Built an auto-refreshing drone restriction layer for ForeFlight — thought some folks here might find it useful

[ybotspawn]

Hey everyone,

Thought I'd post this because I was tired of cross referencing three different apps before every drone flight to figure out what airspace I was dealing with. Turns out NATS publishes the official CAA restriction data publicly, FAA does the same, and nobody had turned any of it into a ForeFlight layer that actually stayed current.

So I built it. Pulls from official sources — FAA for the US, NATS ENR 5.1 for the UK, OpenAIP for Europe and Canada — converts everything to a colour coded KMZ and refreshes automatically every AIRAC cycle via GitHub Actions. FRZ zones around aerodromes in amber, Restricted red, Danger orange, Prohibited dark red, all toggleable separately in ForeFlight.

One thing worth knowing that tripped me up initially — FRZ zones aren't hard no-fly. They're permission required from the aerodrome. The layer makes that distinction obvious which was half the reason I built it.

Open source on GitHub if anyone wants to grab it or contribute. https://github.com/ybotspawn/ForeFlight-DroneLayers

Thanks, Matt

 

[Lindberg]

Curious why you would need three different apps since you'd only be in one country's airspace at a time, and you won't be flying a drone and a manned aircraft simultaneously. In the US at least, there are multiple apps that have this easy, including automatically filling with the online permission system.

 

[GeorgeC]

I didn't know self-refreshing KML was a thing; I should see if I can do that for the smoke product...

 

[ybotspawn]

it’s not entirely “self refreshing” but the GitHub action rebuilds it on a regular basis, so it’s “scheduled refreshing”. I’d imagine you could. If you’re interested in talking about it hit me up

Matt

 

[ybotspawn]

Curious why you would need three different apps since you'd only be in one country's airspace at a time, and you won't be flying a drone and a manned aircraft simultaneously. In the US at least, there are multiple apps that have this easy, including automatically filling with the online permission system.

Mainly because I’m used to using foreflight and I do drone flying in the us and Europe. Wanted to have the layers in foreflight since I practically live in there anyway. In the UK some of the pieces of data weren’t readily available in a single app (foreflight had a lot but not the drone restrictions hence why I just used it). Even then it doesn’t have KPI which is a UK PDRA requirement. Again just found it useful for me, not sure if it’s useful for anything else, but thought I’d post it