PilotEdge Forums

I found an aircraft status mapping tool and modified it to work with PilotEdge. It's relatively resource-intensive, so I have made it available to beta members only.

You'll see the link in the main navigation bar on the site.

The map is self-updating so it's a great tool to have open in another window. I'm working on adding ATC support (so that it will list controllers).

You can click on any aircraft in the list to center that plane on the map. Then, if you click the aircraft on the map, it'll pop open a small window showing details of the aircraft. I'll be adding 'frequency' and 'talking to' fields soon.

The drones are gray, live aircraft are red, giving the ability to quickly locate other live pilots.

Lemme know what you think.

I'm trying hard to locate the original author of the code (it's not listed in the comments, and there's no copyright statements at all), as it also has the ability to draw flight plan routes, drawing data from X-Plane's navigation and airport databases, but I don't have the php script that glues it all together. If anyone knows who the author is, please let me know. I'd prefer to let him know that I'm using it on the site, and to see if I can get the missing script so that flight plans will be drawn.

Keith

Very cool. If in the future we could put these little planes over a Sectional or Enroute chart background (or even make options to switch between them), it would be beyond cool. Seeing airways background could give a good idea of where everyone is, airport locations would come in handy, too.

Very nice KS! I believe I saw this before somewhere....and no, no idea who the author is.

However, there's one piece of constructive criticism. With the drones gray, they are almost impossible to see. Would it be possible to make their edges a different color, or something that'll make them more visible?

Very cool Keith! I have some experience working with the google maps API so if you can't track down the author and want any help with this in the future KS, let me know.

Alex Stjepanovic wrote:Very nice KS! I believe I saw this before somewhere....and no, no idea who the author is.

However, there's one piece of constructive criticism. With the drones gray, they are almost impossible to see. Would it be possible to make their edges a different color, or something that'll make them more visible?

Agreed. The artwork of the existing system came in just two colors. "HERE-I-AM!!!" RED and "JUST TRY TO FIND ME" GREY. I opted to make the drones harder to see, and live traffic bright red. I will happily give the artwork to anyone that wants to perform a touch-up on the PNG files.

Yep, it sure is a resource hawg. I remember seeing this for Vatsim. It may not be VatSpy, but the price is right

I put an X30 in orbit under callsign NASA1. I'll track it to see how the map deals with it.

The map, hopefully, won't care....it just plots lat/lon.

I'm going to have an option on the map to only show live traffic (no drones). That should take a lot less bandwidth and cpu.

Map has been updated so drones are small red planes, live planes are a little larger (best I could do for now, as I'm unable to open the artwork in a basic paint program).

I've also added the frequency and facility for non-drone aircraft to the detailed pop-up balloon as well as the status list on the right.

Next up is a disable drone feature.

Edit: I'm also going to make the map available to the public and keep an eye on the resource utilization.

Ok, drone show/hide has been added, map has been made public, and when viewing live traffic only, a 'show tracks' option has been added. Your browser will keep track of each position report for each live target and draw a purple line representing the track over the ground. This is great for watching patterns, holds, etc.