As you may know, the FAA has used two competing services to provide flight briefings and flight plan filing for many years.  Those two services have been DTC DUAT and CSC DUATS.  All Seattle Avionics products have supported both services for quite a while.  Then, several years ago, the FAA awarded a major contract to Lockheed Martin to modernize most aspects of flight services.  Change was in the air.

A few months ago the FAA changed the game by keeping two briefing/filing services but replacing DTC DUAT with Lockheed Martin Flight Services.  DTC DUAT has protested the award and also asked the FAA to allow it to continue operations as a privately funded company (no government checks).  The FAA initially balked at this but DTC DUAT reports that there are indications that the FAA may change its mind.  Our good friends at DTC DUAT have asked pilots to sign a petition asking the FAA to allow this.  I've signed it myself and I'd ask you and all pilots to do the same as competition is always good for consumers.

In the meantime, we've been working with our new friends at Lockheed Martin about integrating their next-generation flight services.  Lockheed Martin has been very responsive, helpful, and easy to work with.  The result is that we've now integrated Lockheed Martin's services into our backend processing system.

This integration benefits you today as we've wired things up so FlyQ EFB, FlyQ Pocket, and FlyQ Web now automatically use Lockheed Martin's services whenever a request is made for a DTC DUAT briefing or filing.  In other words, it just magically works as it did before.  The only difference is that the briefings and plans are now processed by Lockheed Martin, which FlyQ clearly notes.  Of course, you can also still brief and file with CSC DUATS, too.  

Important!  There is no Lockheed Martin switch, per se, in FlyQ EFB or any of our other products yet.  To use Lockheed Martin, select DTC DUAT as your weather provider in your pilot settings (Settings button, Pilots, your name).  If you don't already have DUAT credentials in, you'll need to add them (although they will not be used) or the app will not save the changes.

In the near future, we'll take more advantage of some of the new services that Lockheed Martin Flight Services allows such as easily closing or amending flight plans, getting automated notifications when your plan has been approved by the FAA and more goodies.  

That said, Voyager, our Windows application, communicates to briefing and filing services differently so the solution above does not help Voyager users who are currently unable to file and brief.  We are actively working on a solution for Voyager but it's technically harder and we don't anticipate a new Voyager release for at least 10 days, possibly longer.  In the meantime, you can file and brief using your Web browser and going directly to CSC DUATS or Lockheed Martin Flight Services directly.  I wish we had a better solution now but we are working on it.

As you probably know, FlyQ EFB 1.5 (download now) added a lot of great features including support for the Stratus* ADS-B receivers and the FreeFlight System RANGR series of certified in/out ADS-B systems.

FlyQ EFB 2.0 has a different mission as it's more about changing some of the internal architecture and user interface for better performance and flexibility moving forward.  It's less about adding a lot of new features.

It lays the foundation for the next several years of FlyQ EFB development. 

I won't go into details about it as we have to leave something for the imagination but some of the changes are:

• Substantially enhanced user-interface.  FlyQ EFB is generally considered to be the easiest to use aviation app on the market but there were some things that we wanted to improve upon to keep our lead.  They are significant improvements that will make you slap your face and wonder why no one else thought of them before!
• All-new 2D mapping system.  300% faster plus smoother, sharper maps.
• All-new always-on status indictors for GPS, Weather, and ADS-B battery charge.  In early testing, this was the single most popular feature in this release.
• And much more!