airspace overlay for google maps (mobile)

[albin0]

1. Is it possible to to turn a smartphone into a free aviation GPS? (Probably using Google maps)
2. Do NATS (or anyone) release airspace data for free?

Dear all,
Tentative first post, and I beg forgiveness if this has already been asked; I couldnt find any specific mention of it searching here or on Google.

I'd like to use the [old] UK airspace files as a "layer" in Google Maps for Mobile (smartphone) - I.E. a rudimentary (free) version of NATS' AWARE device.

Obviously the airspace data, whilst a sterling effort, is still amateurly maintained, and is only worth using as a last resort; but while using DME to find one's location if lost, I suspect its nice to know I'm probably clear of controlled airspace.

Having loaded the .SUA file into "my maps" online, and then loaded up that map as a "layer" on my phone, it shows a couple of ATZs in the region, but most of the airspace is unmarked...

Has anyone got any free GPS "air chart" solution like this to work?

Really, this would only be useful with up to date airspace data, but I understand this is only released in conjunction with undelying terrain maps which carry hefty license fees. Is "controlled airspace" part of air-law? Surely citizens should have free access to data required for them to know what activities are legal where? After all, ignorance is, in the eyes of the law, not an excuse...

Many thanks for any help or suggestions,
al

PS. Don't worry, I would never, ever fly without a paper chart and continual checking that I know my position.
PPS. Obviously, this wouldn't give vertical limits of controlled airspace. on the upside, it's free!

[herts_sc]

This the kind of thing you are after? Remember that Google Maps (etc) requires a data connection, which you may not have aloft.

Personally I'd rather call 121.5 for a position fix!

Link (Desktop/Mobile):

Airspace - Google Maps (http://bit.ly/dbHZxD)

Screenshot (iPhone 4):

http://www.janin.co.uk/iphone.PNG

[albin0]

marvellous! still not displaying completely for some reason (probably the android implementation), but a marked improvement on overlaying just the .sua file I had before. I'll pester someone on a Google Maps forum somewhere, in case its an android problem that's rectifiable, & report back. Who knows, maybe someone will want to make a Labs feature for track and groundspeed!
Quite right about the data connection, and definitely right about calling for a fix, only once I've failed at using the DME, and I can't imagine that happening. (then again...!)
Thank you so much for your help - the iphone is definitely leagues ahead.
al

[Jan Olieslagers]

You might also take a look at OpenStreetMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org) - a wiki-minded alternative map project. There have been efforts to add airspace and other aviation-related data to its database.

[albin0]

thanks! I saw open airspace map, but its pretty small at the moment, of course an airchart overlay on OSM would be equally superb. I may have to admit defeat and but a tiny windows tablet to get sky demon on.
thanks for the pointer; I'll investigate.
al

[dublinpilot]

I'm not sure if you're aware but you have a bigger choice than a windows tablet. Not that that is a bad choice, but you do have others.

You can use a car nav unit or windows smart phone or pda with many systems including PocketFMS and SkyDemon. You used to be able to use Memory Map with some of them but it required some hacking, and I believe they Memory Map have taken away the ability to do that now.

You'll probably find that a car sat nav is cheaper than your small tablet, and a good own will probably have a better sunlight readable screen. Obviously though the screen will be smaller.

dp

[IO540]

Given there is no public machine readable airspace shape/coordinate database (as of 2006, when DAFIF closed to the great unwashed after the national CAAs threatened to stop sending "their intellectual property" to the USA :ugh: ) I wonder where these people get the data from and how reliable it is.

That goes for google too.

[dublinpilot]

I wonder where these people get the data from and how reliable it is.


Well as far as PocketFMS goes, all the aerodata is maintained in-house from the relevant AIP's.

It is very time consuming to do so, but it ensures that our data is extremely accurate. We've had two reports in the past 12 months that I'm aware of that shows this. One was a user who reported our airspace as being incorrect because it differed to their Jepp chart. On investigation it turned out that the Jepp char was incorrect.

The second concerned a piece of airspace that extended across the Belgian/French border. A piece of airspace from one country extended over the border of the other country. A user reported this as incorrect, as it differed from their paper chart (can't remember now which chart they were using). Again investigation showed that the airspace was correct in PFMS. One chart supplier had to update their charts, and one national authority had to update their AIP!

