Bots and real people

Unfortunately, some bots have created hundreds of dummy accounts on the system. I'm in the process of removing them. To identify them, I've scored each account on various things: whether the local area has been set up or not, whether various items have been ticked, whether the email looks valid. Most of them are obvious, but some are not.

In the process, some real accounts may have been deleted by mistake. If yours was one of them, I apologise; please set up a new account. On the other hand, it was probably because you hadn't set them up properly in the first place...

Also, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of accounts that request emails, but don't specify which time of day they are to be delivered, nor for which area they are. In future, I'm going to let you get a week's warnings, then set your email delivery to 'never', to stop me wasting precious email resources to send you messages that obviously you're not reading.

If you're not getting the emails you expected, it's because you haven't set up your account correctly. Go to 'my account'/'edit'/'Email settings', and set up the email frequency and the time you want the email delivered. Then go to 'Set up maps and feeds' on the main menu, and set up an area of interest. Only then will the system be able to send you an email.

In future, if you set up nothing on your account, I'll assume that your account was created by a bot, and delete it. (You will get an email to tell you I've done just that).

Oh, and many thanks to those few subscribers who have donated to the site. They will be getting some extra goodies to reward them in the near future. All the rest of you, thank them for subsiding your accounts!

July 2012 Update

Thanks to the appalling flying weather: The update for July:

  • Major changes to the software to allow for a single NOTAM to be mapped onto multiple areas, where the NOTAM describes more than one affected area. Improved NOTAM text parsing to map these areas.
  • You may now view maps for Spain and Portugal.
  • Details for each airfield/flying site are now on a separate page, from where you can go directly to the correction page, if you know of any changes.
  • FIRs (Flight Information Regions) have been added to the database. You can now show these FIRs on the maps.
  • NOTAMs that affect an entire FIR are now mapped onto the FIR boundary rather than some huge circle.
  • Gliding areas are now shown purple on the maps, rather than the previous green.
  • Minor improvements to the mapping, especially overlaying of lower airspaces.

Outage 18-23 June

There may be some small downtime over the next 48 hours to allow my host to upgrade the server. It's possible that you may lose service for an hour or two.

Update 21 June: My hosting company is now rejecting all subscriber emails as spam. I'm trying to fix this as soon as possible. In the meantime, the RSS and maps are still working OK.

Update 22nd June: The problem is caused by the 'robot' email being lost. I've temporarily set the 'from' address on emails to 'dave' at notaminfo.com, which seems to have fixed the problem. I will revert to 'robot' as soon as my hosts fix the underlying problem.

Update 23rd June. Latest problem is that my hosts were severely limiting the number of emails I can send per hour. So some of you who get emails between 6 and 8am may have not had them sent out. This is now apparently fixed. Normal service is resumed!

AIS problems - 17 May onwards

There seem to be some problems with accessing the AIS web site from the 17th onwards. I've fixed the bug that deleted all the NOTAMs if the AIS web site returned none. Apologies for those of you who got a lot of NOTAMs advised on the 17th - or none.

Add your flying site to the maps

The navigation menu (on the left) now has a link 'add a site' to a page that lets you set up your own flying site on the maps. If the site is an airfield, you may also specify the position of runways as well, laying them down exactly on the ground. You may also specify the activity carried out, so now balloon launch sites, paramotor sites, parachuting sites, etc, can be added. The sites will be marked as unverified, and marked with a white pin, until I have verified them.

Non-airfield sites are marked with a simple site marker. If the site is an airfield, you can add multiple runways. Move the start and end markers to indicate the start and end of each runway, then adjust the width with the edge markers. Every time you update a site, I will get an email with the site details. They will then be updated, and marked as valid soon after.

You will have to be a registered user, and logged in to add or alter a site's details.

Ireland and France added

...and lots more stuff done behind the scenes:

  • You can now set your home country to be 'Ireland', 'France' or 'UK+Channel Isles', The latter gives you NOTAMs from the UK plus the Brest FIR.
  • NOTAMs for Ireland and France will only be fetched daily, for the moment. Ireland doesn't have many; France has squillions.
  • Airfields, paragliding/hang gliding sites set up for France and Ireland. The former taken from the NOTAMs, the latter from paragliding Earth (Ireland) and the FFVL web site(France).
  • A very few gliding and microlight fields have been added, but only where I could see stuff on the ground.
  • Even if you are in one country, you can see the maps for other countries by going to the 'International maps' menu item on the left hand menu.
  • Sites have been rationalised somewhat - an airfield can now be listed with multiple uses, eg it can be a GA airfield, a glider field, a microlight field, and a winching site.
  • The display options for paraglding and hang gliding have been changed a little.
  • Airspace has been reorganised - airspace is now selected by type, rather than by class, eg you can select 'CTR' rather than 'Class A'.

Beware I may have made mistakes! Please bear with them until the changes have been bedded down.

Apologies for the 403 errors on the airfield charts; this is out of my control. I have asked that they be accessible again outside of the EAD web site. Watch this space...