Your engine just quit. You have maybe ninety seconds before you need to commit to a landing site. Where do you go? For most of aviation history, the answer to that question has depended entirely on what the pilot remembers — the airports nearby, the terrain below, the wind direction, the glide ratio of the aircraft. Pilots train for engine failures. They practise forced landings. But in a real emergency, at a real altitude, with a real engine that has genuinely stopped producing thrust, the mental workload is crushing. ForeFlight just built a tool to help. The company’s new Emergency Glide Mode, released in April 2026, identifies reachable runways and off-airport landing sites the moment an engine failure occurs — and shows the pilot exactly where they can make it.

How It Works

ForeFlight’s Glide Advisor has been around since 2017. The original feature drew a green ring on the moving map showing the pilot how far they could glide from their current position — a simple circle based on altitude, aircraft glide ratio, and wind. It was useful but passive: the pilot still had to look at the ring, find airports inside it, and make decisions. Emergency Glide Mode goes further. When activated, the system does not just show where you can reach — it actively identifies specific landing options, prioritising them by runway length, distance, and accessibility. It accounts for terrain, wind, and the aircraft’s specific glide performance to present a curated list of places where the pilot can actually put the aircraft down safely. The distinction matters. In an engine-out scenario, the pilot is simultaneously running emergency checklists, managing airspeed, looking for traffic, communicating with ATC, and fighting the adrenaline that accompanies the sudden realisation that the propeller has stopped turning. Reducing the “where do I land?” decision from an open-ended problem to a multiple-choice question saves cognitive bandwidth that the pilot needs for everything else.

The Saves

ForeFlight credits its original Glide Advisor with several real-world saves — incidents where pilots lost engine power and used the glide ring to identify and reach airports they might not have known about otherwise. The company does not publish detailed case studies, but the aviation community has documented multiple instances where the feature made the difference between a controlled landing at an airport and a forced landing in a field. Every pilot trains for engine failures. But training typically happens at predictable altitudes over familiar terrain. Real emergencies happen at unpredictable moments over unfamiliar ground. The pilot who loses an engine over mountainous terrain at dusk, far from their home airport, faces a fundamentally different problem than the pilot practising power-off approaches at their training field. Emergency Glide Mode is designed for the real scenario, not the training scenario.

The Technology Underneath

The engineering challenge is non-trivial. A useful emergency glide tool must know the aircraft’s current position, altitude, and groundspeed. It must know the aircraft’s best-glide speed and clean-configuration glide ratio. It must account for headwinds and tailwinds at the current altitude and at lower altitudes during the descent. It must have a database of every runway, airstrip, and suitable landing surface within range. And it must compute all of this in real time, on a tablet, without requiring any pilot input beyond activation. ForeFlight has the advantage of running on hardware that every pilot already carries. The iPad has become the de facto electronic flight bag in general aviation. GPS, moving maps, terrain databases, weather data, and now emergency glide calculations — all running on a device that sits on the pilot’s kneeboard or sticks to the yoke with a suction mount.

Why It Matters

Engine failures in single-engine aircraft are rare but not vanishingly so. General aviation accident statistics consistently show that loss of engine power — whether from fuel exhaustion, mechanical failure, or carburetor icing — remains a leading cause of fatal accidents. In many cases, the outcome depends not on whether the pilot can fly the aircraft (most can glide competently) but on whether they can find a suitable landing site in time. Emergency Glide Mode does not fly the aircraft. It does not restart the engine. It does not replace training, judgement, or the thousand hours of experience that separate a student pilot from a veteran. What it does is remove one variable from the most stressful moment a pilot will ever face — and give them their best options, immediately, on the screen in front of them. That is worth having.

Sources: Aviation International News, ForeFlight, Flying Magazine