Softwareentwicklung Heinz Lüdert

How did "PreFlight" develop?

The development of "PreFlight" started at the end of the 80's. During my PPL A training at the "Frankfurter Verein für Luftfahrt" (Frankfurt association for aviation) I noticed, that there is always a larger expenditure of time required to prepare a flight carefully. And as I was already busy with developing software at that time, it suggests itself, to let the computer deal with the many steps of preparing a flight. Thus, soon thereafter, a first version of "PreFlight" was running under the DOS operating system. That "PreFlight" version was already able to calculate the substantial points of a flight planning like courses, flying times, bearings and wind correction angles. Thereby, to prepare a flight towards the end of my flight training, I had only to define the flight route.
Meanwhile graphical user interfaces of the Windows and Macintosh operating systems spread and because for a software developer it's always important to become familiar with new technologies, at the beginning of the 90's "PreFlight 1.0" was also running on Windows and Macintosh.
In the next years, the software was adapted to the personal and practical requirements from time to time. In the year 1993 I introduced my software to the "FliegerMagazin" magazine. After a quite positive test report titled "Komfortable Flugplanung" (comfortable flight planning) appeared in issue 6/1994 (page 36-37) of that magazine, the commercial selling of "PreFlight" began.
Heinz Lüdert
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