Airline flying is one of the safest forms of transportation in the world. So wouldn't it be great if you could use some of the techniques used by the airlines to improve the quality and safety of your own flying? Now, a cornerstone of airline safety is flight data analysis. And today we'll be talking about free software from flystow.net that lets you analyze flight data from virtually any aircraft type you fly. So stick around and learn how you can collect data from your flights and use it to improve your flying.
Hello again and welcome to Aviation News Talk where we talk general aviation. My name is Max Trescott. I've been flying for over 50 years. I'm the author of several books and the 2008 National Flight Instructor of the Year. And my mission is to help you become the safest possible pilot. Last week in episode 364, we talked with Jim Goldfuss about his transition to a second career flying charter for PlaneSense. So if you didn't hear that episode, you may want to check it out at aviationnewstalk.com slash 364. If
And if you've just found our show, welcome. Glad to have you here. Now, in whatever app you're using, touch either the subscribe key or if you're using Spotify or the Apple Podcast app, the follow key so that next week's episode is downloaded for free.
And of course, this is a listener-supported show supported by people just like you. And we've got a lot of different ways you can show your love and support for the show. You can support it via PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, and Patreon. And to do that, just head on out to aviationnews.com slash support, where you'll find those links. And when you make a donation, I'll read your name on the show.
And you can also support the show whenever you buy a headset from Lightspeed. My favorite model is the Delta Zulu because it helps you hear more clearly after you customize it for your unique hearing. To learn more about the Delta Zulu, go out to the website to that special URL I've set up for you, which is aviationnewstalk.com slash lightspeed. And when you use that link to get to their website to learn more and to make a purchase, they'll send a check to support the show.
Today, we're talking with Patrick Leinhardt of Flystow.net about their flight data analysis software. Now, we've talked a little about Flystow in the past, but today we're going to do a deep dive. And I've used it a number of times, but I learned even more ways to use it while talking with Patrick. As he'll explain, there are a lot of ways to record data for your plane.
One of the simplest ways to do that is to use an EFB app, such as ForeFlight or Garmin Pilot, and use the track log feature to record your flight. You can then download it as a KML file and upload that file to FlyStow. Or, if your aircraft is equipped with ADS-Bout,
you can go to a public website, download the ADS-B data for your flight, and upload it to Flystow. Or if you have modern avionics that records flight data, such as the Garmin G1000, you can copy the flight data from its SD card. To copy those files, I used to bring a laptop to the airport, but today I use the USB-C to SD card adapter that I bought last week.
I plugged that dongle into my iPhone, put the SD card from the SR-22 into it, opened the Files app on my phone, and copied the file to my phone.
Now that flight was my client's first flight in an SR-22. Prior to that, all of his flying was in an SR-20. And when I looked at the data, most of his landings scored around 98 and 99 percent, and one of them even scored 100 percent. So congratulations to Chen Chen. Had a great job of flying, and a big thank you to Flystow for making it so easy to analyze this flight.
As we talk with Patrick, he's going to walk us through some demos on their website. And there are two ways you can follow along. If you have access to a computer and you're not driving, one of those ways is you can go out to the web to flystow.net. And by the way, flystow is spelled F-L-Y-S-T-O. And click on the demos on their homepage as Patrick talks about them.
Or if you're a Patreon supporter at the $20 a month level and up, you can view a video I posted of our conversation with Patrick that includes a video screen share from his computer as he demonstrated the many features in Flystow.
So if you've thought about supporting Aviation News Talk, but just haven't quite gotten around to it, sign up now at aviationnewstalk.com slash Patreon. Now let me tell you a little about Patrick Leinhardt. Patrick is a former airline pilot, and he's now the director of marketing for Flystow. He lives in Austria, which is where he was when we talked. And now here's our conversation with Patrick Leinhardt.
Patrick, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us here today. Thank you so much, Max. It's a pleasure to be with you. Well, we're here to talk about Flystow.net. Now, Flystow is F-L-Y-S-T-O. But before we get into that, let's give folks a little bit of framework for reference. Talk about FOQA, F-O-Q-A, which is Flight Operations Quality Assurance. What is FOQA and how is it used by the airlines?
Most of us are aware of the absolutely stellar safety record of Part 121 flight operations, mostly the scheduled airlines. A big reason for that is that these airlines actively manage safety through a safety management system. And FOCWA is one tool in the toolbox that is SMS, the safety management system.
