Significant effort has been put into unifying the data processing pipelines of the free and paid versions of FlightWatch, enabling faster development with fewer bugs. As part of the new pipline upgrades, FlightWatch gains the ability to discover Stations within 100 miles of of your current location. Both FlightWatch and FlightWatchLite can now send metar information using any messaging system you have installed that allows generic messages to be sent through it. This functionality can be accessed via the per-metar menu. Press and hold on a metar to activate the per-metar menu.
Now, on to more philosophical matters.
As a newly minted private pilot I am adding those features to FlightWatch that I actually want to use. That being said, my experiences flying around the San Francisco Bay Area are hardly representative of the aviation community as a whole, and I want FlightWatch to be generically useful. The above was a long-winded way of saying: If you want something in FlightWatch please tell me. I can’t guarantee that it’ll make it in, or that it’ll make it in fast, but I will read the email.
On the development roadmap for FlightWatch:
- Local Weather: a combination of nearby station discovery and automated data fetching, this will allow you to quickly tell what weather’s going on in your area.
- Mobile-Local weather. Local weather as you move, continually updated.
- Trend graphs. I was visiting 14Y and the AWOS terminal there presented nifty 24h graphs on cloud heights, visibility and wind speeds/directions. There’s no reason we can’t have that on android.
- Non-US weather sources. If any non-US pilots know of good, reliable data sources I’d be glad to incorporate them.