Open-source VFR moving map, flight recording, and AI debrief for iPad. Three color modes for the cockpit you actually fly in — paper-day for sunlight, dusk for the descent into the airport, true 635 nm red to keep your night vision intact.
Every other EFB ships light and dark. We ship paper-day for direct sunlight, dark-dusk for evening flight, and a true red-night mode that protects your dark-adapted eyes. Auto-switching by ambient light, civil twilight, and GPS position — with manual override that never gets overridden.
Cockpit sunlight at altitude can exceed 100 000 lux. AMOLED dark mode loses there — the iPad's glass reflects more than it emits. Paper-day inverts the contrast model: warm sectional paper, black ink, magenta airspace continuity. Designed to win at 1 000 nits.
What most apps call dark mode. We use it for the dusk-to-evening window: civil twilight, hangar, dim cabin. True black on AMOLED for power and contrast, warm-white text that matches paper-day's ink color so your eye never has to recalibrate.
True red phosphor at 635 to 660 nm. The blue channel of every visible pixel is clamped to 0x08 or lower — enforced in the SwiftUI color layer, not optional. No motion on critical readouts. No gradients. No glows. Your cones stay shut down so you can see outside the airplane.
A cockpit at altitude is one of the brightest environments your eyes ever inhabit. Direct sun through a clear canopy can deliver more than 100 000 lux at the iPad's glass. Your screen, fighting back at roughly 1 000 nits, becomes more reflective than emissive — and that's the moment AMOLED dark mode quietly betrays you. White text on black turns into a mirror you can barely read.
The traditional EFB answer is to crank the brightness and squint. The right answer is to flip the contrast model. High-contrast warm paper with black ink outperforms dark mode under direct sun by a margin that's not subtle. So paper-day isn't a theme choice. It's the only mode that solves the actual problem.
The other end is harder. Night VFR depends on dark adaptation, and dark adaptation depends on starving your cones — particularly the blue-sensitive ones. Cockpit instrument backlighting has used red phosphor at 635 to 660 nanometers for half a century for exactly this reason. Our red-night mode honors that physics: a hard cap on the blue channel of every visible pixel, no animations, no glows, no gradients. The mode is an invariant, not a theme.
And in between, the dusk window — that hour when your eyes are halfway adapted, the cabin is darker than the sky, and a traditional bright-white EFB blinds you for the descent. That's what dark-dusk is for. Three modes because the cockpit has three lighting problems, and pretending it has two is how every other EFB ends up with pilots manually dimming the iPad to 5% at 1 AM.
Designed by Intactile DESIGN and Airbus for the actual problem: arm's-length legibility on aircraft displays under vibration and glare. Distinct slashed zero, unambiguous 1/I/l, wide aperture, true tabular numerics. SIL OFL licensed, ships with the app. Every other EFB uses Helvetica, Univers, or the system font. We don't.
The sectional chart's magenta is our brand color in every mode — visual continuity from chart to chrome. Class B cyan is preserved in paper-day and dark-dusk per FAA convention. In red-night, everything re-maps to red because dark adaptation overrides convention.
ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot, FltPlan Go — every category leader is closed source, subscription-locked, and built for the enterprise dispatch buyer first, the pilot second. OpenEFB is for the pilot first. MPL-2.0, contributions welcome, no telemetry, no upsell, no premium tier hiding the actually-useful features.
The aviation community already builds the data. NOAA publishes the weather. The FAA publishes the charts and the airport database. SkyVector parses them. The only thing missing has been an EFB the community actually owns.
We're not trying to dethrone ForeFlight. We're trying to give every pilot who wants one a tool that respects their flight, their eyes, their cockpit, and their wallet.