GonnaLand — Beta FAQ

Closed beta · Practical setup and use · Questions we haven't answered here: hello@betterself.ai

NOT FOR NAVIGATION — FOR SITUATIONAL AWARENESS ONLY
The two-minute version: stick the phone on the windshield with the camera looking down the runway, tell the app three measurements of where it sits on your aircraft, and fly. It arms itself, picks the runway, and calls your wheel height on short final. Everything stays on your phone unless you choose to share it.

Contents

What do I need?

An iPhone or iPad running iOS 16 or later, and a suction mount. That's the whole install — no panel integration, no wiring, no box in your avionics stack, and no data connection in flight. Everything runs on the device.

Where do I mount it, and how?

On the windshield or glareshield, with the rear camera looking forward down the runway. A suction mount works well; what matters is that it holds the same position reliably.

How do I know the camera is aimed right?

The home screen is the viewfinder — it shows exactly the frame the app records. Check it on the ground before you go: line up with a runway and confirm it sits roughly centred and stays in frame as you look down it. A minute here saves a whole flight of wondering why nothing appeared.

If the runway drifts out of the top or bottom of the frame as you taxi, tilt the mount rather than hoping. The app needs to see the whole runway — all four corners — to measure where you are relative to it.

The three mount measurements

Settings → Aircraft & mount. Park level and measure to the camera lens with a tape, in inches:

These are what turn a camera measurement into your wheels. Without them the app would be telling you how high the phone is, which is not the number you care about in the flare.

Height and forward distance only need to be close — the Touchdown check on the same screen measures your real wheel offset automatically at each landing (true height is exactly zero at touchdown) and offers a correction once it has a few. The centerline measurement is different: it cannot self-calibrate, because nobody touches down exactly on the centerline, so there is no known-true value to solve against. Measure that one properly.

My aircraft isn't in the list

The picker seeds a Cessna 172, 152 and 182, a Piper PA-28, a Diamond DA40, a Cirrus SR22, and "Other / custom". These are starting points for the mount geometry and approach speed, not precise truth — pick the closest and then measure. Under Advanced you can adjust touchdown deck angle and approach speed if you know them; deck angle is not sensitive (±2° is about ±1 inch).

Should I connect my ADS-B receiver?

Yes, if it broadcasts standard GDL90 over Wi-Fi — Stratux, SkyEcho 2 and Stratus all do. Join the receiver's network and the app finds it automatically.

What it gets you is a better position source. Aviation receivers use WAAS-corrected GNSS with an antenna that has a clear view of the sky; a phone has neither, and is noticeably weaker vertically in particular. GonnaLand knows this and trusts a receiver's fixes considerably more than the phone's when both are available.

On a Wi-Fi-only iPad it is the difference between working and not working at all, because those have no GPS whatsoever. On an iPhone or a cellular iPad it is a genuine improvement rather than a necessity — most useful early, before the camera has picked up the runway, and any time the camera can't see it. Once vision has the runway on short final, the camera is doing the precise work and the GPS matters much less. We haven't yet measured how much difference a receiver makes end to end in flight.

GonnaLand is a landing aid and does not show traffic — keep using ForeFlight or whatever you already fly with for that.

Sentry and Garmin receivers are not supported. They're locked to their manufacturers' own apps. We bench-tested a Sentry: it connects, and it answers the discovery handshake, but it only ever sends an encrypted proprietary format rather than the standard GDL90 messages any other app could read. There's nothing we can do at our end about that.

What do I actually do in the cockpit?

Nothing. Open the app and fly.

Arm automatically is on by default, so the app watches for approaches on its own, picks the runway you're approaching from the FAA database, and starts and stops recording without being asked. You don't need to arm between circuits, and there's no button to find on short final. If a recording turns out not to have been an approach at all, it's discarded rather than left on your phone.

You can still take over: Start now forces a recording anywhere, and a manually started one is never auto-discarded.

What will I hear — and how do I hear it?

First the obvious but essential part: pair your headset with the phone over Bluetooth, the same way you would to listen to music. That's what puts the callouts in your ears rather than out of the phone's speaker, where you will never hear them over an engine. If your audio panel has a Bluetooth input, pairing to that works too and puts the callouts on the intercom for everyone aboard.

Then, on approach, you'll hear height callouts — five hundred, two hundred, one hundred, fifty, forty, thirty, twenty, ten — plus "guidance degraded" if the app loses confidence during an approach.

Two things worth knowing. The heights are your wheels above the runway, not the camera and not the altimeter. And callouts only arm after you've been above 500 ft AGL on the approach — so a low circuit that never climbs through 500 ft gets none, by design: it keeps taxi, takeoff and low pattern work silent.

My callouts got cut off — or didn't play at all

Almost always the headset. Most ANR headsets mute or duck auxiliary audio while the radio or intercom is live, so a callout that lands during a transmission is simply lost. The app has no way to detect this, and no way to work around it.

The fix is in the headset, not the app:

Also worth checking: the speaker icon on the app's home screen is on, the phone isn't muted or on silent, and it's actually connected to the headset rather than another Bluetooth device it found first.

