FlightsForBites.com

Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I put in three airports separately and hit Find but nothing happened....

EMT, FUL and LAX
 
Change the range “Find restaurants at other airports this many Miles from airport or course:” and “Furthest Restaurant Proximity to Airport:”. I entered “EMT”, with 100 mile range, and “short drive” and found Waypoint Cafe(CMA), Airport in the Sky Restaurant (AVX), French Valley Cafe(F70), and Corona Airport Café(AJO). It was missing Robin’s Nest Cafe at EZF when I searched near me. I added it.
 
Thanks it worked when I put 100 miles in for EMT. But it missed Annia's Kitchen which is at transient parking next to the FBO.

For FUL it missed Wing's Cafe which is below the tower.

I added both!
 
W/in minutes of my 1st post, someone was determined to guess my password to the Tomcat manager interface. Whoever you were, hopefully you were just trying to help me better protect the site by showing me what I left open. I've now locked down those interfaces to IPs inside my home network.
 
Worked for me, just added our 3 closest options and worked immediately.

Question: Why not accept KLAX as well as LAX?
Quextion: Why even list CLOSED restaurants?

Suggestion(s):
Keep the interface style and flow simple just like it is!
Remove closed restaurants (maybe)
Switch optional link to restaurant link or also make it optional.
 
Oh, and do another one or same site with cars as well.
 
How are they ordered in the list? Fantastic work btw, but if there was a way to get closest first that would really make it easier to find the closest burger.
 
Question: Why not accept KLAX as well as LAX?
Mostly b/c I'm lazy. The airport source I found did not have the leading Ks. I briefly looked into ignoring leading Ks but then there are airports with K as the 2nd letter. So, the easiest thing was to just ask people not to enter the K.

Question: Why even list CLOSED restaurants?
It's kind of a edge case, but, we have a restaurant in NC which burned down, is currently closed, but they are rebuilding. Also, someone might be looking for a specific restaurant that they don't realize is now closed.

...Switch optional link to restaurant link or also make it optional....
A link to the restaurant has come up several times. Usually Google Maps has the link to the restaurant. Also, if I allow any old link, since the site isn't locked down, someone could add a malicious link.
 
So, has this site been "pre-loaded" with restaurant info harvested from other sites, or is your database being built up from scratch starting now?

A feature that would be nice is: when you enter an airport code and something (or nothing) comes up, to have it display the name of the airport**, and the state, as a double-check that you entered the right thing. After all, if your airport code is off by one typo'ed letter, you're looking at hundreds or thousands of miles away.

I tried a couple of Alaska airports* and they came up empty.
* Having the option to do "either with or without the K" would actually be very handy for us Alaskans and Hawaiians. There are quite a few airports where I know the four-letter identifier but would have to go look up the three-letter one, or vice versa -- because they are not just the same thing but with an extra letter, they're actually different. For instance, you might know "PAMR" but not "MRI" which is the same place.

**Edit: the airport that you searched for, that is.
 
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How are they ordered in the list? Fantastic work btw, but if there was a way to get closest first that would really make it easier to find the closest burger.
In my next update, I'll return restaurants ordered by miles ascending.
 
So, has this site been "pre-loaded" with restaurant info harvested from other sites, or is your database being built up from scratch starting now?
The latter. The impetus for this project was the stale data in the other sites. Since I cannot identify stale data, I cannot identify the good data to seed the site. I tried to make it dirt simple and super fast to add restaurants. So, w/ a little crowd-sourcing effort, we can fill out the database pretty quickly.

A feature that would be nice is: when you enter an airport code and something (or nothing) comes up, to have it display the name of the airport, and the state, as a double-check that you entered the right thing. After all, if your airport code is off by one typo'ed letter, you're looking at hundreds or thousands of miles away.
I'll noodle on this. We kind of went around and around on this topic during beta testing. I have a "search" airport interface already built that maybe I'll add back to help users having trouble identifying an airport in the database.
 
Just use the trailing three characters rather than worrying about a specific leading character. Then if someone puts in a K it doesn't matter. Someone puts in KLAX, it just chops it to LAX. If someone puts in K68 it chops it to......K68.

Unless the leading character is a P and it is 4 chars long, then leave it.
 
I went in and entered a restaurant. Pretty easy to do. Could get populated pretty fast. Neat tool.
 
Just use the trailing three characters rather than worrying about a specific leading character. Then if someone puts in a K it doesn't matter. Someone puts in KLAX, it just chops it to LAX. If someone puts in K68 it chops it to......K68.

Unless the leading character is a P and it is 4 chars long, then leave it.

Unfortunately, this will also eliminate a lot of cool small airports with names like "WV62".
Easier to just accommodate the "K".
 
Unfortunately, this will also eliminate a lot of cool small airports with names like "WV62".
Easier to just accommodate the "K".

Well what I did on my website was:

if (strlen($string) == 4 && substr($string, 0,1) == "K"){
$string = substr($string, 1);
}

or however you want to do it in whatever language you're doing it in.


It's literally two lines of code. I didn't think I needed to be SO specific on here.
 
