Flight Track On Line (FTOL) has matured since my last update.  I include a screen shot of the interface with this post.  Clearly, it is a functional interface (that means I haven’t styled it yet).

FTOL is an application to support high altitude balloon hobbyists in tracking their payload.  In that sense, I log only those packets containing the balloon symbol (/O) in the APRS packet.  In my testing (one of the funnest parts of this port), I have found that FTOL logs up to 9000 packets per day.  I thought that was interesting so I include it and other metadata on the Flight Track Metrics page.

FTOL supports a search of the database.  If the call sign or object is located, FTOL loads the flight information and presents the path on Google Maps.  Alternatively, the Active and Inactive Flights page lists all of the active flights as links (I’ve seen up to 25 active flights on this page).  Click on a link and FTOL starts tracking the flight in real time (I’ve tracked five flights at a time just by clicking on links from this page).  While the link includes “Inactive Flights”, the final implementation is not complete.

FTOL would not be complete without real time flight path prediction.  That idea has not been lost in the multiple database schema and stored procedures changes, performance considerations, and data surprises that have found their way into this journey.  I have ported the algorithm and placed the path on Google maps once just to verify the concept.  There is still a bit of work on that.