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4. Additional Information

4.1 Other Software

fplan

The fplan application is designed to assist general aviation pilots in creating flight plans for cross country flights in powered aircraft. It reads a planfile containing a description of the flight; departure and destination airports, navigation aids, intermediate waypoints, winds aloft, fuel consumption rates, and produces a flight plan including; wind corrected magnetic headings, distance, estimated time and fuel consumption for each leg; latitude, longitude and VOR fixes for each checkpoint, etc.

The fplan flight planning software package was first written by Steve Tynor. The last public release by Steve was version 1.3 and was posted to volume 30 of the comp.sources.misc USENET newsgroup in 1992. 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 things and suggested I pick up the project. My new release of fplan includes support for the graphics previewer option that is based on the XView Toolkit for X11 (release 1.3 required Suntools, making that feature Sun specific). You can obtain the latest release from the fplan world wide web site at

ICAO Map

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 world wide web site at

4.2 Future Plans

My immediate goal is to complete the support for ICAO Map, as well as for the generic format output. Once this is complete, I would like to implement support for NOAA Digital Aeronautical Flight Information Files (DAFIF), which include data for non-US airports. More information can be obtained from the following NOAA web site

4.3 Contacting the Author

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 <jcp@eskimo.com>. Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome. I respond to all my e-mail, but please remember, this is a free software project and I do prefer flying real aircraft over playing with my computer, so don't be alarmed if you don't get an immediate reply.


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