Safety Through Innovation: Jeppesen Foreflight Emergency Glide Mode

June 30, 2026

One of the first emergency procedures a student pilot learns is what to do if they experience an uncommanded loss of engine power. You know the airplane is going to lose altitude, and if you cannot restore engine power, there is an unplanned landing in your future.

It’s up to the pilot to keep the aircraft at best glide speed during the descent to make the most of altitude while simultaneously running the emergency checklist, troubleshooting the issue and communicating the problem. If no airport is within gliding range, the pilot is tasked with finding a suitable landing area that will result in the most favorable outcome. The pilot can experience decision paralysis due to task oversaturation. Meanwhile, altitude and time to react are dwindling.

Jeppesen ForeFlight Emergency Glide Mode was made for situations like this, said Jeppesen ForeFlight VP of Sales Katelyn Matteson.

“Once you lose an engine, the clock starts immediately and it doesn’t stop,” said Matteson, who is a pilot and mentally briefs the loss engine power scenario when she flies her Cessna 182. “Outcome quality isn’t just about time – it’s about how well a pilot can synthesize the information available to them and make the best possible decision against that ticking clock, while simultaneously managing the aircraft, the checklist and the radio.”

Released last April, Emergency Glide Mode isolates promising airports within an aircraft’s glide range. If no airports are within range, it uses U.S. Geological Survey terrain data to identify and highlight viable flat surfaces, fields or roads.

Simplifying a Demanding Puzzle Piece

NTSB accident reports are filled with accounts of airplanes coming down in populated areas when the pilot tries to make it to an airport beyond the aircraft’s glide range. The most painful of these stories are the ones where the pilot passed up suitable open areas that would have likely been a better choice.

“Emergency Glide Mode simplifies the most cognitively demanding piece of that puzzle – ‘where do I go?’ – so pilots can direct their focus where it matters most: flying the airplane and making the call,” Matteson said, “Emergency Glide Mode is meaningful to me both professionally and personally. I recently flew solo in my Skylane over the mountains of New Hampshire and had it active the whole way, not because I was worried, but because the terrain made me think. That continuous ‘what would I do right now?’ scan is what experienced pilots do mentally, but it’s the first thing to break down under real stress. This feature makes that thinking automatic so when it actually matters, the answer is already on your screen.”

Born During a Hackathon

According to Director of Product, General Aviation at Jeppesen ForeFlight Cole Crawford, the concept of creating something that with the push of a button could put the aircraft into best glide all the way to a safe landing was on the developmental radar of Jeppesen ForeFlight for several years.

“We’ve been talking about doing this kind of thing for a long time and have had several iterations of it over the years that we’ve toyed around with internally,” Crawford said. “I actually worked on an early concept of it during my first few weeks at the company. We finally achieved escape velocity on doing it for real this time when our chief product officer built a compelling demo of it during our annual team hackathon.”

A hackathon is a collaborative, fast-paced, engineering event usually held over a short period of time – often for one day — where engineers, software developers, interface designers and others collaborate to solve a specific challenge. The goal of the event is to create a functioning piece of hardware or software to meet the challenge.

“Independently at the same hackathon, one of our excellent map and spatial engineers developed the possible landing areas’ geometries,” Crawford continued. “We knew between the two we had a great combo. After that, we committed to putting the brain power together to build it for real based on his work.”

The hackathon took place during the winter, and Emergency Glide was released to the public the next spring. The company notes Emergency Glide Mode is the evolution of Glide Advisor, which ForeFlight has had for years. According to Crawford, it has saved lives.

“We’ve had many instances of customers writing in to us that they used that tool amongst others in an emergency,” Crawford said.