Help with Rotorhead

Yes, through your own iCloud. Sign in to the same Apple ID on each device with iCloud turned on and your study progress, logbook, currency items and aircraft and aerodrome lookups appear on all of them. Rotorhead keeps this data in your private iCloud database; Skids Down cannot see it.

If iCloud is not available on a device, the app keeps working with a local-only copy on that device.

Your pilot profile is split. Date of birth, medical class and date, licence issue date, home aerodrome, career goals and your tutor notes sync between devices. Your name, licence number, CAA reference and postal address stay on the device where you typed them.

On your device and in your own iCloud account. Study cards, review history, mock exam results, lessons, glossary, logbook entries and currency items live in one store on the device, which iCloud mirrors to your other devices. Any API keys you add are kept in the Keychain and travel to your other devices through iCloud Keychain.

Skids Down holds data about you only if you sign in to a Rotorhead account, and then only what is listed in the privacy policy. Nothing from your logbook or pilot profile is ever sent to our server.

No. Everything in the app works without one: studying, the logbook, weather, currency and career tracking. An account is only needed if you want the AI tutor to run through the Skids Down server with its daily allowance, so that you do not have to bring your own API key. You create one by tapping Sign in with Apple in the tutor's settings.

Open the tutor, tap Settings, and pick a Model provider. Choose Claude to paste an Anthropic key, or OpenAI to use any OpenAI-compatible endpoint: OpenAI, Groq, Gemini, OpenRouter or a local server such as Ollama or LM Studio. Paste the key and, for OpenAI-compatible endpoints, the base URL and model name.

Your key is kept in the Keychain, synced to your other devices by iCloud Keychain, and sent only to the provider you chose. Usage is billed to your account with that provider, not to Skids Down. There is also an On-device (Apple Intelligence) option that uses Apple Intelligence on supported devices and sends nothing anywhere. The Apple cloud option is not yet enabled in this release.

Whichever provider you use, the tutor sends your question together with your study context: your learner notes, syllabus progress, recent results and due cards. It never sends your logbook or pilot profile.

When the tutor runs through the Skids Down server, each account has a daily spend allowance set by its plan. Once it is used the server declines further requests until midnight UTC, when it resets. The allowance covers every tutor call: chat, study sessions, marking, lesson building and grading, question writing and the new askings of cards written after a review session. Long jobs such as building a lesson use more of it than a short question.

If you need more, switch the provider to your own API key or to On-device (Apple Intelligence); neither counts against the allowance. There is no paid plan yet.

In the Logbook screen open the More menu (the … button) and choose Import from another logbook…, then pick a file. Check the column mapping on the Import flights sheet and tap Import. Rotorhead reads:

• CSV, tab-separated or semicolon-separated exports from LogTen Pro, MyFlightbook, ForeFlight, Garmin Pilot, Rotorhead's own export, or any spreadsheet. Columns are matched to logbook fields by their headings, and you can correct the mapping before the flights are added.
• A calendar export (.ics) with one event per flight, as LogTen Pro writes it. The events are turned into a table and go through the same column mapping.
• A KML of places, such as LogTen's Export Places, or any KML with an ICAO code in the placemark name. This adds aerodromes to the app's lookup list; it does not add flights.

Flights that are already logged are skipped, so importing the same file twice does not create duplicates.

From the Logbook screen you can export a CSV of every entry, or a Part-FCL style PDF report. Both open the system save panel so you choose where the file goes. The PDF's front sheet carries the name, licence, CAA reference and address from your pilot profile, so fill those in first if you want them on the report.

Study material can also be exported as Markdown files to a folder you choose, from the study files menu.

METARs, TAFs and SIGMETs come from aviationweather.gov, the NOAA aviation weather service. Forecasts for your saved aerodromes come from Apple Weather and Open-Meteo. Radar comes from RainViewer. If you add your own Met Office DataHub key, the app can also show Met Office map images. The Met Office MAVIS and surface-pressure pages and the NATS AIS site open in a web view inside the app.

The Weather and Flying Today screens fetch when they open if the last fetch is more than ten minutes old, and whenever you refresh. A TAF issued more than twelve hours ago is shown in amber with its issue time, and an expired one in red; a METAR more than three hours old is flagged too.

Rotorhead is not an official briefing. Use it alongside, not instead of, the Met Office and NATS services your instructor expects you to check.

No. Rotorhead is a study aid built around the CAA PPL(H) syllabus, but Skids Down is not an approved training organisation and the questions, lessons and tutor answers are not endorsed by the CAA or any examiner. Treat the app as practice, check anything you are unsure of against your course material, and ask your instructor.

Rotorhead is one app for iPhone, iPad and Mac. It needs iOS or iPadOS 26.5 or later on iPhone and iPad, and macOS 26.3 or later on Mac. The On-device (Apple Intelligence) tutor option additionally needs a device that supports Apple Intelligence.

The app is not yet on the App Store. This page will say where to get it once it is.

See Delete your account below. In short: deleting removes everything about you from the Skids Down server and leaves your study and flying data on your device and in your iCloud untouched.

Email support@skidsdown.com with the subject and the question text, or a screenshot, and tell us what you think the right answer is and why. In a mock exam you can flag a question while you sit it; the flag is there to help you come back to it, and does not send anything to us, so please still email. We check every report against the syllabus and correct the content pack.

Cards, lessons and mock questions the tutor writes for you are generated for you alone and are not shared with anyone else. If one is wrong, email us the text and we will look at it; a lesson can be rebuilt from the Rebuild with the tutor button, and a card you keep answering correctly retires on its own.