Hi guys. Could you please suggest me some solution for flight guidance in aerial mapping tasks. I'm not a pilot, so I don't have much knowlage about flight or navigation. My part of the job is land survey. I'm just trying to find solution for my pilot. The idea is that I can give him screen (iPad, or something else) preloaded with waypoints (parallel flight lines) and he must fly that pattern. I have been searching in available Ipad and PC applications but hasn't been able to find any of them who has dedicated purpose for aerial mapping. I don't even have clear picture what I'm searching for or how is it called. All i learned for now is that app I'm looking for must have left/right arrows and distance indicating how far from the track plane is. Second thing that I think is neccecary is high refresh rate on GPS (external bluetooth solution?) Here is clip I have find what it must look like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaJYkxG74T0 So, I don't need any maps, just graphical indication of plane position related to area of interest.
I thought you may recognize what I need and suggest some solution.
Your video wants a password, but what you are asking for sounds a lot like a SAR search pattern. You might want to look for "grid search" and "creeping line search" and see if those are like what you want.
Finally, GPS navigators have a feature called "user waypoints." This allows you to enter and name a large number of lat/long waypoints which can then be inserted into a flight plan. It is a bit tedious, but very do-able.
... distance indicating how far from the track plane is ...
This is called "cross track error" and is a parameter that can be displayed by any GPS software, panel-mounted or portable, that I have ever seen. So if you can get your pattern loaded as a flight plan, this should fall into your lap.
