From the pilot who built it

Why this is free

Aero Companion exists because I love flying, and because the people who taught me to fly wouldn't have charged me a dime for what's on this site.

I'm a private pilot. Most of the hours I have were earned at small towered and untowered fields with instructors who answered "how do I get better at this?" with patience, a sectional, and a cup of coffee. That kind of generosity is the GA community I want to keep flying in. The two tools here (a crosswind finder, plus a glide aware route planner) are my way of giving back to the GA community, putting a small piece of that generosity back on the ramp for the next pilot.

It started on a podcast drive

I've been a long time listener of Aviation News Talk with Max Trescott (Apple Podcasts). On more than one episode, Max has said out loud what a lot of us think privately, usually after another preventable accident chain made the news. "Somebody should build an app that does this," he said. The two ideas that kept coming back to me were:

• Find me a nearby runway with the crosswind component I actually want to train on, not "windy somewhere."
• Plan a cross country that keeps a real landing option inside glide range as much of the way as possible.

Neither idea is novel and neither is rocket science. They were just doing the homework before the homework is needed. So I built them.

Why these two things, specifically

Almost every accident report you read on a GA single is shorter than it should be. An engine failure in cruise. Loss of control on landing in a stiff crosswind. The accident itself takes seconds, and the chain that led to it had hours of options upstream. Most of those upstream options are decisions you can practice or plan for on the ground, when no one is yelling at the radio:

• Crosswind currency doesn't happen by accident. If you only fly when the wind favors the long runway, you'll meet your real crosswind on a day you wish you hadn't. The crosswind finder is for picking a Saturday morning and going somewhere where the wind is giving you something useful to work with.
• Glide range thinking is the kind of habit that costs nothing on a normal day and buys you everything on the day you need it. The planner answers a very small question along the whole route: if the engine quit right here, where do I actually go? Looking at that question before you launch is a different experience than discovering the answer at 4,500 feet with a quiet propeller.

That's the whole pitch (think through the decisions before the problem ever arises).

Why I'm not charging for it

The core tools (crosswind finder, plus the glide aware planner with the current NOAA winds aloft baseline) will stay free. Always. Two reasons:

• Pilots in training are already paying a fortune. The marginal cost of giving them a planning aid is essentially zero, and the upside in safety habits is real.
• I built this on weekends to scratch my own itch. The whole site is hosted on infrastructure I'd be paying for anyway. Letting other pilots in costs me almost nothing.

There's an optional Pro tier that adds airspace and NOTAM review along your route, an IFR or VFR forecast option, future departure planning with TAF winds on top of the FD baseline, saved aircraft and saved plans, GPX or KML export for ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot, and an ad free experience across the site. An Instructor tier on top of that adds shared fleet and student progress tools. If those features save you time and you want to chip in, that's how. If they don't, the free tier is meant to be useful on its own.

A few honest caveats

• This is a planning aid, not a briefing. Always pull a current preflight briefing from Flight Service (call 1 800 WX BRIEF, or visit 1800wxbrief.com).
• The free tier does not model NOTAMs, airspace, density altitude, turbulence, or the terrain between you and a candidate runway. Pro adds airspace and NOTAM advisories where the official FAA data sources are available, and is honest about coverage where they are not.
• The pilot in command is responsible for the safe conduct of the flight. The output is here to inform a plan, not to make it.

If it helps you

If something on Aero Companion saves you a leg, sharpens a habit, or just makes a Saturday flight more useful, that's the whole point. Please tell another pilot (student, instructor, anyone), and send Max Trescott some appreciation while you're at it. The Aviation News Talk podcast is genuinely one of the most consistent forces for GA safety I know of, and a lot of the ideas behind these tools came directly from listening to it.

A pilot, somewhere in the pattern.