One of the cool things about the current time is that so much neat software is available for free. For instance, Avare is an Android app that displays sectionals and reads ADS-B In data and plans flights, similar to a low-powered version of Foreflight. But, it's free. The main reason it's free is that there's a group of people who are excited about making software like that, and want to do it in their spare time.
I'm a computer nerd by trade, and there's a feature in Avare that I've been wanting for years now. Tonight, I finally sat down and tried to really figure it out. It ended up being surprisingly easy.
The feature is in the flight planning: when you enter a flight plan (the dreaded magenta line), the program can also format your plan and send it off to the FAA as an actual flight plan that can be opened with Flight Service. Thing is, with the new ICAO format, a few things changed with flight plans, and a big one for me was that non-ICAO airport IDs, like my former home at Harvey Field (S43) are not accepted in the Departure or Destination fields. Those fields have to either be a valid (ie, no numbers in the ID) identifier, or they have to be ZZZZ, and then you add your actual departure or destination to the Other Information field, as DEP/S43, or DEST/S43. Since I was flying to and from Harvey, I had to change these fields for every long flight I embarked upon.
So, I just submitted my first bit of open source code to someone else's project (I've generated a bunch of code that's open source, but maybe three people in the world care about that stuff). With this change, when you enter an airport ID that doesn't meet ICAO standards, it does the right thing, inserts ZZZZ into that field, and updates the Other Information field. We'll see if the new code ever makes it in, but if you use Avare, and you notice one day that the flight planning function suddenly behaves like that, you can say you know one of the people who helps make Avare a cool product, that's available for free.
I'm a computer nerd by trade, and there's a feature in Avare that I've been wanting for years now. Tonight, I finally sat down and tried to really figure it out. It ended up being surprisingly easy.
The feature is in the flight planning: when you enter a flight plan (the dreaded magenta line), the program can also format your plan and send it off to the FAA as an actual flight plan that can be opened with Flight Service. Thing is, with the new ICAO format, a few things changed with flight plans, and a big one for me was that non-ICAO airport IDs, like my former home at Harvey Field (S43) are not accepted in the Departure or Destination fields. Those fields have to either be a valid (ie, no numbers in the ID) identifier, or they have to be ZZZZ, and then you add your actual departure or destination to the Other Information field, as DEP/S43, or DEST/S43. Since I was flying to and from Harvey, I had to change these fields for every long flight I embarked upon.
So, I just submitted my first bit of open source code to someone else's project (I've generated a bunch of code that's open source, but maybe three people in the world care about that stuff). With this change, when you enter an airport ID that doesn't meet ICAO standards, it does the right thing, inserts ZZZZ into that field, and updates the Other Information field. We'll see if the new code ever makes it in, but if you use Avare, and you notice one day that the flight planning function suddenly behaves like that, you can say you know one of the people who helps make Avare a cool product, that's available for free.
