Wombat Status Update #1

Wow!  The response to our Wombat announcement has been amazing.  Over the course of the week at AirVenture 2015, we talked with hundreds of pilots and aircraft owners.  Many of them had, shall we say, strong feelings about the pain points of performing NavData updates and collecting flight logs today.  With Wombat, these pain points are eliminated by allowing you to perform these tasks using only your iPad or iPhone, without leaving the cockpit.

Here's a quick update on our progress:

At Oshkosh we had a chance to meet with our existing and potential partners, including app developers, navigation data providers, avionics manufacturers, and fleet operators.  We'll share more information on these partnerships in the coming weeks and months.  Our shared vision is to improve the pilot experience by reducing the current pain points associated with getting data in and out of existing installed avionics.

On the hardware side, we're working with our factory to finalize the enclosure design, artwork, and packaging. We've already gone through one round of physical samples, and the next iteration should be extremely close to the final production versions.  The production electronics are being tested this week, and so far no critical issues have been found.

We're making good progress on the development of the Wombat app, which will be a free download from the App Store.  This companion app allows you to transfer files to and from the Wombat device and provides connectivity with websites that use or supply these files.  At launch, the app will support uploading flight and engine logs to sites such as CloudAhoy, SavvyAnalysis, and CirrusReports.  The app will also support downloading NavData updates from avionics manufacturers that provide web-based downloads.

We're putting the final touches on the Wombat SDK documentation, which several of our partners are using to add native Wombat support into their own apps.  This will allow you to export flight plans, collect/analyze flight logs, or perform NavData updates -- all without leaving their app! 

We're on track to have production inventory in late September, but if you're interested in being a Wombat beta tester, please drop a note to support@bad-elf.com and we'll be in touch.

If you're reading this on our website or via an email forwarded from a friend, you can sign up for the Wombat mailing list to receive future updates on the Wombat project.