It works by basically monitoring the entire operation. So all the aircraft store data, countless parameters per second, and all the data is analyzed. And then that data is utilized for flight ops quality assurance, making sure that all the operating limitations are met, that the standard operating conditions
procedures are followed and it gives the airlines, so to say, the leading edge on safety because the safety managers will see certain trends developing and then the training department can steer against those trends. And so long, long before some worrying trend occurs,
culminates in some occurrence, incident, or even accident, they'll make sure that everybody's steered back on track. And it pertains to the pilots, the mechanics, everybody is part of the safety management system and FOCWA is utilizing the data.
This has been going on for decades in the airline world. You just gave a fantastic description, probably better than I could if I had an hour to write it up. So thanks for setting the stage with that. And I like the idea of FOCUA that it helps prevent accidents. It's the early data that comes in where you go, eh.
we might have a potential problem here. Yes, exactly. I remember I was a very young airline first officer and we had an introduction to how FOCWA works, how the airline utilizes it.
And they explained to us that, for instance, they can see when at a certain airport, a certain aircraft type or model, so a fleet, they will realize if pilots come in one dot below. So maybe due to the surrounding terrain or maybe due to the color of the runway, maybe the width or length, pilots perceive that they should touch down a bit earlier and they
That can be okay, but if that airport, for instance, has some closing obstacles, it's really important to follow the instrument approach procedure to the threshold. And if they see such a trend, they will pick up this trend, put it in the training curriculum, and they will make sure that before this happens 50 or 100 times at this airport,
Everybody will be aware about the issue and will have been trained that there's a reason why you perceive to want to be lower at this airport and it's not necessary and just stick to the glide slope until you're over the threshold. And I found that very fascinating. Yeah. And in some ways it's kind of an automated version of having a flight instructor on board every time to analyze what's going on. But the beauty of this is you're looking at not just
the one airplane that the flight instructor happens to be in, but you're kind of comparing against, you know, all aircraft. So you can pick up even more trends than I might be able to pick up if I were just flying with one person. Right.
You can really think of it as data-driven decision-making awareness. It's a science, and obviously the scope of FOCWA is huge. To summarize it a little bit, it's one of the reasons that the airline flying world is so spectacularly safe, and it hasn't really been used much outside of the airlines. And that's kind of where Flysto picks up.
Yeah. And certainly SMS is not going to be required for charter aircraft here in the U S so they'll start to pick up some of those kinds of capability. But the big question in my mind, as I was learning about SMS was how do we apply that to ourselves as individual GA pilots? And certainly fly stow can be part of that equation. Talk a little bit about how fly stow can bring focal like capabilities to a pilot's flying. So we've seen, uh,
Very early on from the first version of Flystone that people gave us feedback. They were like, this is amazing. This shows me things that I could have sworn I do differently. So it enables you to look into your aviation mirror and see
It's not really grading you in the sense of this is correct or this is incorrect. It's just processing your avionics data to give you the opportunity to dive into your flight as deep as you want to. And, you know, you can do a flight today and maybe in a month when you're on the couch at home, you start looking at it in Flystow.
And this is sort of a non-threatening, non-I-told-you-so. It's a voluntary chance of a training experience based on what you really did. And you can say, okay, how much crosswind was there? How much wind shear was there? What was my centerline performance really like? How was my touchdown impact? And there's no ego involved. There's nobody else telling you that. It's like basically nothing.
The flying story that you wrote with your own data, you can now go and read it. Not only that, you can improve. I was talking with somebody sometime in the past month who was talking about how they had been collecting data on their flying in Flystow and how they were pleased to see how they were getting better and better at some particular aspect of their flying experience.
Now, you've got some great demos on your homepage. Let's go ahead and talk through some of those. And the listeners can follow along if they have access to a computer by going to flystow.net and they can kind of see those demos as well. Right. Plus, we've got a video version of that and people can watch.
See what you're scrolling through, but definitely as you describe the demos, pretend you're describing it to a radio audience that can't see what you're talking about. So we'll go in a little bit more detail. Talk about the section you've got labeled perspectives and just kind of talk about the different images under perspective.
So on flystore.net, there is a section called Live Demo. And it's a couple of sections of features in Flystore. And each section contains two, three, or four screenshots. And we don't do any mockups. What we did was we just asked some active users, hey, this is an interesting flight.
If we change the date or remove the date of that flight, can we share that flight with visitors on the website? And if you click on any of these screenshots, that actual flight opens up in Flystore and you can use Flystore directly.
without an account straight away. It's for demo purposes. It's like a live demo. It's not some screenshot mockup or something. We start with perspectives because, well, it's all a matter of perspective. And our idea in Fly Store early on was to give users the choice of the perspective. Some people prefer to see everything on a north-up 2D map.
