Replay a flight on the detailed map
The detailed map replays a tracked flight over airspace and your choice of basemap. Pro adds model wind, cloud and hazard layers, a weather cross-section and radar.
The detailed map is a full-screen view of one tracked flight. You can replay it, change the basemap, show airspace and navaids, and annotate the map. The weather layers, the weather cross-section and radar are Pro features. The track, basemaps and airspace work on every plan.
You need a flight track to use it. If your entry has none, see See the flight track on an entry.
Open it
- Open a logbook entry that has a flight track.
- In the Flight track section, choose Expand in the corner of the map.
The top bar shows Detailed map and the aircraft registration. Back returns you to the entry.
Replay the flight
The replay dock sits along the bottom:
- Play replay runs the whole flight in about 30 seconds and loops. Pause replay stops it.
- Jump to start, Previous track point and Next track point step through the flight.
- Drag along the speed and altitude graph to go to any moment. The time readout is in UTC.
Layers
Open Layers on the left. Each layer has an opacity slider and a label saying what kind of data it is: model, observed, crowd-sourced, reference or computed.
Table: Layer groups
| Group | Layers | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Weather | Wind aloft, Cloud, Hazards, Radar | Pro |
| Aeronautical | Airspace, Navaids, Aerodrome labels, Route | All plans |
| Display | Flown track (altitude legend), Basemap, Day / Night, 3D track | All plans |
Basemap offers Dark, Light, Satellite and VFR. VFR is the openAIP chart over a muted base map.
Airspace comes from openAIP, which is crowd-sourced. It is there for situational awareness only, not operational navigation. Check the official charts for anything that matters.
Weather layers (Pro)
The weather layers replay conditions along your flight's timeline:
- Wind aloft shows wind at levels around the route.
- Cloud shows cloud cover. Its source can be model or satellite. Satellite is the latest infrared image, not an image from the time of your flight, and is labelled as observed.
- Hazards shows modelled airframe icing and turbulence.
- Radar shows radar frames captured during the flight, when there are any (see below).
The footer of the Layers panel reminds you: Weather is model data · radar is observed. Wind, cloud and hazards come from a weather model (Open-Meteo), not from observations along your route, so read them as an estimate of what you probably flew through.
The model weather service keeps about the last seven days. For flights older than that, the weather layers and the Conditions tab will usually be empty: No model weather for this flight.
Cross-section in the replay dock opens a vertical slice of the weather along your route: your flight path, the freezing level, cloud, turbulence and icing.
The Flight EFB panel
The panel on the right has four tabs:
- Flight: the route, live altitude, speed and heading at the replay cursor, the aircraft, and a flight plan summary.
- Conditions (Pro): wind aloft, cloud cover at high, mid and low levels, freezing level and hazards.
- Airspace: the airspace around your track, from openAIP.
- Tools: Annotate map lets you draw markers, lines, areas, pen strokes and text on the map. Your annotations stay on the map and are read-only when you're not drawing.
The departure and arrival METARs appear as markers at each end of the track. See Weather for a logged flight.
Radar (Pro)
Radar images are not fetched after the fact. Pilot Lab captures radar frames around the aircraft every few minutes while the flight is happening. That only happens for a planned flight with tracking armed that Pilot Lab sees get airborne. The frames are attached to the entry when the flight lands.
So flights you logged by hand, imported or filled from Suggested flights afterwards have no radar, and the Radar layer shows no data. Most flights will be in this state.
On the free plan
The Weather group is hidden and there is no Cross-section button. The Conditions tab shows Detailed weather-replay map with a Pro badge and a short description. The flight track, basemaps, airspace, navaids and annotation tools all work as normal.