Company Update

The past few months have been incredible for our company and for WingX Pro7.  First, some company news.  Hilton Software is a Department Of Defense Contractor having won a large contract to provide a multi-platform mobile aviation solution for the United States Military.  We are extremely proud to have won this contract (beating out many other companies in the process) and to be visiting and working closely with the DoD and our men and women in uniform.  Our company has been hiring aggressively and we plan on moving into significantly larger offices.  We have increased our staff in all departments and hopefully you've started to see our additional marketing efforts.

The 2014 show season was very busy and rewarding.  We had booths at Sebring LSA, Sun-n-Fun, Airventure, most of the AOPA Fly-Ins, NBAA, Palm Springs Flying Expo, and the Airlift/Tanker Association Convention and Symposium.  These shows are a great opportunity to demo our new features, but also to hear feedback from pilots and go back to HQ and integrate those ideas into WingX Pro7. Many of the features in WingX Pro7 are from pilot feedback - we love hearing from you.

Technology Leader

As the iPad technology leader, we have been working on and releasing new features on iPad that you could find in no other major EFB app.  WingX Pro7 was the first major iPad app to introduce Track-Up, Split Screen, Synthetic Vision with AHRS support, Terrain Overlays, Obstructions, GPWS, ADS-B Weather and Traffic, SmartTaxi, Passive RADAR Altimeter, Terrain Profile View, IAP Routing, BlackBox Recording and Playback, Search and Rescue Grids and Patterns, Wearable WingX Pro7, and more...

Can you believe that most iPad EFB pilots still don't have Split Screen or Synthetic Vision more than three years after WingX Pro7 introduced these features to iPad?

We announced WingX Rewind at Airventure racking up yet another first on iPad (more on this below).  We also introduced and released IAP Routing - select an Instrument Approach Procedure and WingX Pro7 automatically adds the IAP to your route - imagine what a life-saver this is in IMC (no other major iPad has IAP Routing).  We are hard at work on a great new technology considered impossible by the rest of the community - we can't wait to announce this.  We have been working with new partners and have added compatibility for several more ADS-B receivers.  We will announce these shortly.  While other apps force you into buying only their ADS-B receiver, we embrace open technology to enable you to select the best ADS-B receiver for you.  The options are many: stand-alone or mounted, WiFi or Bluetooth, single or dual channel, with or without AHRS, powered or battery or solar powered, with or without pitot-static, varying antenna technologies, wide range of cost, etc.  Our company does not make a cent from sales of these devices, no kickbacks, so we can be completely unbiased.  BTW: We continue to ask the Stratus and Garmin people to play nice with us, but they seem to like their closed system, we'll keep trying.

For those pilots who have WingX Pro7 and another EFB app, you may notice that WingX Pro7 downloads its databases much faster than the other EFB app.  The WingX Pro7 data compression is about 4 times better than other EFBs' compression so databases download much faster and the databases take up less space on your device.  While other EFBs require 20GB or more for their databases, WingX Pro7's databases (just 5GB) can easily fit into a 16GB iPad or iPhone.  Moreover, the WingX Rewind compression is so good that in addition to all the databases, you can even store many thousands of hours of flight recording even with real-time AHRS data on a 16GB iPad!  Yip, we'll pack for you!

 * Sizes are approximate and depend on options selected

Aviation Data

When Hilton Software was started, we were (and still are) so fixated on creating the best software that we decided to use FAA VFR Sectionals, IFR Low/High Enroutes, Geo-Referencing and other data from third-party sources.  This is no longer the case.  All moving map charts, as well as geo-referencing and IAP Routing data come directly from Hilton Software.  This change has enabled us to improve the data in several ways; for example we included WACs, we are able to geo-reference more IAPs, and we added IAP Routing.

A quick note: Occasionally we are asked if WingX Pro7 displays Jeppesen approach charts.  The answer is no.  Jeppesen is another company that has decided that sharing is not in its best business interest when it comes to charts.  This is unfortunate.  Over the last few years the GA market has transitioned from widespread Jepp chart use to what now seems like very minimal use - I terminated my Jepp subscription years ago.  Two other factors are at play, first is cost.  Adding Jeppesen charts to an EFB app would significantly raise the cost of flying (exacerbated by the terrible economy).  Secondly, a few years ago, the Government revamped its IAP chart look-and-feel to a point where it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the free and expensive chart.  Having said that, we have always been open and remain open to working with other companies.

WingX Pro7 and
WingX Rewind

We announced WingX Rewind at Airventure with the intent to release it soon thereafter.  However, after receiving excellent feedback from WingX Pro7 pilots and from our partners, we decided to add additional capability to the WingX Rewind Engine.  These improvements will enable us to continue adding more functionality in the future.  The downside is that the additional development and testing time forced us to push back the release date more that we had wanted.  The good news is that WingX Pro7 with WingX Rewind is now in the Apple App Store.

What is WingX Rewind?  WingX Rewind is technology that allows you to record and playback a flight with real-time GPS, AHRS pitch-and-bank, and pitot-static information.  WingX Pro7 will playback a flight as if you were there; i.e. view your breadcrumb track on the IAP, see how well you flew the ILS, see how steep your turns to final were, etc.  You can also email a flight to someone allowing that person to view the flight on the web or view it right on the iPad in Google Earth.  We believe that WingX Rewind will fundamentally improve flight instruction because for the first time, Flight Instructors have a quick and simple way to review all phases of the flight from engine start to engine stop.  Finally, an EFB app that addresses post-flight and review - and WingX Rewind is free with your basic WingX Pro7 subscription.

iOS 8

While we understand the excitement to upgrade to Apple's newest Operating System, we're always cautious in recommending an iOS upgrade especially major upgrades. The initial iOS 7 release had its share of problems, so as we did with iOS 7 we recommended that pilots hold-short for a while with iOS 8.  This stance proved to be the correct one.  Soon after Apple released iOS 8.0, it followed-up with iOS 8.0.1.  Unfortunately iOS 8.0.1 had such significant problems that Apple removed in within hours of its release and quickly pushed out iOS 8.0.2.  While iOS 8.0.2 and iOS 8.1 looked much better, we again took a wait-and-see approach.  Good thing we did - we and others found significant performance problems using iOS 8.1 on iPad 2 and iPhone 4.  Note: All the problems mentioned above are solely Apple's iOS problems and unrelated to WingX Pro7 or any other app.

Our current recommendation is to upgrade to iOS 8.1.1

To our iOS 6 users: Our WingX Pro7 December update will be the last update to support iOS 6. Please update to iOS 8.

We're Hiring!

We are actively looking for great engineers in or near Coral Springs, Florida.  We're looking for smart engineers who like to work hard and play hard - later this month our company is having a company SCUBA day.

In Conclusion

The last few months have been incredibly busy and exciting.  Our engineering and data production efforts have been stellar, but our communication about our advances have not.  Please accept our apologies, you will be seeing more email updates as well as Facebook and Twitter updates going forward. I'm very excited about the future and direction of our company.

Sincerely,

Hilton