Findflight?

[Keith Smith]

This will make sense to exactly 2 readers, but nobody else. Unless he/she wishes to remain anonymous, I'm curious who the developer of 'findflight' is (you can PM me). Looks neat Don't worry, I'm not going to steal your thunder!

[kullery]

Keith.....You scare me!!!!! I have no idea how you stumbled upon this. I was just about to post a message about this but I fould one minor tweak I wanted to make. But since you asked, below is the note I was going to post tomorrow.

But you have to tell me how you found this. I'm guessing it might be related to the link I created to the web based flight plan page. If that is messing up something for you, please let me know and I'll delete the link ASAP.




I’d like to invite any PilotEdge users to try out http://www.FINDFLIGHT.web44.net, a web based utility that I just posted. It will select a flight for you (within the PilotEdge operating area) which meets criteria which you supply (i.e. distance, direction, class of airport, etc.).

Since I am not very familiar with the ZLA area, I always have to stop and think about potential departure and arrival airports when flyingon PE. With this tool I can quickly pick a flight that is an appropriate distance based on the time that I have available.

Now admittedly this is not an earth shaking application……it probably saves about 15 seconds of decision making when picking a route, however it DOES encourage me to fly new routes instead of flying the same familiar ones. You can even let the application randomly assign you a route (again, based on your criteria)……kind of like a RW commercial pilots that have to fly wherever the job takes them! In addition, each route provides a link to the SkyVector web site so you can continue with your flight planning.




Mostly this application was a learning experience for me as I wanted to try my hand at a web based database. I am semi-retired and I’ve had some very limited experience with MS Access databases. I initially thought this would be like saving the database to the web. I was wrong. Instead I got to teach myself a litle bit of HTML, PHP, MySQL and a bunch of other things I had never heard of. It was a good learning experience and that was my primary goal. Someone that knew what they were doing could probably have done this in 5 minutes and made it twice as good.

Anyway, give it a try and feel free to let me know if you have any comments or suggestions that could make this more usable.

ken

[Kevin_atc]

WOW! Mad props man, that is very creative and is DEFINITELY a huge help to anyone unfamiliar with ZLA looking to do a flight similar to one near their home town.
While this would be one heck of a task, I could see pilots really loving this if you involved instrument approaches. For instance, "Find me a flight to an airport that has a VOR approach." Or also entering in TEC routes would be handy.

But regardless, well done.

[Josh Arentzoff]

The link isn't working for me...hmm

[Tim Krajcar]

Hi Ken,

Great job on the app. Impressive work for a first web-based application. Two notes for you that may be helpful:

#1: The 'File on PE' button will not work as you've built it. Right now it simply POSTs a form to the PE filing page. You can't do that, but you can link to the page using specific parameters. Here's an exmple:

Code: Select all

http://www.pilotedge.net/pilot_tools/file?flightplan[departing_airport]=KAJO&flightplan[arriving_airport]=KVCV&flightplan[route]=PDZ%20V442%20APLES&flightplan[altitude]=9000

The field names must be exactly as they are in that example, just the values can change. Note also that doing "URL encoding" is necessary to remove the spaces in the route and replace them with %20s. PHP's urlencode() function will take care of this for you.

In your app you won't have the altitude - just exclude that one.

#2: I was somewhat surprised by the time elapsed between clicking 'search' and receiving a result. Given the relatively low number of records needed for an application like this, I am guessing you may need to add indexes to a column or two in your tables. General rule of thumb for a small project like this is to add an index to any column that you're using in the 'WHERE' column of a query.

Let me know if you have questions on either one, happy to help

[kullery]

Thanks Tim & Kevin... I was wondering if there was a way to drop the airport codes into the flight plan (much as I did with the SkyVector links). I will look at making the changes you suggested so that the selected city pair can be sent to the PE flight plan page.

I'll also look at the database. I did set up indexes but I'll double check them.

Would love to add available approaches data.....will need to find a data source but that shouldn't be to hard.

Thanks for your feedback.....



Josh, sorry I have no idea why the link is not working for you. It's a free hosting service and I don't have much control of it......just to confirm it is:

http://www.findflight.web44.net/

Try pasting that in your browser instead of using the link.

[Andrew Doubleday]

I'm having the same problem with the page not loading anything. It hangs for about 30 seconds and then a "Connection has timed out" error appears.

[bruce]

Ken, thanks for the time you obviously put into this. Working fine for me & I will most definatly be using it.

[kullery]

I suspect that some are having trouble reaching the site because it is so new and has not yet propagated through all the DNS servers (I just barely understand what that means ).

I know that I can not reach the site via AT&T on iPhone. They are known to be very slow about updating DNS servers.

Will keep looking for a workaround.

[Keith Smith]

I'd be surprised if that's it...it's been up for days. For those that can't reach it, can you ping the site via the command line and paste what IP address you're seeing, if any?