Notes from the cockpit
Aviation writing for pilots and enthusiasts - ADS-B explainers, AI flight planning, EFB workflows, and the occasional product note.
ForeFlight vs Garmin Pilot vs Fly Overhead: an honest EFB comparison for 2026
ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot, and Fly Overhead compared honestly: 2026 prices, platforms, 3D airspace, CFI-student tools, and what each app is still missing.
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Concrete arrows to EFBs: air navigation now vs then
How concrete-arrow airway markers guided early pilots, and why Fly Overhead aims to be the trusted modern EFB pilots look to for context.
Read article →Why ATC radio is so hard for AI to transcribe
Air traffic control radio is one of the hardest audio domains for speech recognition. A look at the degraded audio, the phraseology, the shifting callsigns, the merged feeds, and what actually improves a transcript.
Read article →Density altitude: why airplanes struggle when it gets hot and high
Density altitude is how thin air quietly steals takeoff, climb, and engine power. A plain-language guide to what it is, a worked Leadville example, and how to plan around it before the runway runs out.
Read article →Reading turbulence from the sky: inferring rough air from ADS-B
How Fly Overhead infers a live turbulence map from the way aircraft move - vertical-rate variance per cell of sky, anchored to PIREPs, SIGMETs, and AIRMETs as ground truth, getting sharper as the dataset grows.
Read article →Rendering 12,000 aircraft at 60fps in a browser
How we render the whole US sky on a live map without dropping frames: GPU-accelerated aircraft layers, delta WebSocket updates, frame-aligned batching, the cost of smooth interpolation, and code-splitting the map engine.
Read article →AI in the cockpit: what an AI copilot actually does for GA pilots - and what it doesn't
A pilot-skeptical look at what AI copilots can actually do for general aviation in 2026 - six real capabilities, five things they should never replace, and how to evaluate one before you trust it.
Read article →What's that plane overhead? A free guide to identifying aircraft in real time
Open a map, tap the plane, see who is flying it. A plain-English guide to ADS-B, the technology that lets you identify almost any aircraft in the US sky in real time - and the free tools that surface that data.
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