I can't speak for the other suppliers, but that is where ours comes from.

I understand Aerobox gets a feed from NATS for UK airspace, but I'm sure they can comment more on it if they wish to.

Obviously for those systems with just a paper chart overlay then it's not as critical (or non existant in some cases). However paper charts are generally only updated once per year.


dp

[IO540]

I would think PFMS is more accurate than the Jepp VFR/GPS charts, for N Europe where few pilots use the Jepp charts because the national ones are pretty good.

The Jepp charts probably don't get much testing in the field.

Also I don't think Jepp reliably act on error reports; I have reported a few things and never heard anything back.

AIUI you can get a B2B account (for a few k euros a year) with Eurocontrol and then you get unlimited use of their airspace and AIP database.

[dublinpilot]

AIUI you can get a B2B account (for a few k euros a year) with Eurocontrol and then you get unlimited use of their airspace and AIP database.

We looked at that in the past. To be honest the quality of the data that they had was extremely poor. Using poor data is a sure way to ruin your reputation busy very quickly.

Eurocontrol's airspace data was so riddled with errors, old data, and missing airspace that I can't imagine anyone using it for a commerical product and surviving very long.

[IO540]

That is astonishing, since this is the database against which they validate IFR flight plans :confused:

Mind you, nothing suprises me. Their Skyview (http://www.eurocontrol.int/aim/public/standard_page/skyview_intro.html) program comes with a database full of errors.

Some people thought this was deliberate, however, to prevent the creation of 100% workable and free autorouting tools which would compete with the corporate jet service companies.

[devnavogic]

We have been developing an airspace app for android. It provides a moving map and a track ahead with what air space you are heading for. Its going to be basic in its beta form as a period of feedback will be used to hone the screen design.

Features
1. UK airspace... ability to load other OpenAir maps
2. Moving map of airspace (no ground maps too complex for small screens). Pinch zoom facility
3. In airspace warning
4. Near airspace display (Distance and track to airspace)
5. Track ahead airspace. (Text and on Map - upto 200nm)
6. QNH adjustment for FLs

We may charge a small fee for the app to cover costs, registrations and any hosting cost but in principal the basic version will be free. Likely charging method will be by donation. Further fetures such as logging, waypoints etc will come.

We hope that people find it useful when we get it onto the market.

dev

[bookworm]

That is astonishing, since this is the database against which they validate IFR flight plans

No, actually it's not. The ENV database is not the same as EAD. Which is arguably worse!

[1800ed]

I have had thoughts in the past about enquiring as to how much the CAA would charge to licence their VFR charts for use on a website. They seem to allow people to sell CD's with their charts on them. I've seen a few websites offering planning online which plots waypoints onto a Google map, but it would be pretty smart if you could have something similar to Google Maps, but with aviation maps.

(Doubt you could make any money doing it though, and no doubt the CAA would either say no or charge a fortune).

[albin0]

all, thankyou for so many replies! as I said before, I'm just amazed that data that tells people how they must behave in certain places (or risk prosecution?) is not public domain. I can only really understand the underlying OS map copyright.

devnavogic,
that sounds amazing; do you have a website?

thanks all, again

al

[eharding]

I have had thoughts in the past about enquiring as to how much the CAA would charge to licence their VFR charts for use on a website. They seem to allow people to sell CD's with their charts on them. I've seen a few websites offering planning online which plots waypoints onto a Google map, but it would be pretty smart if you could have something similar to Google Maps, but with aviation maps.

(Doubt you could make any money doing it though, and no doubt the CAA would either say no or charge a fortune).

There is nothing to stop you deriving the airspace data from the AIP - but the PDF format doesn't lend itself to particularly easy interpretation.

I have been tinkering on and off with generation of Google Map overlay tiles for the UK derived from the AIP, to give context to some of the NOTAM maps, but that project hasn't had much attention of late, partly because I'd like a more robust source of the airspace definitions than trying to keep up with changes to the AIP. Somewhere, somebody has a definitive AIXM definition of the UK's airspace, but it doesn't appear that they're keen to share it. The free EAD Basic access provided by Eurocontrol on the face of it provides access to airspace vertex data as a funky home-brewed XML dialect, but they don't include the upper and lower extents of the airspace - for that you pay money - and hence isn't much use.

