Flight Replay

Relive Any Flight, Packet by Packet

AltosUI can play back recorded .telem files through the full telemetry pipeline — the same Pad, Flight, Map, and Recover tabs that show live data. Load a flight file and watch it unfold as if the rocket were flying right now, with all the same displays, state transitions, and data updates.

What You See

During playback, every tab updates just like a live flight:

• Pad tab shows pre-flight readiness checks and voltages
• Flight tab tracks altitude, speed, and acceleration through each phase
• Map tab plots the GPS track as it arrives, with pad and tracker annotations
• Recover tab shows bearing and distance as if you were walking to the landing site

The flight player drives all of this from the recorded packet stream, so you see exactly what you would have seen during the live flight — including state transitions from pad through boost, coast, drogue, main, and landed.

How to Use It

The flight player loads .telem files from the app's documents folder. Playback controls let you:

• Play / Pause — start and stop the telemetry stream
• Skip forward / back — jump between flight files when you have multiple recordings
• Jump to start — restart the current flight from the beginning

Two playback speeds:

• Actual timing — packets arrive at the same intervals they were originally transmitted. A 60-second flight takes 60 seconds to replay. Useful for studying what happened in real time.
• Fast timing — packets arrive at one-second intervals regardless of original timing. An entire flight plays back in seconds. Useful for quickly scanning through a recording or verifying completeness.

When It Works Best

After a flight day, replay lets you review what happened with full context — not just raw numbers, but the same visual displays you use during live tracking. Especially useful for:

• Post-flight analysis — walk through each phase and see when state transitions happened
• Debugging anomalies — if something unexpected happened, replay it and watch the telemetry frame by frame
• Validating recordings — quickly check that a .telem file captured the complete flight before archiving
• Demonstrations — show someone how AltosUI works using real flight data, without needing a live rocket

What You Need

• One or more .telem files in the app's documents folder
• Files can be from live flights (saved automatically) or copied from another source via Files or AirDrop

Works with all Altus Metrum flight computer recordings: TeleMega, TeleMetrum, TeleMini, and TeleGPS.