Any time I have the thought "back in my day," I like to laugh at myself as I'm neither old in age nor in pilot experience. After having used CloudAhoy on a few flights, however, I can't help the thought. Reviewing my training flights, or flight performance in general was all manual, based off of what my instructor and I both remembered during the flight. In some cases, one of us would scratch something down on a piece of paper as a reminder, but the post flight analysis was based off of our recollections of the flight, regardless of how our memories were jogged.
Enter CloudAhoy.
Where I once tried to re-fly the flight in my head and pull out the noteworthy parts through memory, I now have the flight recorded and tracked in its entirety.
When I first downloaded the application and looked at the user interface, I laughed. There are four boxes to enter your data - tail number, your name, a co-pilot or CFI, and optional remarks - two areas showing your connectivity to data (3G or wireless) and GPS (internal or external), and two large start and stop buttons. It's as simple as that. Press start before you start the engine, and press stop when you're done. It also has an auto-stop feature (enabled/disabled on the settings page), which helped the one time I forgot to press stop, but I couldn't tell you what triggers it. I'm guessing it was either the GPS getting turned off, or just that it noticed I hadn't moved in so many minutes. In any case, the initial user interface is extremely simple, which is what drew my laugh initially. It was only later that I picked my jaw up off of the floor because of the amount of data that hit me post flight.
After the flight is where the magic is shown. If you think the app looks too simplistic on the flight screen, wait until the flight data is shown on the debrief screen. Switching from the iPad to a computer yields even better results, like the ability to utilize the Google Earth browser plugin for more features. Either way, in the app or on a computer, the left panel allows you to view the flight, broken up into segments automatically by default. If the app detects you are taxiing, or taking off, or flying a turn around a point, or a chandelle, or landing, it will automatically section that data off so that you can analyze that part of the flight on its own. Automation is never perfect, so it sometimes grabs items that it shouldn't, but that hasn't caused any huge issues for me so far. As an example, on
my last flight it snagged one of my laps around the pattern as a left 360 (the yellow line in the picture). Various colors help you to see the various maneuvers. The blue lines are normal flight, with the white and amber being approach and touch-and-go segments, respectively. All of these segments, again, are recognized automatically.
What about the non-standard, or very specific segments, you ask?
You may remember from the
flight up to Harford County that I flew the GPS approach to the airport. The entire GPS approach was shown as blue (normal flight - pictured above), as the app saw the approach as nothing out of the ordinary. Trying to keep up with, and set the program up for every single approach out there would be nearly impossible. Instead, the developer created a CFI tab so that you could add your own maneuvers. This way, you can add the maneuvers you plan on flying before the flight, and your CFI or co-pilot can simply click on the begin and end buttons for each maneuver. This allows you to track, color and name each maneuver so that you may analyze them separately. Additionally, you can also track your hood time by adding that as a custom segment type.
The flight marker option allows you to simply mark a specific point in the flight to remind yourself later on. While the option isn't as specific as defining a segment, it's a lot faster for situations that happen on the fly. The note in the program states: "in flight, when you want to mark an event, tap the event marker and optionally write a corresponding comment on a piece of paper. The tap will result in a number marker shown on the flight path at the current location. Each tap, increments the number. You can later discuss these comments with your student during the debrief." Having this tab back when I was training for my private pilot license would have really helped me out.
The last tab is a settings tab that allows you to select an auto stop feature, disable broadcasting in flight, lock the screen, and set up your CloudAhoy account.
For those of you currently in any level of training, if your instructor does not currently use CloudAhoy, I would recommend talking to him or her about adding it as a tool for your flight training analysis. It could really have a significant impact on the way that you learn and progress through training. After all, one of the fundamentals of instructing, and therefore learning, is critique and evaluation, which this tool would only further enhance.
The only potential negative I found with the application was that it doesn't come with a manual. Granted, we often joke that people rarely ever actually read said manuals, but one would still be helpful for reference. To the developer's credit, however, there are several locations with information buttons explaining what the feature is meant to do. The above quote about flight markers came directly from one of those in-app buttons.
Overall, it's a great app and you really can't go wrong with it. Beyond that, it's free, so you have nothing to lose. Try it out on your next flight and see how it can help you debrief after a flight.