Other people prefer to see a particular maneuver or approach as a 3D view where they can rotate around or follow the aircraft as it flies. Then to dive into the flight, maybe the familiar perspective for most pilots would be a cockpit view. So a lot of our users call it the HUD view.
So it will basically show you a primary flight display with synthetic vision. And depending on the data, all the autopilot modes, all the heading pre-selects, altitude pre-selects.
And then some people are very mathematical. They'll prefer graphs. They want to correlate their cylinder head temperature with true airspeed or maybe iso temperature deviation. And so those are the primary perspectives. And if you, for example, click on this screenshot,
That particular flight will open in Thaisto and you can see this is up here in the middle section at the top. You have 2D, 3D, profile, cockpit and graphs. Those are icons and this is a graph of plotting the CHT for the entire flight. If you want to see the CHT during takeoff, you will just click the takeoff flight phase and the graph will adjust to that phase.
So those are the different perspectives, and you can see those right away on flysto.net clicking the live demo button here. Yeah, and I was really drawn to the HUD view where it basically looks like I'm sitting in the cockpit and I can see my ground speed. Of course, you
Usually don't have airspeed data, but you can often have ground speed data and altitude and kind of watch the attitude indicator turn as I turn and so on. So yeah, a lot of great different views that people can use to look at the data. Sure. Just what you see fly through will just give you what you upload. If you upload some track log from a navigation app, you know, or maybe an ADS-B track log, you'll get ground speed.
If you upload some data from your aircraft avionics, you'll get airspeed. Yeah, maybe this is a good opportunity to just talk about how people get the data to their Flystow account. What are some of the different avionics systems that people can use and how do they then get that into their account? Yeah, great question. So also on the website, we have a section labeled how to upload. It's basically three simple steps. You can create your own account, right?
on the website and then you can upload data and there's a button labeled supported avionics. So we have a list here. You can see
For example, there's a bunch of Garmin avionics. Garmin provides fantastic data for analysis. If you happen to have maybe a Garmin G5, you can click this and there will be instructions on how to log the data in your Garmin G5 and upload it.
If you happen to use an engine monitor, you can also get instructions here. We have links to the manuals for most of the avionics systems. You know, Dynon, you can find links to the manual of the Dynon Skyview system on how to log data. KML exports for, you know, ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot. So really simple on the website. Click how to upload.
create your account,
Step two, check the supported avionics for instructions. And three, see your flights in FlyStore. Yeah, and I guess the good news is if you've got an older aircraft that doesn't have any of these more modern digital avionics, you can go out to websites such as FlightAware or ADS-B Exchange and download the data of your flight from there and upload it. Now, you're not going to have as many parameters and you're not going to have as much resolution, but still, that's pretty useful.
True. So we see a lot of people that are very eager to debrief and analyze their flights, but they don't have modern avionics and they will use maybe an app for flight garment pilot. There's a bunch of apps out there where you can log data, or as you said, they will head over to flight aware and, and pick their aircraft and their flight there. We do actually, uh,
have functionality in FlySo that we're testing right now where you can simply import ADS-B flights. So instead of heading to FlightAware or ADS-B Exchange and downloading a flight, you can just...
select those flights internally in Flystow and it will make it easier for a lot of people to see their flights in Flystow. Yep, a lot of great options for doing that. Well, let's move on down to the next image you had that was called Review and Compare. Talk about the demos that you have there and the capabilities that you're showing there.
So there's tons of options to review and compare your flying in Flystow. So we focus on approaches, traffic patterns, and of course, landings and touchdowns. And depending on the aircraft you use, if there's a lot of those aircraft on Flystow, we will start to show you a comparison of your aircraft to
to the Flystow fleet. Now that's completely anonymous. Nobody's going to be able to see what exactly you're doing, but I can give you an example here with the pattern comparison. If you select the landing in Flystow and you get this shadowy arrow icon, it means that you can compare this traffic pattern. So you click this button, compare with average pattern, and we'll then show you
the model average pattern of all Cirrus SR20s in FlyStore to the traffic pattern you were flying, that particular pattern. So you can see the model average. There is the gray dashed line. And then your pattern will be this one. Now, you can just...
move the slider or you can go into playback mode and replay this and you can see that if there's some significant difference to the model average it's colored here in red on the bottom left there
Now, model average doesn't mean that if someone is based with his SR20 at some short airfield and he has close-in obstacles and he has to fly his base-to-final turn at 50 feet or something, that this model average will be skewed. It's like a smart, ideal model average. So you can see the beam positions and the 45 degrees and so on.
This traffic pattern comparison is smart enough to take into account patterns at all the airports. So it's not only for this particular airport. Again, it's not really telling you
this is the right way to do it or the wrong way to do it. This is more for you to see that maybe your lateral distance to the runway here was a bit further and maybe your power was less. You set less power and some patterns you will maybe be faster or slower. It's really just to show you differences.
