I get this every time I try to access the site: Does this mean the site is down, or is the problem on my end? I can still access pages deeper in the site from my history, but they may be cached. It always felt slightly abandoned.. maybe the hosting didn't get paid? I loved the concept and functionality of this website and was always disappointed more people didn't use & update it. Are they any alternatives to find restaurants on airport or very close?
If fly2lunch comes back from lunch, it really needs to be maintained. Sooo many restaurants closed and the information is out of date.
I always try to make edits such as removing all the operating hours when there's one that's closed. I've emailed the admin, but it seems to be a black hole and nothing gets taken down. It's a starting point; you still have to search out the actual website or Facebook page to make sure the place still exists, but I'm not aware of any other searchable resource to help find on field restaurants.
It'd be nice if the site could be re-done as a wiki. That way it might be a little more self-sustaining.
Wikipedia’s underlining code is GPLd. https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki Buy a domain, easy. Slap a Wikipedia website on a server, easy. Deal with trolls and griefers. Pass for me.
I'm not familiar w/ the site. Please describe what it did and how it was useful. I'm itching for a new project.
It's back up. I'd encourage you to check it out. I doubt it. Last news post was July '21, although it was about deleting restaurants. I've been thinking I should try to reach out to the owners to see if I could help.
Thanks. That's a pretty useful site but, of course, the utility declines w/ the amount of old/bad data you must wade through. Hopefully it gets a second wind coming out of the pandemic. Google charges for those maps with pins over a certain threshold. Considering it's a free site, I'm curious if it was a losing money endeavor.
That's possibly b/c ~90% of the data is readily available elsewhere. I have no idea the site's original mission or if/how it evolved over time. But obviously, the more information you present, the more there is to maintain and become stale. It seems all the airport info, weather etc. is, IMO, overkill. Nowadays, getting restaurant reviews, hours, directions, phone numbers, menus etc. is all super easy. The gap is the aviation specific information i.e. is the restaurant walk-able, how's ramp space, courtesy cars, Uber availability etc.
I typically look up airports in google and see what restaurants are nearby. Probably the best solution would be to have a repository link up to an EFB like ForeFlight.
Better: Punch in a route and see places to eat along the route. Great for trying to plan a lunch stop on a long trip. Of course, I always end up landing wherever has the cheapest gas and taking the courtesy car to the nearest McDonalds.
Pilots don’t even update foreflight info, I have a feeling this will get updated for a few months and then go back to stagnant updates.
http://www.airplanegeeks.com/eat-at-the-airport-import-into-foreflight/ Not sure if this is any better but appears you can send updates
AOPA has the same stale restaurant info on their airport pages, it looks like they siphoned off of fly2lunch.
When I get time, I'll see if I can write a program to log in to POA. They might have protections in place. I wouldn't do this to access site services but only to identify valid POA UID/PWD combinations. If successful, I could then host something simple from my home computer available to POA members.
Most likely the other way 'round. AOPA's airport info is easy to data mine (actually it's fairly well designed believe it or not).
I wrote a program which can tell if a UID/PWD combination is valid on POA. I'll now move on to setting up a wiki server. I'm learning a lot so even if this goes nowhere it's been worth the time.
Updated for 2022: https://www.pilotsofamerica.com/community/threads/show-airport-restaurants-in-foreflight.94927/
I've spent like 3 more days on this now. I've learned a lot...it's all good. I'm now familiar with jsoup. That was interesting. I'm now more familiar with Spring Boot, MySql and Tomcat. Everything new is about two hour activity. I'm hoping the pace accelerates!
I have a lot working. Where I'm stuck now is finding the restaurants (really airports w/ restaurants close by) w/in a certain distance of a route. MySQL provides some good spatial functions which I used to find airports w/in a certain distance of other airports. MySQL also provides functions for finding the minimum distance between a point and a line (which is really just many points), but, what it's doing behind the scenes is finding the closes point describing the line to the other point. This doesn't help much for long legs. I'm thinking I when people enter a route, I need to interpolate points in between route legs over a certain distance...unless someone has a better idea. I've found some serious math equations to compute this but I'm hoping to avoid that.
I thought MySQL was a database, what’s it doing with spatial functionality? There’s a database with USA hotels, restaurants, etc available somewhere which includes GPS coordinates. I think you be better off just having user provide airports as possible stops, then checking all airports within a certain radius and going from there.
Lot's of use cases these days have to do w/ where you are and what's around you. As a result, databases themselves now provide convenience functions so programmers don't have to recreate the wheel. The math/formulas are pretty nasty. Yep. I've loaded a table with every airport in the US (lat, lon, city, state, county, airport code). My plan is not to pre-load restaurants. Users will be able to add restaurants worth stopping at w/ a few pieces of information (related airport, restaurant proximity to airport and a Google Maps link). Users will then be able add pilot-specific commentary by restaurant. Users should access the Google Maps link for everything else (map, pictures, directions, menu, phone number, hours etc.). That's a good idea. I have searching around the radius of one airport working and extending that to a list of airports wouldn't difficult. I'll fallback to that if my route interpolation idea proves untenable. It seems a useful feature to return the restaurants w/in a certain distance of a route as there might be some hidden gems near airports users might not ever think to stop at.
