Fly Virga

With Virga Every day is Groundhog Day! let me explain Let’s say I flew a week ago and used Virga, but today I’m going to go fly and so I open up the app and it still has the date being from last week. So I hit the little propeller icon that is supposed to update to today’s date. But it never works So I end up deleting the app, going to the App Store and reloading it. This is the only way I can get it to work on today’s date. I told them about this four months ago, but nothing has been done. Why is this so hard? If you would fix this glitch then I would give it a four star rating. There is really no good instructional video on how to operate the application. I guess the developer just thought we would figure it out. If you fix this, then I would give me a five star rating.

As another user noted, you have to provide a tail number during signup. I belong to a flight club and fly one of dozens of planes for any given flight. If the other user is right that you can’t reuse a tail number then I guess I “own” the tail number for one of my club’s planes. Honestly, the signup process almost was enough to turn me off the app. Just use apple login. Make signup frictionless. Once you get into the app, you automatically have requests to follow two people. Who are these people? Why do I have a request to follow them? Why am I following people in a PIREP app at all? It’s totally unclear and a little bit unsettling when you first get into the app. Then you figure out it’s the founders of the app. Remember Tom from MySpace? Once you get all of that settled, the app looks promising. I setup a geofence for the area I normally fly in. The next problem I run into is seemingly useless pireps. For example: BFL UA /OV GMN /TM 1610 /FL 085/TP BE35 …ok? Great, some dude’s flying at 8500… is this supposed to help me see and avoid him? There’s no weather data. So, I’m getting notifications with useless pireps. Granted that was just a couple pireps, but why give people the option to share useless reports? Next problem is the filtering. The 172s/182s I fly don’t hang out in the FLs. So, there’s a filter for altitude. Great! But it seems limited to in flight use. For example if I select “all” I see pireps at 6, 20, 370, 8, 330, 390, etc. All I care about is below 150 (15,000’). So I can’t filter for anything below 150, which would be useful pre takeoff. I can filter for +\- “altitude”… I guess that means my current altitude? Next problem is that I appear to be getting multiple alerts for the same report in slightly different formats. For example right now there’s a pirep into KAPC from a PC12. Two of them are from 27m ago (Napa) and two are from 25m ago (San Francisco). They’re all a PC12 reporting tops at 600’. I wonder if this is some kind of feedback loop from the national pireps system and this app? Who knows. I guess it’s possible there are 4 pc12s all going into KAPC in formation all making the same report. So, conclusion: should you get the app? Heck yeah, it’s a great idea. Just be prepared for an incomplete and possibly noisy experience (notifications). Also, be ready to steal someone else’s tail number if you don’t own your own plane… or if one of us stole your tail number. Hopefully this stuff gets worked out. Btw just got my first pireps with photos. This is gold!!

Virga changes the game for PIREPs! A picture really is worth a thousand words when it comes to PIREPs. My wife also downloaded it and gets push notifications for all my PIREPs so she can follow along on my flights from home. Well worth the subscription.