Flight Brief

Flight Brief on Pilot EFB Desk is the flight-folder journey at /flights: one folder per flight, holding your route and times, the weather and NOTAMs briefed around them, your notes, snapshots and attachments. On a desk the folder reads as a record - a route head, cells that state what is set and what is still an estimate, a trust line that says whether the data is current and complete. The footers are the module's standing framing, verbatim from the app: "Reference only - verify officially." under the weather, "May be incomplete - verify officially." under the NOTAMs, "Personal planning only." under the FDP, and "Personal reference · not for operational use" at the foot of every folder.

Find your way around

The landing is a List | Calendar toggle over the same folders.

Each folder card carries a date tile, the route chain (every stop of a pasted airway route), a sector chip ("1 sector", "10 sectors"), a Today chip on today's planned folder, the aircraft type and registration in mono, a "sealed 2 WX · 1 NOTAM" or "not sealed" note on completed folders, and a status chip - Planned, Active or Completed. A folder linked to a duty adds a block time and an FDP verdict chip (Legal, Near or Not legal); when the duty history cannot be read, a band says so and offers Retry rather than showing a silent dash.

With no folders at all the landing opens on an empty stage titled "No briefings yet", with a Plan a briefing action that focuses the FROM well, and the footnote "Informational only - a folder is a read of public sources at one instant, never a dispatch release."

How to plan a briefing from a city pair

1. Open Flight Brief from the sidebar.
2. Type the departure ICAO into FROM and the destination into TO. The swap button between them exchanges the two.
3. Press Build briefing. The setup wizard opens in a dialog with the city pair already on leg 1.
4. At desk width the wizard is a rail-stepped form. The Setup panes rail on the left, headed "Your day", lists Set up the day, one pane per leg (titled by its route once routed, "Leg 2" until then), then Aircraft & crew, Duty times and Monitoring & notes. Each row carries its state - Current, Done, Skipped or Not started. Every pane except the first stays locked, "Complete "Set up the day" first", until the day is valid.
5. On Set up the day, check the From and To fields, press Add onward leg for a multi-sector day, and set the Reporting airport and the Reporting time. The reporting time anchors the duty day; Now (Z) fills it with the current UTC minute. From template pre-fills the route from a template you saved off an earlier folder.
6. Work through the other panes if you have the facts, or skip them - each leg pane takes planned off-block, takeoff, landing and on-block times (or Estimate seeds them from your taxi allowance and cruise speed), a planned cruise level, a flight number, alternates and who flies the leg; the day panes take type, registration and crew, duty times, extra airports to brief and free-form notes.
7. Press Finish & view briefing. You land in the folder and the brief builds around your day.

How to plan from a pasted airway route

1. Start a briefing as above and open the Set up the day pane.
2. In Filed route (optional), paste the route string as filed - the field shows the shape it expects, "e.g. N0450F350 DCT BPK UL10 55N020W".
3. Finish the wizard as normal. The folder's route chain expands through the fixes, so the landing card lists every stop (the KJFK to KBNA folder above reads "10 sectors"), the route map draws the bends, and the route NOTAM sweep follows the corridor.

Reporting times more than 24 hours in the past are refused with "This reporting time is more than 24 hours in the past - set a current or future time to continue."; a time a few hours back is accepted with the note "This reporting time is in the past - fine if you are already on duty."

How to read the folder

Open a folder from any card or calendar day. The page has a header, a hero and then five zones down the page, widest data first.

The trust line grades the data behind the brief in one word: Trusted ("Current & complete"), Aging or Gaps, with the station-by-station reasons a click away. Its explainer states its limits: "A quick check of whether weather and NOTAM data is present and current for every airport on your route. It is not an operational clearance - always confirm against official sources." The Brief spine panel names every source with its fetch time, and a sealed folder adds "Sealed brief · SHA-256 verified".

