shanet / pirep

A collaborative database of all public, private, and unmapped airports in the US.
https://pirep.io
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
13 stars 3 forks source link

Any interest in trips? #110

Open superchris opened 1 year ago

superchris commented 1 year ago

First off, thanks for the excellent work on Pirep. I've been searching for a long time for a solution to display a map with toggleable layers between sectional charts and "normal" road/satellite layers. I'd love to be able to use pirep for trip planning. I've done quite a bit of rails development, and would be happy to give this a go as a PR if there is interest. I'm thinking of starting with just a simple airport to airport trip with a line, but later would love to build more complex trips that include a flight combined with driving directions.

shanet commented 1 year ago

Hi @superchris, thanks for the suggestion. One of the things I thought about early on in development was the ability to create routes on the map of, say, scenic flights that aren't necessarily just point to point between airports/navaids. Ultimately though I didn't want to get distracted from the core functionality of documenting airports and shelved that idea. I wouldn't mind revisiting it, but I am wary of turning Pirep into a flight planning tool because there are many flight planning tools out there already and they are far more complex and capable than Pirep would ever be. I also worry about the liability involved with saying "this is for flight planning" when there's no guarantees made about the accuracy of the information.

That said, I suppose my question would be what would trip planning functionality look like? Is it only for individual users or is it viewable by anyone on the map? The main goal of this project is sharing local knowledge with other pilots so ideally there would be a way to share planned trips with others, but on the other hand, trips are also generally specific to individuals so would there be value in that sharing? If so, how do you filter out the noise of trips that don't appeal to you vs. the ones that do? For example, I'm generally not interested in knowing exactly what route someone else took to get somewhere since the start point is almost certainly different, but I may be interested in the stops along the route if I'm planning on visiting an area. At a high level I'd be most interested in knowing what sort of collaborative aspect route creation and planning would bring but without turning Pirep into a flight planning tool?

N129BZ commented 1 year ago

Maybe trips would be data stored on user's machine, loaded & saved on client side... something as simple as a csv file with vector data?