Flight Planning

Part of the requirements of our permits that allow us to overfly small communities at low altitude is that we have to notify each town when we'll be overflying them. Part of that involves faxing a map of our flight path off to each town hall as well. So far I've compiled a database of over 100 small communities in our survey block that we've been notifying when our flight for the day takes us over them. Its tedious work to determine when exactly we'll be overflying each town, and which ones. So why put up with tedious monotony when you can write a computer program to do it for you?

I've gone over almost the entire map now, and recorded in a spreadsheet the names of the towns and the line # that runs over top of them. Every flight line in our grid is numbered, and the company geophysicist, who processes our data keeps a spreadsheet list of each numbered line, and how long it is. So after obtaining that, I've written a VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) excel program, and now I can specify the line # we're going to start our flight on, and the time we're going to begin surveying, and my VBA program will chew through my database of communities and the geophysicist's spreadsheet of survey lines, and spit out a list of each town we'll be overflying for that particular flight, and the start and end time of each line we fly. I send that list over to the Captain, and he sends out faxes to each community with the calculated time we'll be flying overhead. Done and done.

Now I don't have to spend hours pouring over the map calculating what towns and when we'll be flying over them. It just takes 10 seconds to get the program to spit me out a list, and if we change our flight plan I've only wasted 10 seconds and not an hour. Its also useful to find out how many lines and line kms we can expect to fly for the day. Its always fun when a hobby like computer programming becomes useful.