Show HN: Aviation calculators I built while learning
joseflys.comI'm a software developer from Argentina, currently working on my private pilot license. As I progressed through ground school, I kept building tools to help me understand and practice the concepts, and it turned into this.
joseflys.com is a collection of aviation calculators that run entirely in the browser. Everything works offline as a PWA.
I know most pilots use ForeFlight, SkyDemon, or similar apps, and I'm not trying to compete with those. This started as a learning project to really understand the math behind flight planning, and I figured others might find it useful too.
Some things you can do:
- Wind correction: Calculate heading and ground speed given wind. Useful for understanding the wind triangle.
- Flight planning: Build multi-leg flight plans with fuel calculations, ETAs, waypoints, and climb/descent performance. Export to PDF or Excel.
- TAS/ISA calculators: Convert between indicated and true airspeed, calculate density altitude.
- Takeoff and V-stall: Performance calculators for go/no-go decisions and understanding stall margins.
- LNAV Segments: An educational tool showing how FMS systems approximate great circle routes with constant-heading segments.
Tech: Next.js, TypeScript, GeographicLib for WGS-84 geodesic calculations, World Magnetic Model for magnetic variation. All calculations happen client-side.
The geodesic precision was an interesting challenge. Haversine isn't accurate enough for real navigation, especially at high latitudes or long distances.
It's open source: https://github.com/jfromaniello/joseflys
Happy to answer questions!
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