jkleiber / flight-planner

Automatically create optimal flight plans between two airports

flight-planner

This is not a certified software tool

The goal of this project is to automatically create optimal flight plans, given departure and arrival airports and constraints (such as airspace restrictions, NOTAMs, etc.)

Project Status

The project currently is a command line based tool that can find the shortest path (disregarding constraints) between two waypoints if they are on defined airways in the USA.

The following shortcomings are known:

• The tool does not work on connecting airports to airports.
• The tool cannot connect Alaska and Hawaii to the continental USA.
• The tool only works in the USA.

Installation

Install poetry. Then, just clone the repository and run

poetry update

to activate the virtual environment and install dependencies. From there, you're good to go!

Usage

Generating an Airway Database

An airway graph is provided in data/, but to regenerate it from the local NASR files (also in data/) run:

poetry run python generate_airways.py

This script has the following optional parameters:

• --awy_file: path to the NASR AWY_SEG.csv. Default is to the relevant file in the data/ directory.
• --fix_file: path to the NASR FIX_BASE.csv. Default is to the relevant file in the data/ directory.
• --apt_file: path to the NASR APT_BASE.csv. Default is to the relevant file in the data/ directory.
• --navaid_file: path to the NASR NAV_BASE.csv. Default is to the relevant file in the data/ directory.
• --star_file: path to the NASR STAR_RTE.csv. Default is to the relevant file in the data/ directory.
• --sid_file: path to the NASR DP_RTE.csv. Default is to the relevant file in the data/ directory.
• --in_file: path to a file containing an airway graph to modify. Default is no input.
• --out_file: path to output the generated airway graph to. Default is data/airway_graph.pkl.

Flight Planning

To find a flight plan between two waypoints, run:

poetry run python main.py [start] [end]

where start and end are the waypoint identifiers. The script has the following optional parameters:

• --graph_file: path to the airway graph (generated above). Default is data/airway_graph.pkl.

Example

For a flight plan between MONIA and MILBY, run:

poetry run python main.py MONIA MILBY

The resulting plan is shown in SkyVector:

A longer flight from SWAGG to LIMBO can be found with:

poetry run python main.py SWAGG LIMBO

The resulting plan is shown in SkyVector: