While Matt Guthmiller is well-known in general aviation for his around-the-world-flight at just 19, his popular YouTube channel, and now his starring role in the Disney Plus series, “The Worst Trip Around the World,” he’s been quietly building his own flight planning app, 8Flight.
In fact, during the filming of the Disney series, he spent his downtime refining the app, which he launched about two years ago.
While it started out as a database of airport restaurants and FBO information, over the years he’s added full Electronic Flight Bag functionality to the app.
By the end of 2025, the app was positioned to compete head to head with the “big ones,” including ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot, according to Matt.
“I was getting fed up with some of the other options, wishing it did this or that,” he says. “My background’s in software engineering. I went to MIT, studied electrical engineering and computer science, so I just decided to build it myself.”
He adds it’s an EFB designed for 2025, not 2010 with some evolution to 2025.
He explains he and his colleagues approached it this way: “If you were going to build an EFB today, how would you do it? How would you make all this stuff much easier and faster? And so it’s just a faster, smarter way to plan a flight.”
Over the past 18 months they’ve added to the app so it now features everything from real-time weather via Starlink to charts, fuel prices, live airport intelligence, and more.
Matt adds that all the information a pilot needs is available at “just one glance.”
“You can see all of the details instead of toggling 10 different layers of ceiling, visibility, winds, whatever — it’s just all there at once. And then it puts it on a map in ways that take 10 seconds to figure out what’s going on instead of several minutes or hours of planning.”
Some of the features of the app include:
- A real-time AI weather layer with AWOS, FAA weather cameras, and more
- Seven-day hourly forecasts on the map
- Real-time radar and satellite
- AIRMETs/SIGMETs
- High resolution geo-referenced charts
- Real-time fuel prices, FBO fees, and hours
- Information on restaurants, hotels, museums, fly-ins updated daily
- Offline/inflight flight planning.
The app now has thousands of users, with Matt noting that the only negative feedback he’s ever gotten is that the app doesn’t do everything the market leaders do.
“But not only does it now do everything those do, everything’s a little bit better, a little bit easier, a little bit faster,” he says.
And that’s just the beginning. He and his colleagues have a plan in place to continuously add functionality to the app.
“It’s at this launching point where now we’ve filled in the gaps. It’s a one-for-one replacement with everything else, and now we get to start working on the really cool new things that I think nobody has ever thought of before.”
For instance, he just introduced 20X higher resolution icing, turbulence, and clouds forecast “just in time for winter flying,” he says.
He points out that in 18 months they built everything the other guys built over 18 years.
“So imagine what the next 18 months are going to look like,” he says. “It’s a very exciting time.”
8Flight offers a free 30-day trial, then subscriptions start at $4.99 a month. The app supports iPhones, iPads, and Macs. As of now there are no plans to create an Android version.
For more information: EightFlight.com
Until you are able to incorporate ADS-B weather and traffic it’s not happening, but you know that.
Bells and whistles.
The pricing must have changed since the article was written .. I see a full featured version for $99/yr. Other versions with no charts can be had for $59.99/yr or $5.99/mo
Matt says he hasn’t gotten much negative feedback . . . How about a VFR version with charts and a few less bagels and whistles for a lot less?
Or go to AVAREX for free or a donation ..
“and a few less bagels ” I like bagels – pls keep them…whistles not so much.
I am excited to try this new EFB platform.