In the upper right corner is an icon for the Settings page. The "Nearest / Manual" button allows the App to switch between displaying the closest airport, or any airport around the world that you select. To the right of the "Nearest" button is the ICAO identifier of the airport. If you tap the identifier, you will get more airport details.
Inside the map block, the compass circle is drawn to true North, not magnetic North. Likewise, the runways are drawn to true headings. Of course runway labels are based on the magnetic heading when the airport way laid out and only ocassionally updated for magnetic variation. In the upper right corner, the estimated variation is provided. This is not the official variation (as printed on Sectionals), but is the average difference between the runway labels and their true headings. Plus values are east variation, negative are west.
Runways are color coded by surface, for example, turf is green, asphalt black and concrete dark gray.
The wind vector is drawn in red and the length of the arrow is proprtional to the wind speed. Wind less than 3 knots is not drawn. Wind gusts are draw with a purplish arrow over the steady wind.
In the lower left corner the most recent wind is displayed along with the age of the report. The lower right corner has the reporting station that the wind value came from, along with the station's distance and bearing to the airport.
Below the runway plot is a list of all runways, their dimensions, and the calculated crosswind components for each direction of flight. The calculated values are only for steady winds, gusts are NOT considered. Tailwinds are listed in red. If the list of runways is too long to fit on the screen, it scrolls with a finger-tip drag on the list.
This screen lets you pick an airport anywhere in the world to check its runway layout and winds. There are two ways to pick an airport here. First, you can scroll up and down the picker list. However, with over 45,000 airports to choose from in the picker, scrolling can be tedious. A small assist to scrolling is the ability, in the Settings View, to preselect the starting letter or number of the picker. The alterative approach is typing in the ICAO airport identifier. To bring up the keyboard, tap inside the text entry box at the top of the screen. If you use the keyboard, you must hit "Return" to hide the keyboard, and the "Select" button just below the picker to return to the Main View.
This view provides some supplimental information about the selected airport in scrollable text boxes. The upper box contains details about the location of the airport and the associated radio frequencies. The middle box lists additional runway data such as touchdown zone elevation (TDZE), displaced thresholds, runway surface, lighting, if present, and if significant, runway slope. The bottom box displays the entire current METAR weather report in full text rather than abbreviated form.
Return to the Main View by tapping the Back Button.
The Settings view allows you to set some default behaviours.
There are many types of aerodromes in the database. The App will be faster and easier to use if you select some types to ignore. You can, as described in the Manual Aerodrome Selection View, set a preferred ICAO prefix. This is useful if you tend to search for airports than start with a particular first letter or number.
Finally, only a few airports have METAR weather reporting stations right on the field. Many airports are served by reporting stations a few miles away. The App allows you to decide how close or far from your airport you want to search for weather stations. Five miles will be a quicker search and most accurate conditions, however, not many airports have a reporting station within five miles. Twenty miles is a good compromise. Outside the US, it may be necessary to expand the search to 50 miles. Beyond 50 miles, the wind is so likely to be different between the reporting station and the airport, that it is not worth taking the chance on useless data. Regardless of the search radius selected, the App will always use the closest station within the search radius.
The info button at the top right of this view takes you to this page.