Yeah. And then it's up to you to judge yourself like, okay, this was fine. I had a reason to do this or I didn't. This is the pattern comparison. That's one of the methods to compare in FlyStore. Yeah, go ahead and quickly step us through the other comparisons that you can make. So another feature we have is the approach score.
And again, it's a score. It's not a grade. It just helps you because it will give you a single percentage value for an approach and landing based on a list of parameters and target values. Now, you can either keep those at a default value.
And then you will be compared to everybody else. It's a sort of gamification. So if you fly an S420 and you keep this approach scoring to the default setting in FlyStore,
then you will see down here your position. So are you above average or below average of all SR20s that use approach scoring? If, for instance, you happen to have your own fleet, maybe you have a flight school and you operate five SR20s,
You can customize that and then keep it internally, but it's still a way of comparing. So it will be comparing a particular aircraft to a fleet of aircraft. And this could be for any aircraft type. This could be if you fly 172s or anything.
Yes. Obviously, the comparison to the fleet in Flystow entirely only works if there's significant data. If there's two airplanes, maybe some very exotic type, then there's just not enough data to compare anything to it. It's not going to be accurate.
aggregate enough. It would be one traffic pattern flown in some way would skew all the others. And so, you know, for all the popular airplanes, you will have comparison features in FlyStore. Okay. Any other things that you compare? Yes. We have something that we refer to as landing limits. So the way this works is when you select a flight phase,
for example, a takeoff or a landing, then there will be a bunch of boxes shown here on the left. And those are, we call them landing details or landing limits. So you can specify, for example, you want a certain airspeed below 500 feet, or you want a certain airspeed crossing a threshold. And then
you can issue a caution zone and a warning zone. And then you can see here where it says SR20G6 average. So what we're looking at now is the 50 foot indicated airspeed. So the 50 foot indicated airspeed of SR20G6 is about 80 knots. And
Your 50 foot airspeed of that landing was 78 knots. So you're right on the average there. You can then click on this SR2026 average button and FlySo is then going to calculate the
the distribution of all SR20G6 landings in Flystow for 50 foot airspeed. And you can see that 22.3% of SR20G6 landings in Flystow have a 50 foot indicated airspeed between 78 and 80. And then another 18% between 80 and 83. You can see that
The caution zone and the warning zone are mostly outliers, but there's about 10% of landings that are coming in a bit faster, and there's 3% of landings that are in the warning zone concerning speed. Now, again, you can customize those.
caution zones and warning zones, but then you cannot compare against the fly-still fleet anymore. So you have to leave it at the default setting to get these comparisons to the average. Okay. But we see that individual users are mostly fine with the defaults. We take them based on the manufacturer POH AFM data, or we work with owner-pilot associations, and they have best practices.
We do see larger flight training organizations, flight schools, you know, if they operate a fleet of 50 aircraft, they're fine to compare individual aircraft of their fleet to the fleet. So...
They deviate from these settings. Sure. And if I wanted to compare my landings with only my previous landings, I could do that as well. You can. Okay. Talk about customizable flag rules. What are they? That's one of the main features in Flystow. We allow you to specify...
Flag rules and they will be triggered if whatever you've specified has not been met or has been exceeded. So again, on the website, we have these clickable live demo screenshots. And here's an example for a flag. It says CHT cylinder head temperature was increased.
higher than 365 degrees Fahrenheit for 23 minutes in total on that flight. And there's a graph view highlighting the 365 degree line. And you can see that as soon as the airplane took off, the CHTs
came up to 400 here. Cylinder number three was at 400. And then it took from takeoff, it took about 12 minutes for them to get down below the 365 limit. And then they went up again. And if you want to see that on a map, you can switch to a map view and then we'll color you the area where the CHT exceedances occurred. And then
You could expand the map and see it in the main map. Basically, there's almost an infinite set of conditions that you can specify in the flag rules. I'm going to show you an example here. So if I look in my Flystow aircraft list,
I have a button that's called flags. So this is an SR 22 and we'll click the flags button and maybe I would like to create a new flag. So it'll ask me when is this flag supposed to trigger, you know, for any flight phase or for startup or for on ground?
So we can say, how about we use only when the airplane is airborne? We don't want this flag to apply when the airplane is taxiing.
And then it gives us options for the engine, like fuel flow, manifold pressure, oil pressure. But let's say we're interested in bank angle. So we'll select bank angle here. And we can then specify if this is a white flag, a yellow flag, an orange flag, or a red flag. So you can specify the severity. Let's say it's a red flag when our bank angle is more than 35 degrees.
