airspeed decay with it.
Honest about what it is
iFR Cockpit is a training and situational-awareness aid built on consumer sensors. It is not a certified instrument. The speed tape reads GPS ground speed and is labelled GS, because there is no pitot tube in a phone. Never use it as a primary reference for aircraft control or navigation.
App Categories: Drobnik.com
