Most of Pilot EFB shows you data. Learn & Reference is the part that teaches you to read it. It is one quiet hub holding three kinds of content: narrative guides (the app's name for its reference articles - decoding weather, reading NOTAMs, descent geometry and so on), a shelf of quick-reference lookups you can read in seconds, and the Tutorial & how-tos hub that walks the app itself, feature by feature. All of it ships inside the app, works offline, and is free.
Where it lives
Learn does not sit in the bottom tab bar - it is a destination you jump to. The doorways: Settings carries a Learn & Reference row in its Help & about group (and the Help & onboarding screen inside it links both the hub and the tutorial); the Tools tab carries a Learn & Reference tile in its Reference & learn section; and Home's Make it yours checklist offers "Take the tour", which lands on the tutorial. Wherever you enter from, the back button returns you there.
The hub is a tile grid in three bands - Tutorials, Guides, Quick reference - with a search box above them that matches titles, subtitles and hidden keywords. Type "notam" and both the Reading NOTAMs guide and the NOTAM Q-codes lookup surface; type "morse" and the ident decoder does.
The guides
Seven narrative articles, each a plain-English read on something pilots decode or compute every working day:
- Decoding weather - METAR and TAF groups, cloud codes, flight rules.
- Reading NOTAMs - the structure of a notice and its Q-codes.
- Descent & approach - the 3:1 rule, ROD, VDP and cold-temperature geometry the descent calculators compute.
- Holding patterns - entry sectors, wind correction, timing.
- Reading weather charts - satellite, pressure, SIGMET, radar and meteogram charts.
- Filling a logbook - paper columns, times, EASA and FAA conventions.
- FTL rules - the same free guide the Duty tab opens; the Duty & FTL chapter covers it.
Open one and it reads like an article, not a manual: a hero card sizes it up ("9 topics · 11 min read"), an In this guide contents card jumps to any topic or expands them all, and each topic is a collapsible card of short explanations, tables and worked examples.
Two habits make the guides trustworthy rather than just readable. First, worked examples: a real-shaped raw report sits beside its plain-English reading, so you practise on the format you will actually meet. Second, source chips: topics carry the convention's origin on the card - ICAO Annex 3, WMO No. 306 and so on - so a guide never asks you to take a code's meaning on faith.
One deliberate absence: the "Using Flight Brief" guide is not on this shelf - it lives in the Brief tab itself, behind the info button in the Brief header, where the confusion it answers actually happens. The Brief chapter covers it.
Quick reference
Eight lookup screens for the things you know but want to check: Phonetic (NATO alphabet), Squawk codes, Compass rose (reciprocal headings), Morse code (a VOR/NDB ident decoder), Light-gun signals, SID / STAR, Wake turbulence and NOTAM Q-codes. Each is a single screen built to be read at a glance, from bundled data, offline.
The lookups are as honest as the guides. Squawk codes, for example, groups its codes by severity and labels each one's jurisdiction - ICAO, SERA, US - because the same four digits do not mean the same thing everywhere, and the screen says so up front, verbatim: "Reference only - verify current regional codes via official AIP."
Tutorial & how-tos
The Tutorials band's one tile, How to use Pilot EFB, opens the app's own manual: one how-to per feature area, split into the five Core modules (Home dashboard, Weather briefing, Duty and FTL, Logbook, Tools) covered in depth, and Everything else covered briefly. The header counts your progress through the core five, opened entries keep a viewed tick, and the search box filters the lot. You will also meet this hub from Settings > Help & onboarding - it is the same screen.
Every how-to follows the same honest shape: a plain-English "what this is" intro, a Where to find it line naming the real doorway, and numbered steps that use the actual labels on the actual screens. A Take me there button deep-links straight to the feature - and where the destination needs something real (an airport page needs an airport), it lands you on the search instead and says what to do next, rather than inventing an example for you.
The deep how-tos embed live demos - real, working components fed sandboxed sample data, never screenshots. The weather how-to decodes a sample METAR in front of you; the tools how-to hands you a converter to try. Each demo sits in a frame with a badge that refuses to let it pass for the real thing: "Sample data - not a real briefing." And where a how-to teaches an operationally critical module, the article ends with that module's verbatim disclaimer footer, exactly as the module itself shows it.
Alongside the how-tos, Settings > Help & onboarding also offers replayable guided tours that spotlight the real screens - the Settings, Backup & Sync chapter covers the Help & about folder that hub lives in.
Free, offline, everywhere
Nothing in Learn is gated: every guide, lookup and how-to is part of the free app, and because the content is bundled, all of it reads the same in the cruise with the wifi off as it does at home. The web edition carries the same Learn library, reached through its Settings.
Where next
- Tools - the calculators the descent and holding guides explain.
- Weather - the live decoding the weather guide teaches you to read.
- NOTAMs - the notice board behind the NOTAM guide and Q-code lookup.
- Community - the feature board whose doorway is a tutorial entry.
- Quick start - the first-run path the tutorial picks up from.