And let's add as a second condition when the height HGL, so above ground level, is less than 500 feet. And now we can save this flag. And FlyStore will now retroactively go through all your flights.
And also in the future, monitor all your flights. And if this condition occurred, you will get a flag. And you can look at those flags in the individual flight, but you can also plot the flags on a graph over time. So I can see that this occurred in six flights out of 278. And I can then
see those six flights here immediately. Yeah, this is an amazing tool. You can see we already have flags as a default. So startup, when starter is engaged for more than 10 seconds, when the interval between starter engagements is less than 20 seconds.
you know, that we all read the limitation and we're supposed to let the starter cool down, but people get nervous when the engine doesn't start and then they crank the starter again and they crank it again. And it eventually just kills the starter. And you can see such behavior. We can see that this has occurred with this aircraft in 35 flights. You can check fuel flow on takeoff and it's yeah, whatever. The more data you have, the
the better the flags. Yeah, if I owned an aircraft or if I were a flight school, I would definitely be doing this because, you know, it's so easy for a single renter pilot on a single flight to make the engine temperatures go high and shorten the life of your engine. So this is just an amazing monitoring type capability. Yes, we get a lot of feedback. People love it. So the next one you've got here is called the aircraft performance. Talk about that. Yeah, so...
I remember from my early days of training, we were supposed to do a very proper pre-flight preparation, calculate the takeoff performance, the landing performance. We'd go in those 1970s Cessna POHs and follow along the graphs and get the density altitude and
That was all great. The problem is we never really verified the actual performance. So we knew on paper, like, yeah, okay, according to the POH, we can do this, we can take off and we'll be fine. But we never checked, like,
Are we really close to the book numbers or is the engine even producing enough power? And so I had early on, I had this idea in FlyStore that we show people the actual performance based on ambient conditions. So we basically do a takeoff performance.
cruise and landing performance calculation. I'm going to open this one up here. And so you can see it says takeoff performance for KSLK runway 05.
Flystow will give you an estimated weight. If you upload your flights, you can enter weights if you know them. And this will help Flystow to suggest you more accurate takeoff weights and landing weights. So this is set to metric. Of course, this can be set to pounds. So we have a certain estimated weight here. And now we have POH takeoff weight.
Most of, for example, the smaller single-engine piston aircraft, they don't give you takeoff performance data for any weight. It's mostly maximum weight and maybe some intermediate step. So we have three weights here for the POH takeoff weight. And it's not so easy to interpolate, so we give you what the POH gives you. And let's pick the weight that is closest to the estimated weight.
Also, the top right here, you can see the weather for that airport. You can see the temperature, winds, daylight, time. And then we take that data and put it in the conditions. So we calculate a pressure altitude. We give you outside air temperature, headwind, and factor in the runway slope.
And then we do the POH calculation. So it's full throttle on a dry paved runway, air conditioning off. You're supposed to lift off at 70. You're supposed to have 74 knots over 50 feet. That's when the takeoff distance ends. And we do interpolate for the actual field elevation. So for the actual altitude and OAT. And we do apply a wind factor and a runway slope factor. And then you can see immediately that
that the takeoff distance from starting movement to 50 feet is a lot longer than the POH takeoff distance. So the POH takeoff distance here is, I would say, two thirds of what it took you in reality. And the ground roll, similar. I would say ground roll actual is about, you know,
a third longer than the POH calculated ground roll here. And you can then use the graph down here, and you can try and figure out why. So let's check and see. Here is where the ground roll started. And here-- so it took about 110 feet until full power was applied.
And then we can move along the takeoff run. And we can see that rotation here was significantly later than what the POH ground roll calculates. Because at the end of the ground roll, you're supposed to fly. So rotation was late. And from rotation to liftoff, we have another 200 feet here. And then until 50 feet...
We're way, way, way behind the POH performance. So we can check how does the airspeed behave. So when the ground roll started until full power was applied, we had 38 knots. Rotation was at 72 knots. So that's two knots later than POH. I would say that's pretty close. In liftoff, was it 80 knots? In the POH, liftoff is supposed to happen at 70 knots.
And 50 foot speed here was roughly between 87 and 88 knots. And according to the POH, it's 74 knots. If you take a look at the pitch, you can see very, very smooth and shallow rotation, you know, six degrees. And then the pitch remained pretty much at six, seven degrees and the airspeed increased significantly.
And that's actually perfectly fine on a very long runway here. That's a perfectly safe way to do it.
