One of the most rewarding aspects of building ForeFlight is reading the continuous stream of supportive and encouraging feedback we get from customers. Over the past three years, we have heard some really amazing things – feedback that motivates us to climb higher, farther, and faster.
Some of the most highly rewarding feedback we receive is from customers who believe they are now safer and more informed pilots or who have used ForeFlight to work through a challenging situation. For example, this recent post on twitter:
pilotconway: @ForeFlight I have been so much more aware of the weather now that I have FF.
This past week, a customer experiencing landing gear issues sent along this testimonial:
Dear ForeFlight,
My wife and I purchased your Mobile 3 HD program for our iPad the day before we left for our vacation. My wife, who is not a pilot remarked how intuitive and user-friendly the program seemed to be. We had no idea how valuable that would prove to be.
On our return trip home, I descended to pattern altitude at a non-towered airport for fuel. As I deployed the landing gear, I was not greeted with the usual wind howl and subsequent 3 greens. Realizing the landing gear had not deployed, I immediately decided to divert to another airport. While I was occupied with airspeed and emergency procedures, my wife was able to give me frequencies, identifiers and a situational awareness from your program that she had only worked with for 1 day much quicker than I could from my GPS which I have owned for over a year.
With the information she was giving me, I was able to contact ATC and declare an emergency. They vectored us to Sacramento International where a first response team was waiting in position. The tower and ground crew confirmed the gear malfunction after a low pass. I then executed the final emergency procedures and activated the emergency gear switch which functioned correctly and turned a frightening 30 minutes into an uneventful landing.
Your software was certainly a part of us being able to walk away safely.
Thank you,
Allen Layton
Rolling Hills Estates, CA
The reason why speed and elegance are such important tenets for us when designing our apps is that because when it counts, speed matters. Allen was in a challenging situation, responded by flying the airplane, and handed his iPad to his wife to help him offload some of the work. She was able to help and use ForeFlight without prior training, without flipping through a user manual, and by using the apps prevalent search functions.
We like to say ForeFlight Mobile HD is “intuitive”, but that word is typically of little value because it is overused and subjective. The testimonial above is the right measure of intuitive – Allen’s wife, a non-pilot and first time user of the app, was able to find information and help with situation awareness while he flew the airplane. Truly rewarding.
Allen, happy we could help!