How to sharpen the brief

1. Read the Sharpen your brief card. While the folder is thin it warns "Your FDP is an estimate until the flight-duty items below are complete." and counts what you have added, "1 of 6 added".
2. Click a tile to jump to that field in the wizard. Each tile names what it adds to the brief:

3. As you fill fields in, the cells on the head change from "Not set" and "Estimate" to the figures, and the FDP margin becomes a verdict. The card turns green once every item is added.

How to read route weather and NOTAMs

1. Scroll to Route weather. Each field has a card with wind, visibility, ceiling, temperature and dew point and QNH; the panel is headed with the fields it covers ("METAR · TAF · 2 fields") and Worst on route leads. Refresh weather fetches again. The foot reads "Reference only - verify officially."
2. Scroll to NOTAMs. Entries are "Ranked · closures first", one board row each, grouped by Departure, Destination, Alternate, Enroute and Turnaround, with an "In your planned window" mark on the ones whose validity overlaps your times. Show raw on a row opens the raw text; Refresh NOTAMs fetches again. "No NOTAMs returned" is a report of what the source sent, not an all-clear; the foot reads "May be incomplete - verify officially."
3. The Along the route band rolls up the corridor sweep by tier - critical first - and Open in Ops Map opens the route on the Ops Map with the NOTAM layer and corridor armed. If the corridor was not swept it says so: "No route NOTAM data - the corridor was not swept".

How to mark the brief as reviewed

1. In the working grid, find the review card. Its title is Mark this brief as reviewed and it asks you to "Confirm you have read the weather and NOTAMs for this brief."; a line beneath counts the NOTAMs you have opened.
2. Press Mark as reviewed (personal note). The card then reads "Reviewed by you at" with the UTC time.
3. If the frozen data changes afterwards, the card turns amber, titled Review again, with Mark as reviewed again.

While the trust line reads Gaps or Aging the button stays off: "Resolve the gaps and refresh, then you can mark it reviewed." The mark is a personal note, and the app says so on the button itself: "not an operational sign-off".

How to read the route map

The Route map panel in the working grid is a plan view of your route: 1:10m coastlines and borders with country names, a graticule with edge captions, a distance label laid along each leg, direction arrows, open-triangle ticks for the filed fixes with their idents where room allows, a scale bar, a north arrow, and the surrounding large and medium aerodromes drawn as ring-and-runway symbols with mono ICAO labels. Each route stop and alternate carries a bar showing its longest runway's true orientation, left out when the dataset has no heading. The caption states the limit: "Schematic route only - not for navigation." Open this route in the Ops Map hands the route to the Ops Map for the live chart.

How to save a hash-verified snapshot

1. On a Planned or Active folder, press Save brief to flight in the header. The live weather and NOTAMs are frozen into the folder as they are at that moment.
2. Open the Pre-flight notes row in the extras band to see the ledger of notes and snapshots, each with its saved time and a Verified ✓ mark.
3. On a completed folder the Route weather and NOTAMs zones show the frozen set instead of live data, and the spine reads "Sealed brief · SHA-256 verified".

The row explains the mechanism before you have used it: "Briefing not yet frozen. Saved weather and NOTAMs are sealed with an immutable SHA-256 hash when you start the flight." Every snapshot is hashed when it is written and the hash is checked every time it is displayed; a mismatch is reported as "Snapshot integrity check failed - SHA-256 mismatch" and the spine reads "Sealed brief · seal check FAILED" rather than showing the data as sound.

How to export the briefing pack

1. Open the folder's ... menu and, under Manage, press Share brief (PDF). The browser produces the pack as a PDF document.
2. To carry an Ops Map view in the pack, capture it first: open the route on the Ops Map, set the layers and time you want, and press Add map to briefing pack in its Share panel. The map needs a brief leg selected - "Select a brief flight leg first - the pack belongs to a flight."
3. Export the pack from that folder. The map page carries the "Not for navigation" badge, the basemap credit and the UTC capture stamp burned into the image itself, and it embeds only in the flight the capture was made for.

