There was a time in aviation when every preflight weather briefing was personal. The pilot and the briefer stood over charts and laid out how the day might go. Visualization of potential weather issues was much easier, and that, by design, made go/no-go decision-making a simpler task, too. This month Houston-based mobile app maker ForeFlight (Booth C10021) introduced a digital version of that good old-fashioned integrated preflight weather briefing in its mobile flight-planning and moving-map app.

“Foreflight Briefing changes the paradigm by delivering required elements of a standard flight briefing in a modern, aesthetically pleasing and graphical design that helps pilots visualize weather and related flight information along their route of flight, all in a way we believe pilots will enjoy,” said Tyson Weihs, co-founder and CEO of ForeFlight.

The briefing may be digital and pulled straight from Lockheed Martin Flight Service’s mainframe, but the ForeFlight app takes the data and parses it into the most logical sequence and sectioning, from the synopsis, forecasts and big picture items such as prog charts and sigmets or airmets, to its presentation of plain English TAFs and Metars in sequential order along the chosen routing (replete with color coding to denote VFR or IFR). Notams are perhaps the nicest change. The app breaks them down into rational sections, also in plain English, telling you where tower lights are out (and how close to your routing) or if there are special-use airspace issues, chart changes and more. It only hands you what you need as you need it, in digestible segments.

Perhaps the most radical change in the app’s handling of the preflight weather briefing is its integration of graphics into the stream of the classic briefing, bringing us back to the old way we did things, with the briefing and the graphics right there in front of us together. A regulation 14 CFR 91.103 (a) digital preflight briefing has never been quite so elegant.