What I like about this depiction is if you want to do a takeoff from a short field, really at the limit of the takeoff performance, this would be the wrong way to do it. And you would be aware that you have to set takeoff power statically, release the brakes, aggressively rotate, fly the correct speed. And...
It's just nice to see. And we've had feedback from people that they were like, my airplane is not even close to book numbers. I focused in on it. I tried it. And turns out my engine wasn't doing enough power, stuff like that.
I am really amazed. I didn't realize they had this capability. And I've never seen this kind of capability in anything I've ever seen before. And I think it addresses kind of a hidden issue in flying small aircraft, which is, yes, we know that the engines get older. They put out less power. But nobody takes the effort to try and quantitatively measure how much less power and what's that doing to your performance. Looks to me like you have just...
An amazing tool for helping people understand the amount of performance they're losing in their airplane, either by pilot technique or an older engine. That's right. It visualizes the actual takeoff performance. And that's actually what makes sense. What's the point?
of doing a proper pre-flight, going through the effort of doing these boring calculations when in the end it just works out because your runway is like three or four times the distance you need. Yeah. I mean, when you're flying, you don't want to have things just happen to work out because you've got tons of extra margin. You'd like to know what kind of performance you'd like to know. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. We do the same thing for cruise and landing. It's maybe not as critical, but
But we've had a lot of feedback here from people that buy maybe newer, expensive aircraft. And then we'll show them that based on the POH, their airspeed is, their true airspeed is, you know, lower, their fuel consumption is higher. And if you see these grayed out areas, that's because we take into account
stabilized cruise conditions. So we don't compare different aircraft types to the POH data if the cruise is not stable. So if any value here is fluctuating or running around or there's power changes or altitude changes, it's discarded. But if you're here at 30,000 feet flying a single engine
turboprop and your true airspeed is stable over a long time and your torque is stable and the temperature and ISA is stable, we'll show you that your true airspeed here is 4.1 knots lower than the cruise data in the POH. We do the same thing for landing as well. I bet there aren't too many airplanes that fly faster than the POH numbers.
Let's see. I worked with a new capability that I hadn't used before in Flystow, and I uploaded a video from one of my helicopter flights and then did an instrument overlay with it. Talk about that capability.
Yeah, so we do have a pretty neat feature called the video upload feature. So there's a certain data sample in Flystore from one of your flights and you happen to have a video clip, maybe of a takeoff or of a landing or whatever. Maybe you did a stall exercise. And if you upload that video clip,
FlyStore will analyze those pixels and then it will find the correct time in your flight data. It will then take the flight data and superimpose an instrument overlay on your video. Now, the cool thing is I record most of my landings
using a smartphone that I just put on the dash. And the time code used in that smartphone for videos is very different to the time code used in, for example, a Garmin G5 log, right? You will know everything about time codes, Max. So what happens is if I simply take a video editing program and I put
this video in there and then I'll put some airspeed or some other overlay over there. Over time, they will not be in sync.
And what FlyStor does is it sort of keeps both data sets, the visual and the flight data set, completely synchronized for the entire duration. And I can click on this landing here, and you can see that instead of the kind of once per second data rate of the flight data, you now get this very fluid video view of
And you can speed it up or speed it down. Yeah. And let me just describe what we're seeing here. Essentially, this aircraft is on the base to final turn. It's a little low over the airport and superimposed on the video looks like essentially the PFD from a G1000, for example. So it's as if we superimpose PFD data on top of the video. So it's really very instructive. You can see exactly what your flight parameters were as you were doing them. Right. Right.
And there's a couple of things that I can highlight as we take a look at this. So this is a G1000 flight data sample set. And so we have all the engine data here. Interestingly, at the bottom here of the engine indication, we have flaps. It says flaps 0, 50, 100%. And this is really cool because the G1000 for this aircraft type doesn't record flaps.
These flap settings, FlyStore detects them aerodynamically. So if we have enough data from a particular aircraft type and we happen to have access to that aircraft type, we can verify FlyStore's flap detection algorithm. And we've had some people
that wanted to introduce this for their flight school, and they might have an aircraft type that's not so prominent, not so often used. So they just took videos of the aircraft
exact time on the primary flight display and when they actuated the flaps. And this allowed us to introduce this feature. Yeah, you've got a lot of capability here. I'm just amazed that I'm learning new things as we're talking here. Let's move on and talk about the ADS-B traffic and also about wake turbulence. Yeah, so we also have a lot of advanced owner pilots who might fly into some of the larger airports like Class B airports. And
It does happen once in a while that you will be sequenced for landing behind a larger aircraft. Any larger business jet or airliner
can pose a real threat through wake turbulence. And we decided to include ADS-B traffic data in Flystore because it's important for this full immersion, debriefing and flight review experience so that you see what was going on around you. We do use the traffic to
give you these proximity alerts. So FlyStore detects if two aircraft are on a direct collision course and will tell you, you were on a collision course, collision would have happened in 30 seconds. And the second use case for ADS-B traffic is wake turbulence awareness. So I have an example here. One of our users was kind enough to allow us to use this.