The captured map lives in memory only. Reloading the browser clears it, and the next pack simply has no map page rather than a stale one.

How to use the crew bag

1. Scroll to Crew bag in the working grid ("stored per-flight · hashed").
2. Drag files onto the dashed well - "Drop charts, plates or a roster photo here - kept on this flight, offline." - or press + Add document and pick a photo or PDF.
3. Each row shows the file name, its size, "added" with the UTC time, a short hash, and its kind, Image or Document. Click a row to open it; the bin button asks "Delete attachment?" before removing it.

Attachments you add in the browser upload with sync to the same cloud storage the iOS app uses, so they are not lost to a browser clean-up and appear on your phone. A file added on the phone lists here with the caption "Available on your iPhone or iPad" and does not open in the browser. Adding and deleting stay live on a completed folder.

How to watch this flight

1. In the folder header, press Watch this flight (it reads "Reading route..." while the legs are resolved).
2. The Watch Desk rule editor opens prefilled with the folder as a route scope - departure, destination, alternates and monitored airports with the ETA - and a TAF rule for IFR or worse in the 6 hours around your ETA.
3. Confirm the rule there. Nothing is saved on the press itself.

A folder with no legs says so in place: "This folder has no route airports yet - add legs first." The button is hidden on a completed folder.

How to manage the folder

The ... menu in the header groups the actions:

A Planned folder starts itself at your reporting time and goes Active; the lifecycle line offers Undo - back to draft if it started before you were ready. A completed folder is read-only and shows Fly again in its place. Completing the day and turning sectors into logbook entries works as in the iOS chapter, and the entries land in the Logbook.

How to use the calendar

1. Press Calendar in the toggle at the top of the landing.
2. Move between months with the arrows, or Jump to the current month. A day with a folder shows its route; a day with a duty but no folder shows a hollow marker.
3. Click a day. The panel beside the grid lists its folders ("2 flights") with a route, registration, date and status line each, reads "Duty day - no flight folder / Open the Duty hub for the figures" on a duty-only day, or "Nothing planned or flown on this day." otherwise.
4. Press Add flight on this date to open the setup wizard with that date.

On iPhone and iPad

On the phone the same folders live in the Brief tab as the Flight Brief launcher, with the paced two-step wizard, the suggestion card from your roster, snapshots from the folder's add button and the completion review that proposes one logbook entry per sector; the free tier there holds 3 folders. The browser-only pieces are the calendar over the same folders, the rail- stepped wizard, the plan-view route map, the Ops Map snapshot in the pack, drag-and-drop into the crew bag and Watch this flight. See Flights on iPhone and Brief on iPhone.

Troubleshooting

FDP MARGIN shows a dash. The cell reads "Estimate until timed" until the folder has a reporting time and an end-of-duty time. Add them from the Sharpen your brief tiles, and check a duty rule set is chosen in Settings.

The landing shows a dash where the FDP verdict should be. The duty history behind the verdicts could not be read; the band says "Duty history could not be read, so FDP legality shows a dash instead of a verdict." Press Retry.

Mark as reviewed is off. The trust line reads Aging or Gaps. The card says "Resolve the gaps and refresh, then you can mark it reviewed." - fix the missing or stale stations and press Refresh.

The pack has no map page. The Ops Map capture lives in memory and a reload clears it, and a capture embeds only in the folder whose leg was selected when it was taken. Capture again and export from that folder.

NOTAMS reads "Unavailable - source down". The NOTAM source did not answer. The folder does not guess; "No NOTAMs returned" or an unavailable source is never an all-clear. Press Refresh NOTAMs later and verify officially.

Where next

• Weather - the workbench behind the Route weather zone, and the flight-route group an active folder creates.
• NOTAMs - the full NOTAM board the folder's rows link to.
• Ops Map - the live chart the route map hands off to, and where the pack's map snapshot is captured.
• Watch - the rule editor Watch this flight opens.