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 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
.
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/
.
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.