Flytimizer by Windrone

No-fly zones under the local rules are always avoided. Untick the sites below you don't need to avoid.

The drone picked above loads its speeds and wind resistance rating, or enter your own — editing a value switches the picker to "Custom". A payload as heavy as the drone itself halves that leg's speed. Battery energy, rated flight time and weight drive the battery estimate; lower battery health for older packs.

26 Oct 2026

• Wind stretch by stretch: every ~30 m of the route gets its own wind — the forecast at the nearest of up to 5 places along a long route, the building effect at that spot, and the stretch's own heading on a detour — for the times and battery.
• Takeoff and landing wind: the wind 10–30 m up at the start and the destination, among the buildings there (funnelled or sheltered), with a warning when its gusts may be too much for the drone.
• Every plan is a waypoint mission: plans now stay at the mission speed (Normal mode) or slower, never Sport mode, so every plan can be downloaded as a DJI flight plan and flown as it is. A leg too windy for the mission speed shows as not safe.

25 Oct 2026

• Buildings slow the wind (beta): along a route through a built-up area, the wind at each height is scaled by how much the buildings around it shelter it, for the flight times and battery. The gust and crosswind checks still use the forecast. It can be switched off in the drone settings.

21 Oct 2026

• Easier start: pick the mission and drone at the top, tap the start and the destination, and the route is worked out right away. The Calculate button now stays on screen.
• The Fewer people tab is always shown for a route: when there's no worthwhile way round, it says why (hardly anyone under the route, no detour saves enough, not flyable, no data).
• 12 more drones: DJI Mini 3, Mini 4K, Mini 5 Pro, Air 3S, Mavic 4 Pro, Flip and Avata 2; Autel EVO Nano+ and EVO II Pro V3; Parrot ANAFI Ai, Potensic Atom 2 and Skydio X10.
• Changed something while it's calculating? Press Calculate again: it starts afresh. Start over stops it too.
• The start and destination are now a green A and a red B on the map, each labelled, so a shared route is easy to read.

20 Oct 2026

• Add to home screen: a button at the top installs Flytimizer like an app (Android, Chrome and Edge); on iPhone and iPad it shows the two taps to do it from Safari.
• Payload in kg: enter what the drone carries and the app works out how much heavier it is. It warns over a published max takeoff weight (Matrice 300 RTK: 9 kg) and when a sub-250 g drone goes over 250 g.
• More realistic battery: each drone is calibrated at the speed its maker measured the flight time at, and flight times not measured from real logs are cut by 15% (makers measure them in a lab, down to 0%).
• Cleaner result: the heights, battery, downloads, warnings and forecast up front; the wind table, side view, rules, buildings and people under Details. Longer explanations open on a click.

19 Oct 2026

• People under the route: roughly how many people live within 50 m either side of it, and how crowded its busiest stretch is, from the EU's population grid.
• Three plans: Fastest, Least battery and, when a modest detour passes over far fewer people, Fewer people (dashed purple line) — each with its own heights, battery, side view and DJI flight-plan downloads, named after the plan.
• Two speeds per drone: the mission speed (Normal mode — the most a waypoint mission flies, from each drone's specs), used by the plans and the downloads, and the top speed (Sport). Flight times are now for the speed a mission really flies.
• The plans pick the speed too: into a headwind, Fastest may fly a leg at Sport speed by hand; Least battery may fly a leg slower, or into a strong headwind at Sport speed, when that saves at least 1% of a battery.
• Too windy for the mission speed? Instead of “no safe height”, the plan flies that leg in Sport mode by hand, with a note that a mission can't fly it.
• Restricted areas settings: schools, hospitals, playgrounds and other sites that aren't no-fly zones in themselves can be switched off. No-fly sites under the local rules are always avoided.
• Conditions here button: for the start point or your location, the predicted number of navigation satellites overhead, the Kp index (GPS space weather), the highest height today's wind allows for your drone, and its round-trip range.
• GPS spoofing check: a warning when your device's location is in another country than your internet connection and time zone say — like the fake position at Beirut airport.
• DJI Neo 2: battery, speed and climb figures measured from real flight logs, so its battery estimate is no longer about a third too low.
• The side view of a photo / inspection mission no longer shows a landing at the destination, since the drone turns around in the air there.