It shows a Cessna 206 getting ready to cross the San Francisco airport's class Bravo here. He's flying at about 2,000 feet. And in the ADS-B traffic depiction here, we see a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. It's climbing away from San Francisco to the northwest here.
And you see a couple other planes. And our guy is now in the class Bravo. He's descending a little bit, climbing back up to maintain his 2,000 feet. He's doing 140 knots. And as he comes close to the 787's flight path, what happens is...
Flaisto shows the historical positions of the 787 one minute ago, two minutes ago, and three minutes ago. And then if we zoom in, we can see that...
Our Cessna 206 is exactly where that 787 was three minutes ago. So three minutes ago, if you were sitting in that 206, a 787 was a thousand feet above you, laterally 0.3 nautical miles away. So pretty much at the same position. And if you take the FAA or ICAO wake turbulence guidance material, these wakes are
they will descend between around 200-ish, 300-ish feet a minute in typical atmospheric conditions. So this means that if that 787 was 1,000 feet above Earth,
Right now, the wakes are where you are. And this is not some super precise science. This doesn't mean that there was a wake actually there. Obviously, this 206 was perfectly fine. You might have felt a ripple or something. But it just shows you that if you don't have this awareness depiction in FlyStore, that you were close to a wake turbulence zone, you would have probably...
Had no idea at all. Like that there was a 787. Crisscrossing your path there. A couple minutes ago. And there have been fatal accidents. Involving wake turbulence. Taking off. Behind a. Heavy prop aircraft. Where the prop. Wash through.
a light aircraft on its back or approaching, I think it was Knoxville where a Cirrus was toppled over when they were approaching behind an Airbus A320. So we'd rather show this 10,000 times in fly store and people are like, oh, interesting. I didn't realize that rather than not show it and have just one more of these weight turbulence accidents.
It's an important subject area that I think a lot of pilots, certainly as I'm flying with people, I see that they don't have kind of the same level of awareness that I have. I'm often just using the traffic system and trying to figure out, oh, that airplane is passing about three miles in front of us and we're doing this speed, therefore we'll be there in X number of minutes and will the weight turbulence have dropped down 300 feet in that first minute? And yeah, so I think these are important kinds of things. What I would love to see is
the kind of depiction that you've just shown here after the flight in real time in the cockpit. So I'm hoping, Garmin, if you're listening, let's bring that capability to your system sometime in the future.
That would be cool. I did pull up the cockpit viewer, the HUD as our favorite users call it, to show you how FlyStore also highlights a potential collision here. So it actually shows the traffic target in the PFD and it shows that there's a 737 MAX 9, 5 miles away, and there's a potential collision within 60 seconds.
Obviously, a small course correction here and it's no more a threat. But I just think it's nice. You guys are lucky, especially close to the larger airports. You have the ADS-B mandate. For example, in Europe, we don't have that. So if you're in Echo class airspace here in Europe, there are still legal ways to fly completely without any transponder, anything, gliders, etc.,
This traffic stuff in Flystow is really, really a revelation to see how much traffic is out there. Yeah, indeed. Talk a little bit about the weather capabilities. So if you fly from an airport that has weather reporting, ATIS,
AWS or whatever, we store that globally. We keep the data in Flystow. So if you did a flight today from an airport that has weather reporting capability and you upload that flight in half a year, Flystow will still give you the weather for that flight. What we also do is we archive weather radar, so ground-based weather radar,
And we have recently added SIGMETs and AIRMETs. I'll give you the weather radar example here. Again, I'm pulling up the 2D map here. I can configure the map. Let's put it to maybe satellite and satellite.
reduce the opacity a little bit, and then we can click anywhere on the track line to enter playback mode. We can speed this up a little bit, and we can see that there's our user aircraft and two other aircraft that are using the gap in this convection storm system
So a PC-12 and I think a 737, and our user here is TBM960, and they've all been using the same gap in the storm system. And we have a 10 minute resolution between the radar images that we archive.
And we also use computer vision to do the transitions. So you can use this to analyze your avoidance strategy. You can also use it to figure out, okay, would there have been a better gap somewhere else? Or how did this weather develop?