What does the display mean?

The big number is wheel height above the runway. Around it: sink rate, distance to the threshold, a centerline needle, and a glide-slope diamond referenced to that runway's published glide path rather than a generic three degrees. Both needles are fly-to — centre them the way you would an ILS.

The word in the top bar is how much the app trusts itself:

It didn't record my approach

Usually one of these:

If auto-arming isn't cooperating on a flight where the data matters, turn it off in Settings and use Start now — a deliberately started recording always records.

Will my phone overheat?

A phone on a glareshield in direct sun, running the camera and neural engine, is genuinely a hard thermal case, and we'd rather tell you what happens than pretend it doesn't.

As the device warms, the app sheds work in stages instead of dying: it slows down the vision processing first, keeping the display and callouts. If it reaches the hottest stage it drops vision entirely, blanks the screen to shed heat, and tells you plainly — "device hot · display suspended, callouts continue". Video keeps recording throughout, and the callouts keep coming from the barometer and motion sensors.

Practically: give it some shade when you can, let it cool between approaches if it feels hot, and don't leave it baking on the glareshield during a long ground stop. iOS itself will take the camera away if the device gets hot enough, which no app can override.

How does it work?

The camera watches the runway. On-device computer vision finds it in each frame and works out where you are relative to it — how high, how far, and how far off the centerline. That's fused with GPS, the barometer and the phone's motion sensors, so the guidance stays sensible when the camera can't see (in the flare, for instance, when the nose comes up and the runway leaves the frame).

The runway itself comes from the FAA's national database, which is also where the published glide path comes from — so the diamond reflects the approach that runway actually has, not an assumed three degrees.

All of it runs on the phone. Nothing is sent anywhere to make it work, and it needs no connection in flight.

The reason it can be precise about your wheels is the boring part: the measurements you enter. The camera measures the camera; the geometry does the rest.

Is this certified? Can I use it to descend?

No, and no. These are the terms you accepted at first launch, and they are not softened here:

It is a training and situational-awareness aid. The most useful thing it does is help you notice a destabilized approach earlier — and then you fly the aeroplane.

What gets recorded, and where does it stay?

Each approach is recorded to your device: the camera video and a sensor log. It stays there. Nothing leaves your phone unless you separately opt in to sharing.

Recordings are large — roughly half a gigabyte per approach — so the app deletes them from the device 7 days after the flight to keep your storage sane. You can turn that off in Settings → Recordings, and anything still waiting to upload is kept until it finishes. Nothing under 24 hours old is ever deleted automatically.

You can play any recording back with the full display alive — video, needles and callouts in sync — which is the point: it makes the approach reviewable on the ground, with a student or an instructor looking at the same picture.

Why would I share my approaches — and what does it actually do?

This is the part where you can genuinely make the app better, so it's worth being concrete about it.

GonnaLand recognises runways because it was trained to. Every shared approach becomes training and evaluation data for that recognition — and the thing that limits it today is not cleverness, it's variety. Runways we've never seen. Lighting we've never flown in. Aircraft we don't own, mounted in positions we didn't think of. Grass strips, displaced thresholds, faded paint, low sun, haze.

What that buys, specifically: the runway is found earlier on final, it's found more reliably at airports nobody on our team has ever landed at, and the guidance holds together in conditions our own flying never produced. Every approach you share is one more place the app will work for a student who isn't you.

We started this because landing well is the hardest thing we teach and the least instrumented. If you want it to be good for the next student in the left seat, sharing approaches is the single most useful thing you can do — more than any bug report.

It's off by default, entirely optional, and you can stop at any time.

What exactly leaves my device — and what never does?

When sharing is on:

What never leaves:

The app never uses the microphone.

Do I need an account?

Only to share. The app is completely usable without one — the display, the callouts, the recordings and the replay all work signed out.

Sharing needs an account so that shared approaches have a stable owner and so we can reach you if one of them raises a question. Sign in with Apple or Google; if you use Apple's Hide My Email, that's fine and we'll never see your real address.

How do I stop sharing, or delete my account?

Settings → Share approaches. Turning sharing off stops uploads immediately. Deleting your account removes the account, your name and your email, and turns sharing off.

One asymmetry we'd rather state plainly than bury: approaches you already shared stay in the training dataset, carrying only the anonymous identifier, with nothing connecting them to you once the account is gone. If you want those removed too, email us before deleting your account — afterwards we genuinely can't tell which recordings were yours.

What doesn't work yet?

It's a closed beta, and this is where it stands:

How do I report a problem or send feedback?

Email hello@betterself.ai — we read everything, and in a beta this small you'll get a real answer.

The most useful thing you can include is which approach: the airport, the runway, and roughly when. If sharing is on and the recording uploaded, that lets us replay exactly what you saw, frame for frame, and see the problem rather than imagine it. "The callouts sounded late at KXYZ on Tuesday afternoon" is worth more than a page of description.

GonnaLand is an advisory training aid, not certified equipment. See the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Betterself.ai LLC · hello@betterself.ai