I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try and build a web app on top of freely available VFR and IFR aeronautical chart data from the FAA. I’m not sure exactly what the final ‘product’ looks like, but have a few ideas (below).
Either way, figuring out how to download, parse, and turn the chart data into something usable in a browser sounds like a fun, so thought I’d start there and see how it goes.
Breaking this into three rough parts:
- Build a service to fetch charts from the FAA website (ideally with some kind of caching layer), collate, process, and present them as a browser-based moving map.
- Add some form of basic flight planning component, sort of like a simplified version of skyvector.com.
- ???
As mentioned, I have a few ideas percolating for ‘Part 3’ thanks to feedback from friends. Examples could be displaying Localized Aviation MOS Program (LAMP) data for a flight route, or replaying historic flight plans over time (eg. from a digital log book).
Motiviation
This project’s an excuse to learn about GIS (something I’ve been interested in for a while but know nothing about), get deeper into a few technologies like Docker, GraphQL, CQRS, and explore a few new AWS Services.
The plan is to write the backend services layer in Java (which I haven’t written since university), the UI in React + Redux Toolkit, and have them communicate via a REST API (possibly Spring + GraphQL).
Tasks
- Set up a Trello board.
- Set up a GitHub repo.
- Set up an AWS account.
- Create a ‘Hello world’ Java-based Docker container, and get it to automatically build and push to Amazon ECR on commit.
- Learn more about running Docker containers on AWS (eg. tradeoffs between K8s, ECS, etc) and decide on which approach to go with.