If I fast forward a little bit, you can see how it changes. So the transition, you can see that now basically these returns have intensified and this path would not have been possible. And we're talking, you know, this was 2120 and now we're at 2132. So we're talking about 10, 12 minutes later and you have a completely different weather situation, radar situation.
returns changed very quickly. You can see in FlyStore using this feature that full blown thunderstorms develop within 15, 20 minutes. So it's interesting. It's mostly used by the pressurized turbine guys, but it can also be very helpful if you crisscross weather in a smaller airplane and you want to see how close you really were. It's helpful. I
I like it. Yeah, it's impressive. I think, for example, looking at data on FlightAware, there's one static image of the radar map, and you don't really know is that the weather at the beginning of the flight, the middle of the flight, the end of the flight. Here, you're actually updating the weather so you can see what the weather was, plus or minus 10 minutes, when you were at any particular point of the flight. So that's an amazing capability I haven't seen before, and I think that's really valuable.
And you can perfectly see like the path here. He's avoiding all the returns for a safe landing there. Even though he got a potential collision flag, we can check it out. So you can see that FlyStore triggered the potential collision flag due to a helicopter there. And again, you can simply open this flag and it will expand and then you can replay this particular situation.
So you can see that FlySto first colors the helicopter in orange and says it's within 60 seconds. And then it colors it red and says it's within 30 seconds. But then there's a course change or an altitude change. And FlySto understands that vertically you will not hit, but laterally it was pretty close, as you can see.
Tremendous amount of capability. So talk a little bit about pricing, both today and perhaps in the future. So the last couple of years, we were really, really, really big on product development. But obviously,
Obviously, we do plan to offer pricing paid subscriptions because we want to keep developing for a long, long, long time. Basically, we want to make Flystow better every week and we want to do it by...
charging those user groups that get very high value out of Flystow and compared to the aviation activity, compared to the flying they do, Flystow will be a completely minor cost. We plan to keep it free
There is going to be a basic version of FlyStore that's going to stay free for student pilots, people who charter aircraft, people who fly maybe the typical, what is it, 50 hours a year. We don't want people to be priced out because they might not fly enough to warrant another subscription expense. They should be able to use FlyStore.
If you fly a new glass cockpit aircraft for 200 hours a year, we'll charge something, but it will probably be less than the cost of one flight hour. And if you need advanced functionality like...
specific trend monitorings, or you want to manage your aircraft, or you want to share your aircraft, or if you're a commercial entity, will charge more, but you will also get more data, more hours, more functionality and features. The pricing hasn't been finalized yet. We do have a pricing information on the website, which just says it's free of charge.
If we need to make the development sustainable, we'll offer paid subscription plans. But
they will be absolutely no factor for someone who can afford to fly a couple of hours a year. Flystow is going to be available. Okay. So bottom line, it's free today and there might be a price sometime in the future. Patrick, where do people go if they want to find out more information about Flystow? So please visit flystow.net, the website. Check out the intro text, how to upload instructions. I mean, it's 10 seconds to create an account. It's basically...
you know, put in your email and password and off you go. You can read about all the different data formats and how you can extract them from your avionics or apps and how to upload them. There is
a dedicated native iOS app for all the iPhones. There's a dedicated native Android app for all the Android smartphones. There's a web app for all the iPads. There's a desktop app, obviously. So no matter what device you're using, you can log on to Flystow and try it out using the live demo feature.
If you have any feedback, as soon as you have a couple of flights on Flystow, you can check out your inside section, which is the aggregate portal where all your data flows together. And you can see your highlights. How many airports did you visit? How many flights did you do? Maybe you want to see a nice map of all your flights. No problem. We have it. So Flystow is very user-centric and
You can't really do anything wrong. If you get lost in some of your flights, just click the button on the left and start over. That's great. Patrick, thanks so much for joining us here today. It's my pleasure, Max. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And my thanks to Patrick Lienhardt for joining us here today. You can find out more about Flystow at flystow.net.
And just a reminder that I love hearing from you and I read many of your emails on the show. If you'd like to send me a message, just go out to aviationnewstalk.com, click on contact at the top of the page. That's absolutely the best way to send me a message. And of course, I also want to thank everyone who supports the show in one of the following ways. We love it when you join the club and sign up at aviationnewstalk.com slash support to
To support the show financially, you can also do that at aviationnewstalk.com slash PayPal. We also love it when you leave a five-star review on whatever app that you're listening to us on now. And of course, if you're in the market for a headset, please consider buying a Lightspeed headset and using one of the links in our show notes, because if you use those links, they will donate to help support the show. So until next time, fly safely, have fun, and keep the blue side up. And remember that you can always go around. Go around.
Coming down Don't wait Till you're silent Baby sliding Upside down You can always