I added three for you.
Thanks Ryan! Spread the word. The more who crowd source the better for everyone.

I'm still trying to get my head around the person who tried to hack the site. WTF! I spent a ton of time trying to put something out there that will benefit us all and the first thing someone does is to try to insert themselves. I'm trying to remain positive that they were a white-hat hacker, but still.
 
People are adding restaurants w/o google maps links. Those more technically savy, if that is the issue, edit these restaurants and update the links, please.
 
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Well what I did on my website was:

if (strlen($string) == 4 && substr($string, 0,1) == "K"){
$string = substr($string, 1);
}

or however you want to do it in whatever language you're doing it in.


It's literally two lines of code. I didn't think I needed to be SO specific on here.

I respectfully ask you guys to sort through this and let me know the result. I'm happy to implement anything that makes the site more useful.
 
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I respectfully ask you guys to sort through this and let me know the result. I'm happy to implement anything that makes the site more useful.

Well, I'm assuming here that the issue is that the catalog on your back end does not know the ICAO (K-ified) identifiers. In which case, Ed's solution will work great for the contiguous US, to translate the "K's" into "non-K's" so they can be looked up in the catalog.

However, if your catalog does not have the ICAO's, there's no way to automatically translate Alaskan/Hawaiian "P" identifiers into "non-P" identifiers and the "chopping letters" trick won't work there. The only way to recognize both is to have something on the back end that actually has the ICAO identifiers in its database; see https://airportcodes.aero/icao/P for a list of them. So maybe your code could query some kind of internet database... but probably the easiest/laziest way -- what I would do -- is to just cut-and-paste this whole "P" list and incorporate it into a big ol' Ed-style if statement:

icaohash = { # define a list of weird ICAO's, each associated with the corresponding non-ICAO
PAAK: AKB,
PAAQ: PAQ,
PABA: BTI,
<etc etc etc... put the whole list here>
}
if (identifier in icaohash): # if it's one of these edge cases....
identifier = icaohash[identifier] # overwrite it with the non-ICAO one

<and then Ed's if-statement to overwrite any 4-character K thing with the non-K thing>

Another weird edge-case: Tok Junction, Alaska is "PFTO" or "6K8". But it doesn't show up on these lists of ICAO identifiers for some reason, though that's how it's listed on the charts and in GPS's and whatnot. I don't know what the deal is with that one. But Tok Junction does have a restaurant across the street from the airport... I've entered four restaurants for ya today! OK, time to put the computer down...! :)
 
If you download the 5010 information it has the P ids for AK and HI and the 3 letter IDs associated with them. Then another IF statement to decide which one to use.
 
People are adding restaurants w/o google maps links. Those more technically savy, if that is the issue, edit these restaurants and update the links, please.

I'm guessing a lot of people won't go the extra mile and add the google maps link.

Should we spread the word spread the word?
 
I'm still trying to get my head around the person who tried to hack the site. WTF! I spent a ton of time trying to put something out there that will benefit us all and the first thing someone does is to try to insert themselves. I'm trying to remain positive that they were a white-hat hacker, but still.

Hopefully it wasn't a POA related user and a "bot" that made the discovery then phoned home...
 
Hopefully it wasn't a POA related user and a "bot" that made the discovery then phoned home...
FWIW, it was probably that. There's a lot of organization/nation-state assets constantly probing the net for vulnerabilities.
 
Awesome, now we just need to get the list populated.
Could post it on the "fun places to fly your airplane" FB page and get a lot of responses if you wanted to.
 
Awesome, now we just need to get the list populated.
Could post it on the "fun places to fly your airplane" FB page and get a lot of responses if you wanted to.

Unfortunately Facebook is rejecting the link as suspicious/not secure.
 
Yeah but it would be a good way to spread the word and get some restaurants added. A lot of people on fb with nothing better to do.
Thats why I suggested it ;)
Will they take the POA link that then contains the link?
 
I respectfully ask you guys to sort through this and let me know the result. I'm happy to implement anything that makes the site more useful.

:D

I just query for either "what they entered" or "K + what they entered" because my database has the Ks in it, being sourced from the FAA data.

You guys are slinging PHP so maybe my nodejs SQL example is no good, but...

var { rows } = await db.query('select fboid, fboname from fbo where icao in ($1,$2)', [search, 'K' + search]);
 
W/in minutes of my 1st post, someone was determined to guess my password to the Tomcat manager interface. Whoever you were, hopefully you were just trying to help me better protect the site by showing me what I left open. I've now locked down those interfaces to IPs inside my home network.

Single factor auth on admin of any website has a good chance of being brute force attacked in minutes. There's a reason you see recaptcha on all sorts of everything that has a login these days. This became much more prevalent maybe six months to a year ago. I doubt very much that it's personal. Oh, and I'm sure you're aware, but old spring/tomcat is a common target now.
 
How are they ordered in the list? Fantastic work btw, but if there was a way to get closest first that would really make it easier to find the closest burger.
Results are now ordered by by distance ascending.
 
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