FWIW, the debug tiles are here:

http://ukairspace.appspot.com/static/AirspaceUK_V2.html

Select 'Composite' from the view control for the full set of rendered tiles. The square boxes and co-ordinates in the middle of each tile are the debug annotations.

One of the challenges is to derive a label clipping and placement algorithm so that the labels on each edge of the airspace shapes don't overlap at each zoom level, and that appropriate edges are labelled without cluttering the view - as you can see, there is some work to be done on that, and I haven't even started on overlap detection for labels on the curved segments. The linestyles need work as well. Inevitably, the end result will need some manual placement of labels, but the goal is to keep that task to less than 1% of the total label count.

The cartographers generating the CAA maps do a fantastic job, and I don't begrudge the few quid it costs to buy a CAA map on paper or via Memory Map for my own use, but I do think that having a freely available online depiction of UK airspace (or anywhere else for that matter) would be of benefit all round.

[devnavogic]

Right now we dont have a web page for this. When we have a stable UI we will put one up.

It was interesting to see the work done on presenting data on the web. We have found the airspace maps contain errors and we have registered with the caa web site to get up dates when the airspace changes and hopefully can provide improved digital maps.

We are using openair as the map format. Our app is designed to be used all over the world and so we will need to handle different types of airspace that does not occur in the uk. For instance in some parts flight levels are handled in meters not hundreds of feet. Quality of the airspace map is very important. If UK maps are bad then what are other parts of the world like.

Handling the flattening of the map is interesting. UK maps either use the Lambert (part uk) method or the mercator (full uk) method which creates tiny differences in the airspace.displayed. The Lambert projection in the UK uses fixed latitude points in the projection but because the openair maps are vary the system needs to calculates its own latitudes for the projection which may introduce more small differences.

A previous post describes the problems of labels... this is actually really complicated but we have a solution and once this is complete, some UI navigational changes, and preferences persistence we should be ready for a beta.

If anyone has any comments, features requests then we would be interested in hearing them. We are not a company but a small group who are interested in developing this for general use. Gliding and GA mainly.

[albin0]

eharding - kudos for your work, and best of luck finding an effective way of annotating it.
devnavogic - wish I had some programming skills to offer! I was very impressed by sky demon's GUI, with the cross section of airspace to the aircraft's 12 o'clock, so one can see (for example) airways coming down from above, or danger zones coming up from below, although it costs valuable display real-estate to present the info, seems good to me for at-a-glance assimilation of controlled airspace in the vertical.

al

[devnavogic]

albin0: I liked sky demo when I saw it.It seems to have good graphics and the pc code seems easy to use. The use of translucence looks cool but how this works in a busy cockpit I would like to experience. They also have a lot of detail in the maps which is handy. I am a glider pilot so the concept of flight planning is rather novel! Keeping clear of airspace is my main worry hence the interest in the project.

I had thought about the profile view of airspace but rejected it because of the lack of screen space but thinking about it I can easily implement it as another view - it might just get in for the beta!
Cheers

[cutandpaste]

Can anyone tell me how to get this working on a Nokia X6. I've saved it to Googles My Maps but when I go to load it via layers-My Maps I only get part of the overlay.

[GogglesOnTarget]

@DevNavLogic:
Hi, I'd be very interested in trying the app. Let me know when it's out, I'll be happy to help test it.

[albin0]

cut&paste, I'm in the same boat I'm afraid - if I find a solution I'll post it.+
al

[devnavogic]

Following on from the posts above in August... AirCub is now available in beta for uk (mainland) airspace.

It will down load a recentish map after install and ask for a QNH value. Then you should see a map. Pinch zoom will allow you to zoom in and out and a track line should show airspace changes ahead.

The map is fixed at your current location (GPS) but if you enable drag mode from the settings you should be able to drag the map about. there is also a setting to adjust the altitude. Pilots of different qualifications can set up a set of warnings for particular airspace types. For me Class A is a red NOFLY!

The map app is and will stay free. We may make a small charge for more featured versions with more navigation tools ie a couple of quid. As I said its a beta so its not quite all there but we wanted to test out the code more widely.

It should work with other openair maps of other countries but the maps will have to be loaded and setup by hand. For those who would like to try other countries see the wiki with the app. We would like help getting other maps that have some sort of credible authority saying they are accurate.

Very keen on feedback good or bad....