Previous Next Table of Contents

4. Additional Information

4.1 Other Software

fplan

The fplan flight planning software package was written by Steve Tynor. It was designed for constructing VFR cross country flight plans. The last public release by Steve was version 1.3 and was posted to volume 30 of the comp.sources.misc USENET newsgroup. As a product of my efforts with avdbtools I made some improvements and fixes to fplan. When I approached Steve with the changes, he indicated he was too busy with other projects and offered me the option of taking over as maintainer, which I accepted.

The next release of fplan should be available soon. It will include support for the graphics previewer option that is based on the XView Toolkit for X11 (release 1.3 required Suntools, making that option Sun specific). The XView Toolkit, developed by Sun Microsystems, is available in source code form, and has been ported to a wide variety of UNIX/X11 platforms including HP-UX, Linux, SVR4, and Solaris of course. When everything is ready, I plan to distribute fplan from the directory ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/aviation/.

ICAO Map

ICAO Map is a program for generating and displaying maps for aviation purposes. It was written by Martin Pauly, and runs under UNIX systems with X11/Motif. It's input is a so called "world file", that contains descriptions of objects such as airports, navigational aids, roads, towns, etc. It can use either Lambert or Mercator projection to generate a map from this world file, either on your screen or as Postscript output. It also includes interactive features, such as scrolling, rubber band lines to measure distances and tracks, etc. Additional features are available for both motorized and soaring (glider) flights. For more information, visit the ICAO Map home page on the World Wide Web at http://www.oih.rwth-aachen.de/~pauly/icao.html.

4.2 Future Plans

My immediate goal is to complete the support for ICAO Map, as well as for the generic format output. Once this is complete, I have some ideas for new features. A simple GUI interface to the Geomagnetic Field Model, perhaps based on the Tk, Xforms or similar widget sets might be useful. Another idea would be to generate database files for updating GPS receivers. I find it quite annoying to be shelling out lots of hard earned cash for something we basically paid for already in the form of taxes. This isn't a trivial project however, since all of the manufacturers zealously guard much of the necessary information (correct me if I'm wrong). Another idea would be to create an interface to a high quality database engine such as PostgreSQL. This idea is less interesting in view of the fact that this sort of thing is already available over the net, see http://www.airnav.com/.

4.3 Contacting the Author

If you find a bug in this software (especially if you also have a patch for it) you can contact me by electronic mail at <jaypee@netcom.com>. Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome. Please note that I sometimes go through periods of time when I can't check my mail regularly, so don't be alarmed if you don't get an immediate reply.


Previous Next Table of Contents