iFly GPS Forum

iFly GPS does pretty well in depicting weather--except in the EFIS view, which always seems to have clear skies. It might be nice if the ADS-B radar were painted in that 3D virtual reality EFIS view of the world, as well as overlaid on the map. Here's a squall my camera saw a few minutes ago:

and my iPhone's iFly GPS looking right at the squall:

Now, it's REALLY cool that on one screen iFly shows both the squall on the map AND a synthetic view of terrain and sky in the EFIS. But wouldn't it be even cooler to show the squall virtually, right in the EFIS? Then I could just fly around the squall without needing to look at the map at all.

Cobra, you may want more than I had in mind. Take ADS-B traffic as an analog for weather. We see it top-down on the 2D map AND we see it from the side in the EFIS. That's as much as I was thinking of for storms. My idea about storms in the EFIS was that we'd get a better idea of their height that way. . But I should have said so more specifically

Now, whether it would be practical or even possible is another matter. But, then, wishes are rarely practical, even if they're possible.

I'm still trying to understand what you have in mind.  There is no information in the ADSB Wx broadcast regarding the vertical location of storm activity.  No cloud bases, no cloud tops, no height data on where radar echos are occurring.  iFly would not know how to present weather information in the third dimension. 

But even if it did, I don't know how it would present it in a meaningful way.  Say it draws a gray or green rectangle in the middle of the "blue sky".  How would you know if it was 50 ft in front of you or 500 nm away?  Traffic targets are "points" in space, and iFly gives you both height and distance cues by drawing a line to the point on the ground over which the traffic is flying, and tagging the traffic with a height number (or maybe just drawing the line to the proper height; I don't really remember).  I don't know how you use that visual technique to locate a cloud or a squall line because those are "blobs", not points, and I don't have a great idea for a different visual technique to do that.

Ultimately, how do you envision using this information?  I.e., how would you use what you see in the EFIS to modify your flight path?  And how would that differ from using what you see out the window to modify your flight path? 

When the idea of "synthetic vision" came to aviation, the primary selling point was that you could use this virtual display to "see through the clouds or darkness" and so it would provide situational awareness to help with poor visibility conditions.  I've always considered iFly's EFIS to be providing a similar type of benefit, but it seems like you're asking for something opposite.