emmarobins

About

Sponsor & Context

This project was conducted in partnership with ForeFlight, the industry-standard Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) used by general aviation, commercial, and military pilots worldwide. ForeFlight became part of Boeing in 2019 and, together with Jeppesen and other digital aviation assets, was acquired by Thoma Bravo in 2025 as part of a $10.55 billion transaction.

ForeFlight supports nearly every stage of the flight-planning process, including route planning, weather analysis, airport information, navigation, and flight logging. Because pilots rely on the platform during safety-critical activities, the product prioritizes efficiency, clarity, and reliability. Despite aviation being inherently collaborative, ForeFlight remains largely an individual-use tool. Pilots routinely seek mentorship, airport recommendations, operational advice, and local knowledge from other aviators, but these interactions typically occur outside the platform. Information is scattered across Reddit communities, Facebook groups, Discord servers, aviation forums, and personal networks, making collaboration feel disconnected from the flight-planning experience.

This disconnect presents an opportunity to explore how community-driven interaction could be thoughtfully integrated into ForeFlight without compromising its identity as a safety-critical aviation tool. Rather than transforming ForeFlight into a social network, our project investigates how pilots might share knowledge, build trust, and connect with one another within the workflows they already use.

Problem Statement

How might we implement a social feature that enhances collaboration, information sharing, and a sense of community among pilots in the ForeFlight experience?

Why this Problem Matters

Aviation is an inherently social field. Student pilots depend on mentors. Experienced pilots rely on word-of-mouth for local airport quirks that are never formally documented. Yet ForeFlight, the tool most pilots already have open during planning, offers no way to tap into this collective knowledge.

Prior research sharpens the stakes. Haffey & Gardner-Vandy (2025) found that pilots who feel socially supported are more likely to persist in training, suggesting community connection has real retention implications for ForeFlight. Sharma et al. (2011) caution that social features in professional tools backfire when perceived as misaligned with the core purpose, meaning the design must earn its place. And Simon et al. (2021) show that aviation tools must minimize cognitive load during high-demand moments, setting a hard constraint on any new feature.

These tensions, social value versus safety focus, community benefit versus professional trust, defined our challenge from day one. Getting this right could meaningfully improve how pilots learn, connect, and stay engaged with aviation.

Initial Framing and Assumptions

We began with a deliberately open design question rather than a predetermined solution. Our assumption was that some form of social integration in ForeFlight could be valuable, but we held that loosely, knowing research might tell a different story.

We assumed our primary users would be general aviation pilots: student pilots and recreational flyers who lack the institutional support structures available to commercial pilots, and who are most likely to seek peer knowledge and community. We also assumed that trust and safety concerns would be significant, but we needed research to tell us exactly how significant, and what forms they would take.

Critically, we did not assume that social features should live inside ForeFlight's core interface. That question, embedded vs. separate, was one of the first things we needed evidence to answer.