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This morning, I took my first stab at supporting the W3C Geolocation API in OurAirports and ourairports.mobi. If you’re using a geolocation-aware browser, such as Firefox 3.5 or recent versions of Safari, and you authorize OurAirports to know your location, your latitude and longitude (or your browser’s best guess about them) should appear automatically in the search box on the home pages.

I’m hoping especially that this will work with the iPhone (version 3 or better), since it’s supposed to support the W3C Geolocation API now. If this is successful, I can add new capabilities, such as an automatically scrolling map, without too much work.

If you own an iPhone, please try out the sites, and let me know what happens. They’re working fine with Firefox 3.5 in Linux, except that Firefox tells OurAirports that I’m in downtown Ottawa, about 4 km away from where I actually am (probably guessing from my IP subnet).

Source: david

I need to reward (and re-word) myself with a bit of silliness, after roughing in the first navaid pages on OurAirports, so here is a sentence made up entirely of valid navaid identifiers, with one small cheat at the end:

BUT IT IS ART, AS ANY OLD CAT OR DOG CAN SEA.

Does anyone have any better ones?

(This would be more fun with fixes and airport idents as well. Maybe in a future posting …)

Source: david

OurAirports now includes pilot info pages with comm frequences, live weather, runway information, and live notams — for now, it’s accessible though the “Pilot info” tab at the top of each airport page, but I’ll be redesigning the site over the next few weeks, so the link location will likely change.

Here’s sample pilot information for Bahrain International Airport.

Note that it’s not currently possible to edit frequency or runway information. I’ll be adding that ability soon, as well as data for more airports (right now, only larger airports have runway and comm information).

Update: if an airport doesn’t have its own METAR and/or TAF, OurAirports will display the closest ones available. This works in both the main and mobile versions. Look at pilot info for Rivière-du-Loup Airport for an example (mobile pilot info for Rivière-du-Loup Airport).

Source: david