Study Airlines: Focus Flights

Study Airlines turns a study session into a flight.

You check in at the gate: pick a departure and a destination from 350 real airports, enter the subject you are working on, and choose how long the session should be. Then a seat, a boarding pass with flight number, gate and barcode, and boarding.

From take-off the map fills the screen. It flies the actual great circle between the two airports on Apple Maps, heading up, with the camera low over the terrain, so the country underneath you keeps moving. Altitude, ground speed, distance flown and estimated arrival run alongside it. You can pull the camera off the aircraft and look around, or switch to the route view and see the whole leg at once.

A cabin crew flies with you. Seventeen recorded announcements per language carry the flight: the welcome, the captain after take-off, the seatbelt sign, the service round, turbulence, descent, touchdown. The engines are not a looped audio file. They are synthesised on the device, and level and filter follow the phase of flight: loud and bright on the climb, quiet and dull at cruise. The sound mixes with whatever you are already listening to instead of cutting it off.

The flight continues when you put the phone down. On the lock screen and in the Dynamic Island a Live Activity shows the flight number, the route and the time remaining, and the timer runs on timestamps, so the aircraft lands at the right moment whatever else you are doing. When you land, a notification says so. The engine sound plays while the app is open and picks up again when you come back to it.

Your session is not private. Every flight is posted anonymously to a public departures board, and the board is in the app: it opens from the cockpit header before departure and from the arrival screen after landing. It is a live departures board: every flight on it with callsign, route, phase of flight and time remaining. No name, no account, no subject. During your own flight the board stays closed, because the flight is the point.

On arrival the flight is stamped: destination, minutes studied, distance flown. Book the return leg and the study time doubles.

Study Airlines is fully translated into English, German, Turkish and Arabic, including right to left layout. There are no accounts, no sign-up and no personal data. It works offline: without a connection the built in globe takes over from Apple Maps, and the announcements, the timer and the flight itself run unchanged from the device.

Discovery signals