Flight Planning (was Re: Introduction)

["John C. Peterson" <jaypee@netcom.com>]

Jerry Kaidor writes:
>
>Hello,
>
>   I'd like to introduce myself.  Name is Jerry Kaidor.  I've been Linux-ing
>for 7 or 8 years ( started with kernel version 0.95 ) and flying for three.
>[...]

>   One thing I think a Linux system can be very good for, is flight
>planning.  Now that DUATS is accessable via telnet, I'm imagining a 
>system where I say "I'd like to fly the Turtle to Pismo Beach this
>afternoon", and a full set of documents is printed, including charts,
>flight log, etc, etc, and a flight plan filed with FSS.  With a minimum
>of human intervention.  And with enough artificial intelligence to 
>say "whups, jerry, are you sure you want to do that?  There's icing
>at 5000....", and taking into account the particular capabilities and
>limitations of my airplane ( "Xwind component is forcast to be 10knots
>gusting to 15, didn't you almost groundloop the airplane last time
>that happened?" :-) ).  
>

   I'll agree with this, and it appears that a few pilots out there
had the same idea and have already taken a shot at this problem.  I
haven't tried them, or added them to the FAQ yet, but I've seen some
Perl scripts designed to decode METAR reports, etc. You can find them
on CPAN (and mirrors):

   http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/J/JB/JBRIGGS/Aviation-Report-1.02.tar.gz
   http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/J/JZ/JZAWODNY/Geo-METAR-1.12.tar.gz
   http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/MSOLOMON/Geo-WeatherNOAA-4.30.tar.gz

There is a wealth of other quality weather data out there that's up for
grabs (satellite and radar summaries from Intellicast, etc). It would
be real neat to have something that could quickly retreive data from a
variety of sources, and collate it in some coherent fashion.

>   I know flight planning isn't as sexy as the in-cockpit stuff, but
>it can be an awful lot of work.  To do it right, that is.  And the
>plug-together-tinkertoy nature of Unix could potentially make it
>more doable than in Windows.  
>
>                                  - Jerry Kaidor ( jerry@tr2.com )

   Now is probably a good time to put in a plug for the Linux based
flight planning software effort I started about a year ago. Actually,
it's a resurrection of the Unix (Sun) based flight planning tool written
by Steve Tynor way back in the late 80's. It's called fplan and you
can find it at

		http://metalab.unc.edu/fplan/

It's come a long way since Steve's last public release, but there's
still many obvious improvements that could be done. It's been out for
a few months now, but I haven't received too much feedback in the
way of suggestions for improvements yet. Comments and volunteers
are welcome....

Best Regards, John

-- 
 ___|___  | John C. Peterson, KD6EKQ | "640 K is all the memory you
  -(*)-   | mailto:jaypee@netcom.com | will *ever* need..." - Bill Gates
  o/ \o   | San Diego, CA   U.S.A    | See http://www.linux.org/ for info
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