pocitadlo

OGN Logbook

In the meantime while endlessly waiting for CUBE 3.1’s parts to arrive I got teased into coding (yet another) logbook engine / web page as the other ones have supposedly some nuances missing. Flying is still off-topic as the monsoon weather keeps us on the bar at best. Hence on one rainy weekend I convinced myself I am capable of doing such thing while it shouldn’t take longer than one or two days.. right?

Well, yes and no. It was really functional that Sunday evening but numerous tiny details had to be polished over the following month. At this moment it seems to be quite functional (I admit there are some unwanted “features”) and stable. Therefore, it is my pleasure and privilege to present you the ni­gel­na­gel­neues OGN Logbook! 🙂

OGN Logbook - main page

The home page shows current traffic as observed by the logbook backend. There are some differences based on you browser’s language settings. German speaking users will see ED, LO and LS traffic by default, Czechs and Slovaks airfields with ICAO code starting with LK and LZ and finally all others can see the entire world’s traffic.

By clicking onto an ICAO code you are forwarded to records related to the airfield of your choice. A click on an airplane’s registration shows you detailed information about selected airplane. Except the main page all presented flight records are listed by selected date, which you can change using the small arrows in the header.

Sometimes the calculated flight times may seem to be wrong. For example in the image above there is a flight which took-off at 09:51, landed at 09:58, showing 6 minutes of flight while based purely on this presentation it should clearly be 7 minutes. The matter (and trouble?) is the presented timestamps are rounded to nearest minute while the flight time is calculated from flight duration recorded in seconds and even then rounded – which makes this flight time information more precise. But it looks wrong. How to round minutes and calculate the times is still a subject to wild discussions.

As mentioned earlier, the logbook observes and records all traffic in the OGN network. However, only take-offs and landings in vicinity up to 4 km around air-fields and ports are taken into consideration and stored into database. The landables list is based on czech VFR Manual and entries sourced from openflightmaps.org. No field-landings (so far). All vehicle take-off velocity is set to 50 km/h and landing to 20km/h for gliders and 50 km/h for tow planes. For landings there is yet another condition applied – of being below altitude of 160m above terrain level.

A useful feature is .csv export of the airfield’s traffic of the selected day by clicking on the ICAO code while on the airfield’s detail page. The file’s structure is specific for Air Jihlava’s Flight Office. This import is now being integrated into the FO suite so one can import the data by just a single click. The files are also easily accessible by using the download url directly (and amending the date if required) by your scripts. If another format would be useful for you, please let me know!