Fly a live flight
A live flight turns Navigator into a timing instrument: it follows your position, works out whether the current leg is running early or late, and tells you what ground speed will fix it. When you land, it grades the flight from the track it recorded.
Before you start
Have your .fpl on the device and your planned leg times worked out —
see Prepare a route. Set Auto-Lock to Never so the panel does
not go dark, and if you are using GDL90, confirm you are on the receiver's Wi-Fi network.
Setting up
Tap Start Live Flight, the button floating at the bottom right of the Flights screen. The setup form has four sections.
ForeFlight .FPL
Tap Import .FPL Route and pick your file. On success the section shows the loaded byte count, the Route section fills with your waypoints and their coordinates, and the Planned Legs section generates one row per leg.
If nothing appears, the file did not parse — see Troubleshooting.
Location Source
Pick Device GPS or GDL90. This is fixed for the flight; to change it you have to back out and start over.
Rotation Speed
The ground speed, in knots, at which Navigator considers you airborne. Default is 40 kts.
This single number does more than it looks like it does. It is the takeoff detection threshold, it is the speed floor for automatic leg switching, and after the flight it is the speed below which leading track points are trimmed off. Set it below your actual rotation speed but above your taxi speed. For most light singles the default is fine; a fast airplane or a windy taxiway may want it higher.
Planned Legs
One row per leg, labelled Leg n: FROM → TO. Type the planned time and use the toggle to
mark the leg scored or unscored. A scored leg with an empty time shows "Planned time is
required for scored legs" in red and blocks the start button.
Start Live Flight enables once the route has at least two waypoints and every scored leg has a time.
The setup screen after importing a route. The Route section confirms what Navigator
parsed out of the .fpl.
In the air
The live screen fills the display. Before takeoff it shows Ready for Departure and a PRE-FLIGHT pill.
Before takeoff. The header already shows which leg you are on and where you are headed.
Timing starts one of two ways:
- Automatically, the moment your ground speed reaches the rotation speed you set. The pill flips to AIRBORNE and leg 1's clock starts.
- Manually, by tapping Start. Use this if you want the clock to start on a specific event — crossing a start gate, or a rolling start — rather than at rotation.
Once airborne, the panel switches to the delta card and the four instrument tiles. What each one means, and how to fly to them, is covered in Reading the instrument panel.
Legs advance by themselves
Navigator switches to the next leg when all of these are true at once:
- You are within the checkpoint radius of the next waypoint (0.75 NM by default).
- Your ground speed is above the rotation speed.
- Your distance to that waypoint has started increasing — you are past the closest point, not still approaching it.
- At least 5 seconds have passed since the last automatic switch.
That third condition is why the switch fires as you leave a checkpoint rather than as you approach it: it waits for closest approach so the passage time is the honest one. You get a success haptic when it happens, the progress bar at the top fills another segment, and the next waypoint's identifier appears in the header.
The AUTO pill in the header tells you automatic switching is armed.
Taking control
Leg Control at the bottom of the screen opens the in-flight menu:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Enable / Disable Auto Switch | Turns automatic leg advancement on or off |
| Jump to Leg… | Opens a picker; choosing a leg makes it current and restarts its clock |
| Restart Current Leg | Resets the current leg's clock to zero, keeping the leg |
| Restart Flight | Discards the recorded track and starts the whole flight over from leg 1 |
| End Flight | Stops tracking and computes the final score (confirms first) |
Leg Control keeps every in-flight override one tap from the panel.
Two things worth knowing:
- Jump to Leg turns auto switching off. Navigator assumes that if you are correcting it by hand, you want to keep the controls. Re-enable it from the same menu when you are ready.
- Restart Flight throws away the track. It is the "we're doing this again" button, not an undo. There is no confirmation on it.
Use Restart Current Leg when Navigator switched early — say a checkpoint sits close to your course to the next one. Use Jump to Leg when it missed a switch entirely and you are already a checkpoint ahead of it.
Finishing
When you pass the last waypoint the panel shows Flight Complete.
Open Leg Control → End Flight and confirm. Navigator stops tracking, grades the recorded track against your route, and shows the results sheet: total score, leg count, track points recorded, and the timestamp.
From there:
| Button | Result |
|---|---|
| Save to Flights | Saves to your Flights list, with the track stored as KML and the original route as FPL, then returns to the list |
| Export JSON | Shares the full flight record — score, legs, settings, inputs — through the iOS share sheet |
| Export KML | Shares the recorded track as a KML line, openable in Google Earth or ForeFlight |
| Return to Menu | Leaves without saving |
Nothing is written to your Flights list until you tap Save to Flights. If you leave the results sheet without doing so, the flight and its track are gone. Save first, export later — a saved flight can be exported again at any time.
Secret checkpoints and fuel come afterwards
The live setup form has no fields for secret checkpoints or fuel, so a live flight is graded with both at zero. That is deliberate: neither is knowable in the air.
To add them, save the flight, open it from the Flights list, tap Edit, fill in the Secret Checkpoints and Fuel sections, and tap Grade Flight again.
The KML that Navigator saves for a live flight is a gx:Track carrying every fix's real
timestamp, so re-grading recomputes the same timing and elapsed points the flight finished with.
Adding secret checkpoints and fuel changes only those categories.
A live flight saved by an earlier build stored positions without timestamps and will not re-grade at all — its original score stands.