Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Mon 8th May, 2006

Travel, Geometry and Interactive Maps all rolled into one!

A random neuron fired somewhere and I was inspired to read the Wikipedia article on the Great Circle. It linked to the Great Circle Mapper, a map that allows you to put in airport destinations and it'll show you the 'correct' (i.e. least distance) path between them. You can put in a route (CBR-MEL, MEL-SIN, SIN-LHR, LHR-SNN), you can get the map in a variety of projections, you can get information about the airport (including, in some cases, a map of its runway configuration), and you can show the 'range' circle that is equidistant from a point (e.g. 8000nm@SYD will show the range of the Airbus A380 in passenger configuration). Fun!

Incidentally, did you know that the Airbus A380 uses a switched 100baseTX fast ethernet network in star topology to control the plane using UDP? And this is significantly more advanced than the bus topology of ARINC 629 used in Boeing 777s (which themselves are a step ahead of the old 747-400)...

Last updated: | path: tech | permanent link to this entry


All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.


Main index / tbfw/ - © 2004-2023 Paul Wayper
Valid HTML5 Valid CSS!