8 Oct 2026

• Round-trip range on the map: how far the drone can fly from the start and still get back with a 20% reserve, in every direction with today's wind. Works with just a start point.
• Speed in wind setting: drones that hold their speed over the ground (DJI waypoint missions, most multirotors) or through the air (fixed-wing, or flying flat out) — they behave differently with a tailwind.
• Building heights: where OpenStreetMap doesn't say how tall a building is, the average building height around it from the EU's Global Human Settlement Layer is used instead of a 7 m guess.
• Detours explained on the map: a dashed ring shows the keep-out distance around each restricted area, and the map zooms out to show the whole route.
• Restricted areas: public shelters are no longer counted as military sites, the 3 km keep-out in Israel now applies only to military airfields, and a start or destination inside a keep-out zone no longer sends the route out to the zone's edge and back.
• The side view shows both legs, and says so when they fly the same altitudes.
• Start over button; on phones the recommended heights come first, number fields open a number keypad, and the mission settings fit the screen.
• Messages appear in the page instead of pop-ups, including a clear message with Try again when the forecast can't be loaded.
• Better accessibility and contrast in light and dark mode.
• New guides on drone altitude, battery, round-trip range and routes in wind.

5 Oct 2026

• 48-hour outlook: see the wind and rain for every hour ahead and tap an hour to plan the route for that time.
• Mission types: Delivery (land or drop at the destination, lighter on the way back, one flight plan each way) and Photo / inspection (stay airborne at the destination, same weight both ways, one round-trip flight plan), each with a time at the destination.
• Two plans for every route: Fastest, and Least battery, which can hold its altitude over rolling terrain instead of following every hill, to avoid costly climbs.
• Battery estimate: round-trip battery use for the recommended heights (and every row of the table), from each drone's rated flight time, payload, climbs, wind and temperature — with a warning when less than a 20% reserve would be left.
• Imperial units (ft, mph, mi) for routes in the US, or pick your units next to the result.
• New satellite map with place names, plus a street-map option.
• Country-specific rules: the route now follows the drone rules of the country it starts in (Israel and the US so far), including height limits, airport distances and Washington DC's no-drone zone.
• Terrain-aware routes: heights are now above the ground, so over hills like the Carmel the drone climbs and descends with the terrain and never goes above 120m over the ground. New side view of the route under the result.
• Flight plans (WPML) now carry a separate height for every waypoint, following the terrain.
• Progress bar with an estimated time left, which learns from your previous calculations.
• More reliable restricted-area and building lookups: backup map servers, automatic retries, and a "Try again" button.
• More accurate wind model: crosswind correction, strong headwinds flagged as unflyable, fixes to the forecast hour and to wind direction between altitudes.

• The right height makes deliveries faster, keeps food warmer, and saves battery or stretches your range.
• Fly often — a delivery route, say — and small gains per trip add up fast.
• Wind isn't uniform with height, so a route grounded by a high-wind warning near the ground can still be flyable higher up.
• We won't recommend flying below 30m — besides clearance margins, it also cuts noise disturbance noticeably. We'll keep you at least 20m above the tallest building OpenStreetMap knows about near your route, shown in faint orange on the map — climbing over buildings is simpler and safer than weaving between them at low level.
• We apply the drone rules of the country your route starts in — currently Israel (CAAI, 50m height limit) and the United States (FAA, 400ft / 122m). Anywhere else we fall back to Israel's rules, which are on the strict side. If you hold a permit to fly higher, tick the box in the drone settings.
• Heights are above the ground, not above takeoff: over hills the drone climbs and descends with the terrain, stays at least the chosen height above it, and never goes above the local height limit over it. The side view under the result shows the planned altitude against the ground, from Copernicus GLO-90 elevation data (~90m resolution).
• Schools, kindergartens, hospitals, playgrounds, nursing homes, universities/colleges and power infrastructure are risky to fly over — we mark the ones OpenStreetMap knows about in red on the map and route around them by at least 30m (or their real size, if bigger), since altitude alone doesn't make overflying them safe.
• Airports, military sites, prisons and similar sites are a different kind of risk — flying near them can be illegal or need authorization no matter how you route around them. We use each country's own distances (in Israel, for example, 2km from airports; in the US, controlled airspace around airports needs LAANC authorization, and Washington DC has its own no-drone zone) and flag them with a separate, more prominent warning. We only check OpenStreetMap's map data, not official no-fly-zone maps or current NOTAMs/TFRs — always verify there before flying.
• Altitude choice matters most on long routes, with higher-drag drones, and when the wind runs roughly along your heading.
• Drag isn't the enemy — flown with the wind, it works for you.

Payload effect
tytorobotics.com — how payload affects flight time
ResearchGate — UAV weight and payload vs flight time

Flying above 30m to reduce noise
"Determination of optimal flight altitude to minimise acoustic drone disturbance to wildlife using species audiograms", doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13691

Drift equations
IJpelaar, Bruijn, de Haan, Schreur & Holtslag (2016), "Observing Boundary-Layer Winds from Hot-Air Balloon Flights." a ≈ 0.1 for a drone — after about a minute it's drifting at almost the wind's speed.