On-device Flight Reports and PDF sharing

The Flight Report is an on-device post-flight summary generated from a .telem file — a scrollable HTML document with the headlines, the chart, the timeline, and the advisories, right on your phone before you’ve packed up the car. Share it out as a paginated PDF and you have something you can hand to a teammate or email to yourself for the log.

Three ways to open a report

The app gives you three paths into the report, depending on where your .telem file lives.

From a live or recorded tracker. On the Map or Recover tab, long-press a tracker and choose Flight Report. This is the typical field workflow: the flight just landed, the file has been written, and you want the summary.
From Quick Look in Files. Open the Files app, tap a .telem file for its Quick Look preview (see working with telem files on iPhone for what that preview shows), then Share → Open with AltosUI. This path generates the report without importing the file or touching your tracker list.
From Open With in Files. In the Files app, long-press a .telem file and choose Open with AltosUI. Same result as the Share path; use whichever gesture fits your hands.

What the report covers

The report is a scrollable HTML document, organized top to bottom the way you’d actually read it after a flight.

Flight information — date, serial, callsign, device type.
Headline performance — max height, max speed with Mach number, max acceleration with G.
GPS and drift — where it went and how far from the pad.
Altitude profile chart — inline SVG with phase-transition markers on the curve.
Flight timeline — the state machine from pad through landed, with timestamps.
Motor performance — burn time, peak and average acceleration, burnout speed and altitude.
Aerodynamic deceleration — what the rocket did on the way up once the motor quit.
Apogee details — the transition itself and the numbers around it.
Stability metrics — for IMU-equipped devices only (TeleMega).
Recovery system performance — drogue and main deployments, descent rates.
Signal-quality breakdown — how the radio link held up.
Observations and recommendations — rule-based notes generated from the data.

When a value isn’t available — for instance stability data on a non-IMU device — the report says why rather than showing an unexplained dash. That’s a deliberate choice: you should never have to guess whether a blank field is a missing feature or a missing measurement.

Banners and warnings

Every report carries an Experimental Flight Report (Beta) banner at the top. That’s the real label — the feature is feature-complete but still collecting real-world feedback before it graduates out of Experimental.

Two situation-specific warnings show up when the data calls for them. A Signal Loss warning appears when the radio link cut out before landing and the flight is truncated — the numbers are still useful, but “max altitude” means “max altitude observed” rather than apogee. A High-Altitude warning appears above roughly 30 km because the barometric sensor ceiling has been exceeded; above that point the baro-derived values are no longer reliable.

Sharing as PDF

Tap Share and the report exports as a paginated PDF with proper page breaks — not a screenshot, not a single endless column. Attach it to a flight log, email it to a teammate, or archive it with the rest of your records for that airframe.

iOS is Tier 1. There are two more tiers.

The iOS Flight Report is deliberately scoped to what’s useful at the launch site on a phone. It’s Tier 1 in a three-tier analysis progression, and it’s worth knowing what the other two look like so you know when to reach for them.

Tier 1 — iOS Flight Report. Generated from the .telem radio capture, right on the device, no laptop needed.
Tier 2 — AltosUI desktop reading the same .telem file. Zoomable multi-channel plots, thrust curves, GPS track maps, and CSV or KML export. Same input data as Tier 1, more analytical depth.
Tier 3 — AltosUI desktop reading the .eeprom file. The lossless onboard log pulled over USB from the recovered flight computer — the authoritative record for records submissions and serious motor-performance work.

The iOS analyzer was audited against the desktop’s algorithms, so Tier 1 numbers are consistent with Tier 2 — not identical, because the input data differs, but in the same ballpark and drawing the same conclusions. If you need the deeper analysis, the tier above is always available on the desktop side. The iPhone app doesn’t do .eeprom download or CSV/KML export — those are desktop workflows.

Why this is Experimental

The Flight Report is one of three features waiting on field validation. We want to know which numbers you look at first, whether the advisory wording is useful or just noise, and whether any fields are showing “unavailable” when you expected a value. See Help us ship these features out of Experimental.