AeroCheck 4.2.0 - Live Activities, One Aircraft per Tail & a Faster Cockpit

AeroCheck 4.2.0 puts your flight on the Lock Screen with Live Activities and new widgets, gives every tail number its own aircraft, and delivers the deepest performance and accessibility pass since the 4.0 redesign — the app now redraws only what actually changed, launches reliably on poor connections, and scales its text to your eyes.

New Features

Your Flight on the Lock Screen

• Live Activities: an active flight now shows on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island — current phase, a live elapsed-time clock, your next waypoint, and circuit counters (T&G / FS). Updates ride the flight's own events, so it sips battery. Tap it to jump straight back into the cockpit.
• Lock Screen widgets: new circular and rectangular widgets start a flight without unlocking into the app.
• Tinted Home Screen support: the widgets now render properly in iOS 18's tinted and StandBy modes.

One Aircraft per Tail Number

• Every registration is now its own aircraft: fleets with multiple tails of the same type (like the DR400s HB-KFO and HB-KFP) appear — and are selected, tracked and logged — individually. 16 tails across three flying clubs.

Smarter Data Guidance

• Airspace with no data now says so: enabling the airspace layer before downloading data shows a clear notice — in the map's Layers panel and in Settings — with a one-tap route to the download screen.
• Data & Storage now links directly to region management in Navigation & Maps, so adding or removing countries is one tap away.

Improvements

• A faster, more battery-friendly cockpit: screens now re-render only when something they show actually changes — a recorded GPS point no longer redraws the whole app. The in-flight clock, map annotations and airspace/navaid/obstacle queries were all reworked for a smoother map at scale.
• Lighter in-flight recording: crash-recovery data is now written incrementally instead of re-saving the whole track every 30 seconds — the safety guarantee is unchanged, the work shrinks from megabytes to kilobytes on long flights.
• Text that scales to your eyes: Dynamic Type now works across the ground-use screens — flight planning, Flight Log, Home, Settings, onboarding and the paywall. Cockpit HUD instruments intentionally keep their fixed, glanceable sizing, and share cards stay pixel-perfect.
• Accessibility: larger touch targets on the navigation bar (gloves welcome), VoiceOver labels on the map controls, Reduce Motion respected across the map, Companion mode and the flight-plan builder, and grouped VoiceOver reading on the paywall.
• Apple Watch efficiency: live flight updates now stream only when a watch is actually paired — and start automatically if you pair mid-flight.
• Honest trial wording: the paywall's free-trial text now reflects the actual trial length from the App Store.

Bug Fixes

• Reliable launch on poor connections: the app could be killed at startup when iCloud-stored settings or flight plans weren't yet downloaded on a slow network — launch no longer waits on iCloud, and the data catches up in the background.
• Map layers stay visible: airspace and other overlays no longer vanish after switching chart layers, and now appear on the first opening of the navigation view without needing a pan or zoom.
• Renaming a flight plan no longer duplicates it on the next launch.
• Flight plan editing during flight no longer rewrites every plan on each waypoint passage.
• Plus broader stability, dead-code cleanup and documentation polish across the app and API.

Compatibility

• Requires iOS/iPadOS 17.0 or later. Live Activities appear on the Lock Screen on all supported devices, and in the Dynamic Island on iPhone 14 Pro and later. Companion mode and shared GPS require iOS 26 on both devices.

Full Changelog: 4.1.0...4.2.0