The best insights into the weather are often the conditions you see out your windshield with your very own eyes. Fast-changing weather conditions make pilot reports (PIREPs) critical for safety of flight, but this system relies on pilots to take the time to accurately report the weather they are seeing, for those PIREPs to be disseminated in a timely manner, and for PIREPs to be readily accessible by pilots. PIREP Pro is a new app that aims to make it easier for pilots to record and share the weather phenomena they are seeing and to enhance the experience with the addition of a social networking flavor. Brought to you by the developers of the Aviation W&B app, PIREP Pro is a free app you can download and install on you iPhone or iPad. It offers these main functions:
- Download and store current PIREPs prior to flight
- Warn you in-flight of relevant PIREPs near your location
- Help you to record PIREPs while flying so they can be shared with others
- Thank other pilots for their PIREPs
After installing PIREP Pro, you'll need to create a free login as well as enter some data about yourself and the aircraft you fly.
To get the most out of PIREP Pro while flying, you'll need to establish a network connection before you depart and launch the app so it can download and store currently available PIREPS. If you have a device with cellular data capability and you don't mind inhabiting a legal gray area, you can try to access new PIREPs in flight by not enabling airplane mode on your device. It's only a matter if time before GA pilots will have internet access in their cockpit. Be mindful of the current regulations regarding cell phone use in an airborne aircraft.
PIREPs downloaded and stored by PIREP Pro come from two sources: NOAA (reports made by pilots through LM Flight Services or by dispatchers on behalf of pilots using a secure AWC web site) and reports created with PIREP Pro and uploaded to their server. Ultimately the PIREP Pro developers hope to upload the reports their users create to NOAA. That two-way exchange of data is not yet available.
In Flight
To see warnings about weather that has been reported in your location, you'll need to toggle flight mode ON by tapping on the Flight Mode button. Next, use the slider at the bottom of the screen to set the radius in nautical miles. You can filter PIREPs by setting the minimum and maximum altitudes and the age of the reports in hours by tapping on the button that looks like a funnel in the lower right side of the screen. Then go about using the apps you usually use while flying. If there's a relevant PIREP that is within the radius and altitude envelope you've set, you'll get a pop-up notification regardless of the app you are currently using on your iPad or iPhone.
Recording a PIREP
Entering the details for a PIREP with this app is a two step process, which seems like one step too many. Tap on the PIREP button in the lower right side of the screen (it looks like a big comma) and you are presented with a dialog. Select the items you want to include (Turbulence, Icing, Clouds, Thunderstorms ...) by taping on the corresponding button. A check mark appears on each button to let know you've selected that particular item.
The Temperature button is not visible until your scroll down and I mistakenly assumed that the Winds selection would include a way to enter the temperature. To select all possible items for a PIREP requires seven taps. That's one tap-happy interface! It would be much simpler to eliminate the first step and just present all possible items from the get-go. That way you would enter the things you want to report and the ones you don't enter would just be left out of the report.
Tap on Next and you'll see a second dialog where you can enter values for all the items you selected. Conveniently, the current time and GPS altitude will be entered by default. You may need to adjust the altitude depending on the barometric pressure.
To select an aircraft type, tap on the arrows to scroll through all the types that you've configured. You may have to do a lot of tapping, depending on how many types you have defined. You only have to select a type once for each flight and PIREP Pro will remember it for subsequent reports.
A similar selection scheme of one-at-a-time scrolling through all possible values is used for Turbulence and other items. This is problematic because 1) you don't see all the available values and 2) you may have to tap multiple times to locate the value you want. You may even have to back up. You can always memorize the available values, but forcing the user to retain UI context is an inefficient and error-prone design choice. The more tapping, the longer it will take to enter a PIREP and the more your head will be down instead of attending to other flight duties.
To enter the information just to describe Turbulence as Light Intermittent Chop shown below took a total of nine taps. And there was plenty more tapping before the PIREP would be complete.
Entering altitudes, temperatures, wind directions, and visibility requires more tapping. The developers have tried to make things easier by making a short tap change an altitude by just 100 feet and a long tap by 1000 feet, but I found little success with this in a moving aircraft. Visibility entry could certainly be simplified by providing preset values like 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 10-plus and so on. And having to scroll through all possible wind directions 1 degree at a time is tedious at best.
By the time I finished entering my first PIREP, I was maxed out. My regular readers may think me a User Interface (UI) snob, but a thoughtfully designed UI is crucial for any product is to be successful. The current version of PIREP Pro needs to address its UI shortcomings and allow pilots to enter a PIREP with minimum tapping and minimum head-down time. I hope they realize their goal of connecting pilots through the sharing of PIREPs. It's a great idea with tremendous potential, but the app as it stands needs more polishing.
Posted with Blogsy
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