Introduction

Overview

Flight Explorer combines flight tracking data and weather to provide real-time situational awareness. Current air traffic is displayed over the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii), Canada, Europe (for authorized users of FE Professional only), parts of Mexico, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and world-wide for customers using hardware or data services from one of our global tracking partners leveraging ACARS or Iridium communications. Aviation specific weather products can be applied within the display and are provided by the premier vendors in the industry.

Description

Flight Explorer is a PC based graphical aircraft situation display (ASD) that uses flight position and geographical data to generate a set of graphical overlays. By using various selection tools you establish the content of the overlays. You also establish which overlays will be displayed, the geographical region and scale. All of these settings together are called a User Defined View.

Features

Flight Explorer creates a graphical depiction of dynamic and static data to provide an aircraft situation display. Dynamic data includes aircraft position data, aircraft list data, aircraft history data, and projected course data which is constantly updated. Individual aircraft position data is updated by the FAA for most aircraft about once per minute. Static data includes political boundaries, FAA Air Traffic Control facility boundaries, sectors, airways, fixes, NAVAIDs, airports, radar sites, time zones, TRACONs, Special Use Airspace (SUA) boundaries, drawing objects, Flight Service Stations, communication facilities, weather stations, major cities, interstate highways, detailed NavTeq street maps and raster based background imagery. Static data is updated concurrently with a FAA 28-day update cycle.

World Maps are visible in two styles; Standard Projection and Spherical Projection. Standard Projection depicts the entire world in a flat representation and Spherical Projection depicts the world as a globe that can be rotated in all directions.

Overlays

A graphical overlay is created for each type of data. content of the overlays is controlled through the use of filters. Use of filters is explained in the User Defined View help section. you control your display by selecting filter criteria and selecting overlays for display by using the mouse or keyboard as explained in the User Defined View help section.

Functional Capabilities

Flight Explorer displays static and dynamic data in accordance with filters and overlays selected by the user. User Defined Views are a collection of overlay settings that can be stored. You can switch between different views with a single mouse click. What's in a view? A view includes all settings in View Settings (all tabs) and the current geographic region and zoom level. The overlay selection scheme has been designed to allow extensive control of overlay options, while still providing quick access to common options.

Flight Explorer provides the ability to define multiple, complex aircraft filters. You can get to the aircraft filters by clicking the View Settings toolbar button and selecting Plane Filters, by clicking the down arrow next to the Plane Overlay toolbar button and selecting Plane Filter Settings from the menu, or by pressing the Advanced Filter icon on the Filter toolbar. To meet the needs of those who only require simple, quick filters, the Quick Filter option is accessible from the Filter toolbar (Single Filter icon) or the View menu. This allows you to quickly define simple aircraft filter criteria and then add them to the filter list or replace all previous filters.